Margo Leavin, a distinguished determine within the Los Angeles artwork world, whose West Hollywood gallery hosted main worldwide artists and supported the town’s burgeoning checklist of artists for greater than 4 a long time, has died.
Leavin had been sick for some time. The reason for demise, confirmed by longtime enterprise associate Wendy Brandow, has not been decided. She was 85.
Born in New York and skilled in Mexico and UCLA, Leavin started promoting prints from her condominium as an artwork vendor after transferring west within the late Nineteen Sixties. In 1970 she opened her Robertson Boulevard gallery and remodeled the previous studio of designer Tony Duquette right into a compact exhibition house. Through the years the gallery expanded, finally filling nearly the complete half metropolis block as much as Hilldale Avenue.
Hilldale’s entrance led to a big room dedicated to sculpture exhibitions. From the road it might be acknowledged by a big knife blade that appeared to chop the constructing in two, the work of the sculptor Claes Oldenburg.
Till her retirement in 2013, Leavin represented many essential Los Angeles artists, together with John Baldessari, Alexis Smith, Roy Dowell, Allen Ruppersberg and William Leavitt. Amongst greater than 400 exhibitions, the gallery additionally hosted massive solo exhibits with works by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Advert Reinhardt, Sol LeWitt, and different New York artists.
In 2015 the gallery’s archive was acquired by the Getty Analysis Institute. 4 years later, UCLA unveiled the brand new Margo Leavin Graduate Artwork Studios in Culver Metropolis, a state-of-the-art facility for the nation’s No. 2 artwork faculty made attainable by a $ 20 million reward from the artwork vendor. Leavin’s donation is the most important ever made by an alumna to the humanities inside the UC system.
A full obituary will comply with.
