82. Paula Cooper

Following studies in Paris, Paula Cooper (b. 1938, MA) entered the New York art world aged 21 working at the World House Galleries on the Upper East Side. In 1964 she opened the Paula Johnson Gallery, where she showed work by Walter de Maria and Bob Thompson, among others. From 1965 to 1967 Cooper served as the Director of the artist’s cooperative Park Place, whose members included Mark di Suvero, Robert Grosvenor and David Novros––artists she continues to work with today. Paula Cooper opened the first art gallery in SoHo at 96-100 Prince Street in 1968 with a benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, showing works by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman, as well as Sol LeWitt’s first wall drawing. Paula Cooper Gallery moved to Wooster Street in 1973 and then to Chelsea in 1996, and has consistently shown art that is conceptually unique and visually challenging. In addition to the 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. Of particular note was a series of New Year’s Eve readings of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake for twenty-five years until 2000, a ten-year series of concerts by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center that began in the early 1970s, and an annual concert by the S.E.M. Ensemble that continued until 2019. Cooper was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design (1995) and the order of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministre de la Culture et de la Communication (2002) followed by the order of Officier des Arts et des Lettres (2014). In 2003 Cooper and her husband, the publisher Jack Macrae, opened the independent bookstore 192 Books. Cooper continues to run Paula Cooper Gallery.

She and Zuckerman discuss the end of life, bad and good, how art revives, relationships, the New York artworld, the line between art and business, art as a language, visceral connections, celebrating messiness, art as true expression, not taking anything for granted, and the importance of encouragement!