Due to the growing public health concerns, Paula Cooper Gallery will temporarily close from Saturday, March 14, until further notice. We are taking this precautionary measure in order to promote the safety of our staff, artists, and community. Gallery operations will continue remotely during this time. Digital packets for Ja’Tovia Gary, flesh that needs to be loved, and the group exhibition, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sarah Charlesworth, Sherrie Levine, are available upon request. We will continue to monitor the situation and share updates as things progress.

Paula Cooper Gallery, the first art gallery in SoHo, opened in 1968 with an exhibition to benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The show included works by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman, among others, as well as Sol LeWitt’s first wall drawing. For over fifty years, the gallery’s artistic agenda has remained focused on, though not limited to, conceptual and minimal art. In 1996, the gallery moved to Chelsea to occupy an award-winning redesigned 19th century building. The architect was Richard Gluckman. In 1999, Paula Cooper opened a second exhibition space at 521 West 21st Street. In fall 2018, the gallery temporarily relocated its primary space to 524 West 26th Street, opening with a 50th anniversary exhibition that benefitted March For Our Lives.

Beyond its immediate artistic program, the gallery has regularly hosted concerts, music symposia, dance performances, book receptions, poetry readings, as well as art exhibitions and special events to benefit various national and community organizations. For 25 years until 2000, the gallery presented a much celebrated series of New Year’s Eve readings of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.