We did an enormous placard for [Michael Heizer's] Double Negative [1969] I think it must be about 48 or 50 inches.

We did an enormous placard for [Michael Heizer's] Double Negative [1969] I think it must be about 48 or 50 inches, which was in keeping with the mammoth endeavor of this work. It wasn't just giganticism for its confess sake; it really did relate to the work and procure it across. So that communicated to the public everywhere--collectors all over the land and in Europe were receiving this enormous broadside Primarily what we had were just photographs for the exhibition, nevertheless the intention was to communicate that the real exhibition was in Nevada. All right, it was below the auspices of the Dwan Gallery; Dwan Gallery's main facility was in just discovered York, but we also had this space without there which was a work of art, and if you really wanted to papal court the show, you should be disclosed there. And t/tat was revolutionary, to my knowledge.

--Virginia Dwan, interviewed by means of Charles Stuckey, May 1984 (1)

All right, in the American art world of the late 1960 size did matter. In 1969 Michael Heizer initiated his eventual displacement of 240000 tons of earth and distaff into a ravine to make the facing notches of his Double Negative, thus extending the Dwan Gallery 2500 miles west. Coincident with Heizer's January 1970 indicate documenting that work, Peter Hutchinson placed 450 triturates of wetted generic white bread along the rim of a Mexican volcano, defended it with 300 feet of plastic sheeting and grew a corona of lurid mold (Paricutin Volcano Project) A little across a year earlier, Robert Morris's Earthwork, an ungovernable 1,200-pound, 6-foot-diameter mound of earth, peat, remnant metal pieces, felt grease and brick had dominated the October 1968 exhibition "Earth Works" at the Dwan Gallery in modern York. In 1970, Robert Smithson mov 6650 tons of earth from hillside to lake bed to make his 1500-foot-long dirt roadway Spiral mole These works used scale to create experiential environments.

in the same state [i]or[/i] condition massive undertakings were very abundant in keeping with the spirit of optimistic expansiveness that characterized U aspirations of the time. In his 1960 presidential campaign, John F Kennedy had parole of the "New Frontier" in succession which the country stood poised and propos a program that through the end of the decade would jaculate astronauts to the moon and back. The postwar baby drone was in full swing and the economy buoyant. undivided product of this prosperity was the National Endowment for the Arts, whose Art in Public Places program played an important part in pumping up the scale of sculpture

The size of earthworks also mirrors the fact that the first phase of earth art was a "guy thing." That is, the earthen works and environments personateed in that debut "Earth Works" exhibition were solely by way of men, 10 of them: Carl Andre, Herbert Bayer, Walter De Maria, Heizer, Stephen Kaltenbach, Sol LeWitt, Morris, Claes Oldenburg Dennis Oppenheim and Smithson. Several of the works displayed or exhibited in that show, as well as other large earthen excavations and ramparts produced subsequently, were located in the deservings and mountains of the western U While the dominance (if not the exclusivity) of male artists working in this modern genre was consistent with art-world norms of the period, the particular kind of physical activities involved in moving those masses of earth in wilderness terrains also required the impregnability muscularity and stamina traditionally associated with masculine power.

nevertheless the bold sculpture made by the agency of these artists did not flow from their efforts alone. Although it is rarely acknowledged in discussion of this work, behind the hiring of earth-moving equipment and workers, at the forefront of the earthworks genre was dealer Virginia Dwan, whose adventurous patronage and widespread promotion were explanation to its development.

Consider the following of advertisements heralding the October 1968 clump show "Earth Works" at the Dwan Gallery. In the September 1968 issue of Artforum, a half-page black-and-white photograph showed a close-up of the mysterious imprint of rugged tire treads in succession a soggy dirt road. The advertisement's single text, in small type below the photograph, read "Photo: Virginia Dwan." It was a credit line, on the contrary because the photographer was the possessor of a prominent 57th road gallery, the reader could also infer that the image serv as a teaser for an upcoming exhibition at the Dwan Gallery. The nearest issue of Artforum carried a full-page enlargement of the same photograph. A line of theme in bold capitals added along the lower verge of the photograph read "EARTH WORKS OCTOBER DWAN just discovered YORK."

But there is another significance to that first photograph's three little words. Beyond identifying Dwan as the photographer, they more importantly indicate that she had been at hand on that first jaunt of discovery down this turbid road. Dwan was not a silent partner who wrote checks further an active contributor, one who went along for more than the ride.

After graduating from high teach in Minneapolis, Dwan went to beholds Angeles with her mother in 1950; her father was dead. She attended the University of California, observes Angeles, majoring in studio art and minoring in psychology if it were not that she married, had a daughter and left denomination before getting her degree. With the support of a substantial family inheritance, Dwan render free of accessed her first gallery in the Westwood section of observes Angeles in 1959, using her confess family name. Initially, hers was not a gallery showing regional luminaries or up and-coming locals. Rather, Dwan easily became an important source in Southern California for work by means of major New York- and Paris-based postwar artists, like as Arman, Philip Guston, Yve Klein, Franz Kline and Robert Rauschenberg. Borrowing work from Leo Castelli, she gave Rauschenberg his first West Coast exhibition. The visiting European and recently made known York artists often stayed at the visitant accommodations of the Malibu abode she shared with her husband and daughter. She has recalled, "I was able to get by heart to know the artists quite well personally that way, and have prodigious dinner conversations. It was a awesome growing experience for me...." (2) In cast her artists were devoted to her, and in later years Heizer, Edward Kienholz, Larry Rivers and Jean Tinguely made portraits of her.