I remember when I went to a gallery in Paris at one point, they had drawings of earthworks set in different places. I asked the person sitting at the gallery desk where these works were - where in France they could be found. She looked at me in horror as if I'd asked something completely insane. She said, "Well, of course, these works don't actually exist. They're concepts."
Virginia DwanQuite honestly, even as a woman dealer, I really wasn't interested in masculinity or femininity as such. What was important to me was the value of the work itself. If a woman had come along, somebody like Lee Bontecou or Louise Nevelson, and said, "I'm working on the land," I would have gone to see it.
Virginia DwanHad opened a gallery I already had strong connections with New York, because I was taking work on consignment from New York dealers. So I already knew a great many of the dealers and the artists here. It wasn't cold for me.
Virginia DwanI enjoyed cross-country road trips. And I found the work challenging because it was art that existed on the land rather than mere concepts in a gallery or photographic documentation, or any of the paraphernalia that can be used to indicate that. The art was on the land.
Virginia DwanWhat's happening in the larger world always influences art. When I first started the gallery in 1959, one of the first things I learned was that most people assume artists know one thing and one thing only - that they were idiot savants. I found very quickly that most artists were very informed and very aware of what was happening in the world around them. So all of those things go together, especially for earthworks. And at that time there was such an intense interest in American art. So there was a great deal of attention paid to where it was going.
Virginia Dwan