She Wanted Adventure (Art, Protest, and the Gallerists Who Made the Counterculture)

The untold story of five women gallerists whose risky and raucous exhibitions brought art to life and to Los Angeles from the 1960s onward—and whose influence transformed the city and remade the canon.

A Volkswagen microbus sighs to a halt and out tumble nine people. It is 1962, and the passengers—artists, dancers, musicians, eccentrics—are haggard and harried from weeks on the road. They range from the already famous (Merce Cunningham, John Cage) to the soon-to-be (Robert Rauschenberg), and their arrival sets off a series of events that will change Los Angeles and the history of modern art forever.

Who invited them? That would be Virginia Dwan: heiress to a sandpaper fortune, art-school dropout, regal, restrained, twice divorced, and barely thirty years old. Her namesake gallery in Westwood would host the van dwellers and, in the years that followed, serve as a haven and a laboratory for risk-taking, era-defining exhibitions, antiwar activism, and raucous cultural experimentation.

Doubly invisible as both a curator and a woman, Dwan and her story have remained largely untold. She wasn’t the only one. This is the tale of Dwan and four other women—Eugenia Butler, Riko Mizuno, Suzanne Jackson, and Claire Copley—whose lives converged and collided alongside the rise of the counterculture. Some had money; some did not. All bucked convention to open their own galleries in a time of radical change, a time defined by possibility and paranoia—emptying their bank accounts, escaping from their families, breaking up their marriages, and sometimes breaking the law.

In She Wanted Adventure, Catherine Wagley brings to light the strange, full, obsessive, private, and wonderful lives and works of these women—for whom art was not just a way of living but life itself.