Predecessors Cooper ran her own space, the Paula Johnson Gallery, from 1964 to 1966, where
Walter De Maria launched his first solo show in New York. She worked for
Park Place Gallery from 1965 to 1967, a co-operative gallery of five painters and five sculptors, including
Mark di Suvero,
Leo Valledor,
Robert Grosvenor, and
David Novros.
1968–1975 According to
The New York Observer: "The history of Paula Cooper Gallery is, in many ways, the history of the New York art world." Cooper opened the first gallery at 96 Prince Street with $4,400 in October 1968. “I didn’t like uptown,” Ms. Cooper told
The Observer. “I thought it was just little shops. I looked downtown. And people told me that I was crazy to open there. That no one would go there.” The gallery opened with an exhibition to benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, working alongside
Veterans Against the War; proceeds of sales were split 50-50 between the artists and the committee. The exhibition featured LeWitt’s first wall drawing, and included works by
Carl Andre,
Jo Baer,
Dan Flavin,
Donald Judd, and
Robert Ryman. That show is now widely recognized as seminal in the development of a new generation of rigorous and challenging work. By 1975, the neighborhood had been renamed
SoHo, and included 83 other art galleries.
1996–today Cooper bought a building at 534 West 21st Street in 1995, and subsequently relocated the gallery to Manhattan's
Chelsea neighborhood in 1996. The initial round of renovations was overseen by the architect
Richard Gluckman. Critic
Michael Kimmelman, reviewing a Carl Andre exhibition, wrote in
The New York Times: "The news here is how good Paula Cooper's new gallery looks: the main room is like a big chapel. Too bad for SoHo, which Ms. Cooper, one of its pioneering dealers, recently abandoned to the hordes of retail stores." In 2007, Paula Cooper gave the extant records of Park Place, dating from 1966 to 1967, and the early records of the Paula Cooper Gallery, from 1968 to 1973 to the
Smithsonian Archives of American Art. In 2013, Paula Cooper Gallery opened two pop-up spaces, in a former auto parts shop at 197 10th Avenue, near 22nd Street, as well as on the ground floor of 521 West 21st Street. In 2018, the gallery temporarily moved its headquarters to a 9,000-square-foot space located at 524 West 26th Street due to construction in an adjacent building. In 2021, Paula Cooper Gallery opened a space in
Palm Beach, Florida. ==
The Clock (2011)==