Paula Cooper Gallery

The story

Paula Cooper opened her Prince Street gallery with $4,400 and was told she was crazy to do it. Downtown in 1968 was not yet an art destination, and she knew it. The gallery's first show was a benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, splitting sales proceeds equally between artists and the committee. That opening act set the tone: a gallery with a conscience, not just a commercial space. The New York Observer would later call its history, in many ways, the history of the New York art world itself.