November 12: Deborah Treisman and Anne Doran—The Dream Colony: A Life in Art
Presented by 192 Books, Deborah Treisman and Anne Doran in conversation with David Salle to discuss Walter Hopps’s The Dream Colony: A Life in Art (Bloomsbury, 2024)
This event will take place in person at 192 Books at 192 10th Ave on Tuesday, November 12th at 7:00 PM ET. Seating is limited. RSVP for free here. The discussion will also be streamed directly on this page. There is no login required. A recording will be archived.
Books will be available for sale after the conversation.
Walter Hopps—The Dream Colony: A Life in Art (Bloomsbury, 2024)
An innovative, iconoclastic curator of contemporary art, Walter Hopps founded his first gallery at the age of 21. At 24, he opened the Ferus Gallery with then-unknown artist Edward Kienholz. Ferus turned the spotlight on a new generation of West Coast artists, premiered Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, and was at one point shut down by the LA vice squad for a show of Wallace Berman's edgy art. In the sixties, Hopps mounted the first museum retrospectives of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell and the first museum exhibition of Pop Art—before it was even known as Pop Art. When Hopps became the director of Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art at age 34, the New York Times hailed him as “the most gifted museum man on the West Coast (and, in the field of contemporary art, possibly in the nation).” A few years before his death in 2005, Hopps began work on this book, a vivid, personal, surprising, irreverent, and enlightening account of his life and of some of the greatest artistic minds of the twentieth century.
Deborah Treisman has been the fiction editor of the New Yorker since 2003, and is the host of the award-winning The New Yorker: Fiction podcast. She was formerly the managing editor of the art and literary quarterly Grand Street, for which Walter Hopps was the art editor. She is also the editor of the book 20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker.
Anne Doran is an artist and a writer and editor for the visual arts. She has written for Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Mousse, Collector Daily, Time Out New York, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. From 1996 to 2004, she was an editor at the art and literary quarterly Grand Street.
Photo by Robert Wright
David Salle helped define the post-modern sensibility by combining figuration with an extremely varied pictorial language. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at museums and galleries worldwide, and Salle's paintings are in the permanent collections of major museums throughout America as well as Europe and Asia. Although known primarily as a painter, Salle's work grows out of a long-standing involvement with performance. Over the last 35 years, he has worked with choreographer Karole Armitage, creating sets and costumes for many of her ballets and opera productions. In addition, Salle is a prolific writer on art. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and his collection of essays, How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art, was published by W.W. Norton in 2016.