Virginia Dwan

Virginia Dwan (born October 18, 1931) is an American art collector, art patron, philanthropist, visionary and founder of the Dwan Light Sanctuary in Montezuma, New Mexico. She is the former owner and executive director of Dwan Gallery Los Angeles (1959–1967) and Dwan Gallery New York (1965–1971), a contemporary art gallery closely identified with the American movements of Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and Earthworks.

Virginia Dwan, heiress to the Minnesota-based conglomerate 3M, was born in Minneapolis. She attended the University of California at Los Angeles to study art, but then dropped out and married a medical student in Los Angeles.

Dwan leased a tiny storefront in a Spanish Mission-style building at 1091 Broxton Avenue in the Westwood section of Los Angeles in 1959. The artists she presented there included Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt, Joan Mitchell, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston. In contrast to Ferus Gallery, Dwan was well funded.

Dwan found a bigger space in 1962, hiring art dealer John Weber, who brought in a few of his own artists and organized some shows. In June 1962, Dwan moved to the new location at 10846 Lindbrook Drive, which was twice as large as her first space. The building's renovation, which was designed by Morris Verger, a student of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, was inspired by the V.C. Morris store in San Francisco designed by the latter. Dwan organized several influential exhibitions in her new space, including "My Country 'Tis of Thee", an exhibition of Pop Art held in November 1962. This show belongs to a substantial group of exhibitions in Los Angeles between 1962 and 1963 that heralded the arrival of Pop as a major artistic style in the early 1960s. Though "My Country 'Tis of Thee" focused on New York artists, it also included the work of Edward Kienholz. Another important exhibition included "Boxes" (1964), which featured box-shaped works by an international group of artists including Los Angeles sculptors Larry Bell, Tony Berlant, Edward Kienholz, Ron Miyashiro, and Ken Price.

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