Virginia Dwan: Flowers

VIRGINIA DWAN showed artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt, Joan Mitchell and more at her Los Angeles gallery in the 1960s. Since then, Dwan has pursued her own artistic practice, and has dedicated the last three and a half years to documenting military graves in cemeteries across the United States. 

This collection of photographs serves as striking evidence of the ever-growing number of lives lost as a consequence of war. Though the work is political, the volume is purely visual, without comment—just page after page of headstones. The only text in the book is the late Pete Seeger’s question, “Where have all the flowers gone?” The images speak for themselves.

This book accompanied the exhibition From Los Angeles to New York: The Dwan Gallery 1959–1971, a major show at the National Gallery of Art and LACMA (2016–2017). The exhibition featured of 250 works by 52 artists from the Virginia Dwan Collection, as well as supplemental works that Dwan exhibited from other collections, and tells the story of her remarkable career as a gallerist and patron.