Art dealer Gavin Brown has donated the archive of his gallery, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, to the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) in New York's Hudson Valley.
The collection includes artist files, catalogues, documents and exhibition histories from across Brown’s 26 years of dealing art in New York. From when the gallery first opened downtown in Soho in 1994, Brown showed some of the most important contemporary artists, including Alex Katz, Joan Jonas, Mark Leckey, Arthur Jafa, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Elizabeth Peyton. Brown shut his eponymous gallery in 2020 to join Gladstone, bringing a number of his high-profile artists with him.
“Gavin Brown’s Enterprise was as much a social space as an influential pillar of the commercial gallery world, and it remains a key touchstone for independent representation within the arts community,” CCS Bard's executive director Tom Eccles said in a statement.
At CCS Bard, Brown’s archive will join a growing number of holdings donated by dealers, the most recent examples being Colin de Land and Pat Hearn. Curator Robert Storr and art historian Eddie Chambers have also donated their archives to the centre.
“The archives at CCS Bard are an unparalleled public resource documenting the history of contemporary exhibition-making," Ann Butler, CCS Bard’s library and archive director, said in a statement. "The donation of Gavin Brown’s archival holdings deepens our collections to provide unprecedented insight into the workings of the iconic gallery and broader contemporary art world during a critical period of inflection and growth.”
A selection of objects from the archive will go on display at Bard this summer as part of an exhibition titled Start Making Sense (22 June-20 October), which will use CSS Bard’s holdings to investigate how curators, artists, gallerists and other members of the larger art community have affected how meaning is applied to art, primarily since the 1990s. The exhibition will include works by Christopher Wool, Ida Applebroog, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Tiravanija and others.