Gavin Brown Donates Archive to CCS Bard

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College has acquired the archive of legendary New York art gallery, Gavin Brown’s enterprise (GBE). Donated by gallerist Gavin Brown, the archive represents a 26-year history of one of New York City’s most innovative art spaces, home to a generation of many of today’s most important artists, including Joan Jonas, Alex Katz, Mark Leckey, Arthur Jafa, Elizabeth Peyton, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Laura Owens, Elaine Sturtevant, Peter Doig, and LaToya Ruby Frazier, among others.

Alongside comprehensive artist files, exhibition histories, catalogs, and documentation, the archive contains an intimate portrait of the New York art world from the mid-1990s through 2020. Beginning with the gallery’s opening at its Broome Street location in 1994, the archive traces the evolution of Gavin Brown’s enterprise through its relocation to the Meatpacking District in 1997 (replete with the bar, Passerby, and a fully functional disco floor designed by Piotr Uklański), to its move to the West Village in 2003, and finally to Harlem in 2013, where it famously premiered Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, The Message is Death. A selection of works from the archive will be on view this June as part of the exhibition Start Making Sense, which draws on CCS Bard’s holdings to examine the complexity of how art gains meaning through the advocacy of curators, fellow artists, gallerists, and others who form what is commonly referred to as the “art community.”

“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,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of CCS Bard. “The archives preserve and make public a dynamic history of a space known for challenging convention and for dynamic exhibition making.”

The Gavin Brown’s enterprise archive joins a growing list of gallery archives, including those of Colin de Land and Pat Hearn, held at CCS Bard. Other additions have included most recently the archival holdings of curator Robert Storr and art historian Eddie Chambers respectively.

“The archives at CCS Bard are an unparalleled public resource documenting the history of contemporary exhibition-making. 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,” states Ann Butler, Director of the Library and Archives at CCS Bard.