Constance Lewallen

Constance Lewallen (July 25, 1939 – April 24, 2022) was an American curator. She was curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She was known for her support of Conceptual art and West Coast artists. Lewallen died on April 24, 2022, at the age of 82.

Life and career

Lewallen (née Ehrlich) was born and raised in New York City. She attended Fieldston School followed by an undergraduate degree from Mount Holyoke College. She received a master's from San Diego State University in 1970.

Lewallen's first worked at Bykert Gallery in New York, where she met Michael Snow and Vito Acconci. After moving to Los Angeles, Lewallen worked for Cirrus Editions and Broxton Gallery (with Larry Gagosian). Lewallen then founded ThomasLewallen Gallery in Santa Monica with Morgan Thomas; the gallery showed many of the artists associated with Cal Arts, including Douglas Huebler, John Baldessari, Jack Goldstein, and Jonathan Borofsky. In 1977, Lewallen and Thomas along with gallerist Claire Copley, created the nonprofit Foundation for Art Resources to produce artist projects; one if its first projects was the production of John Baldessari's film Six Colorful Inside Jobs.

Lewallen moved to the Bay Area in 1979. She worked for the UC Berkeley Art Museum from 1980 until 2007; first as curator for the museum's MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art, then as Senior Curator (1998–2007). As MATRIX curator, she organized nearly 90 solo exhibitions by international artists, including Julian Schnabel, Chuck Close, Barbara Kruger, Hamish Fulton, Pat Steir, Elizabeth Murray, Jean Michel Basquiat, and Martin Puryear. Lewallen also worked as associate director of Crown Point Press, a fine-art printer and publisher, in the 1980s and 1990s. She was a contributing editor to the Brooklyn Rail.

In 2000 Lewallen was named a Gerbode Fellow by the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, which recognizes five individuals annually who have evidenced extraordinary commitment and accomplishment in the not-for-profit field.

Lewallen married poet Bill Berkson in the 1990s. Her previous two marriages, to San Francisco gallerist Thomas V. Meyer and New York artist Donald Lewallen, ended in divorce.

Curatorial work

Lewallen was known for her work around the California Conceptual art movement of the 1970s. Her exhibitions helped to assert that Conceptual art had roots beyond New York City. State of Mind New California Art circa 1970, curated with Karen Moss in 2011, was a seminal contribution to the history of West Coast conceptualism. In 1980, Lewallen wrote a chronology for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art about the development of conceptual art in the 1970s.

In addition to her work on conceptualism, Lewallen was known for her solo shows of single artists, including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Bruce Nauman, Joe Brainard, Jay DeFeo, and Paul Kos.

Publications

References

Further reading

• Bay Watch: A Snapshot of the Visual Arts in the Bay Area by Constance Lewallen, Brooklyn Rail, November 2017