This year, Art Basel inaugurates its Gallery Legacy Award – an honor recognizing a gallerist whose work has impacted contemporary art by shaping aesthetic movements, nurturing collectors, and above all, supporting the artists whose visions are the art world’s beating heart.

The first awardee is Paula Cooper, a venerated New York gallerist who guided the early courses of Conceptual and Minimal art, and whose influence has only broadened in the decades since. Known for embracing challenging work and for her commitment and integrity, Cooper could well be the consummate ‘artists’ gallerist.’

What follows are just some of the qualities that have made Cooper (now age 88) and Paula Cooper Gallery (nearly 58 years in business) so unique.

Instinct

Cooper opened Paula Cooper Gallery in New York’s downtown SoHo district in 1968, the deadliest year of the Vietnam War and when both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. At the time, SoHo was known as ‘Hell’s Hundred Acres’ – some of its cast-iron buildings still hummed with the industry of textile sweatshops, factories, and printing presses; others had been abandoned. Despite the presence of a handful of pioneering artists who squatted in the area, no art galleries had settled here. Real estate was undesirable, but cheap.

Cooper knew SoHo through her work with an artist cooperative and wanted to be where artists lived. The rent on her first space, a third-floor Prince Street walk-up, was USD 300 for over 900 m². She opened in late October with the 10-day show ‘Benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam’, featuring Carl Andre, Donald Judd, and Sol LeWitt, with his very first wall drawing, among others. Two works sold, and the income was split between the artists and the Mobilization Committee. ‘I started the business with a show where we didn’t get any money!’ Cooper has said, but that would soon change. In 1973 she moved to a storefront on Wooster Street, buying the entire building in what she would later describe as ‘the best decision I ever made.’

By following the artists and her own intuition, Cooper had pioneered an art hub; by showing Minimal and Conceptual art, she redefined how to look at art. By 1975, 85 other galleries had opened in SoHo; five years later there were more than 100. In 1995, Cooper again acquired a vast space in a desolate neighborhood – a warehouse on 21st Street in West Chelsea – giving her artists more space to experiment and leading another gallery migration. She has since opened pop-up galleries in Palm Beach and Shanghai, but never permanently expanded beyond a second space a few blocks away from her Chelsea headquarters. ‘I want to be small, to be intimate, and more focused on how we present work,’ she says. ‘I always had the idea, when I was young, of being a gentleman art dealer.’

Integrity

To Cooper, the notion of a ‘gentleman art dealer’ has meant cultivating intimate, long-term relationships between artist and gallerist, and between gallerist and collector. It also means taking meticulous care of how art is presented (archival photographs show her deep in concentration while installing exhibitions). Cooper has remained attuned to the complexities of relationships to and between humans and artworks, and to aesthetic clarity even as the art world has grown larger and faster. There has always been a distance from the art market’s drift toward speculation and big business.

How has this gentlewomanliness – to update the language – played out? Unlike the usual 50/50 gallery-artist split when an artwork is sold, Cooper allocates 60% to the artist. ‘I always felt that the artist should get a little more,’ she has said. Those from her earliest roster (Walter De Maria, Sol LeWitt, Lynda Benglis) now grace art history’s pages; many have worked with her for decades. She never favored scale over quality, or salability and trends over artistic vision.

Artists are well aware of Cooper’s care, her precise eye, her preference for demanding, risky works (many artists say they ‘know what a Paula piece is’). ‘Paula had people’s respect. […] People took her seriously. And if she was showing someone, they were going to take that artist seriously,’ artist Elizabeth Murray said in an interview in 2005.

Engagement

That first anti-Vietnam War show set the tone for decades of stance-taking and organic community-building. In September 2024, in the run-up to the most recent US election, Cooper mounted ‘Flags’, a show in which 90 works by artists ranging from Jasper Johns to Gordon Parks riffed on the American flag. In between there have been a multitude of socially engaged shows and events, including marathon readings of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans each New Year’s Eve (readers have included composers John Cage, Philip Glass, and Meredith Monk, and musician David Byrne, to name just a few). At the height of the AIDS crisis in 1991, she staged a benefit exhibition for ACT UP, a grassroots coalition of AIDS activists. When the gallery celebrated its 50th year in 2018, Cooper recreated her inaugural 1968 exhibition, this time to benefit March for Our Lives, a student-led organization that targets gun violence in the United States. The gallery’s program has often made, as Cooper says, a ‘forceful statement for peace.’

Cooper quietly did something else that has had lasting resonance: She championed the work of female artists, nurturing the early career of iconic feminist artist Lynda Benglis (who briefly worked alongside Cooper in the gallery, as did art critic Roberta Smith), for example, as well as Jennifer Bartlett, Elizabeth Murray, Jackie Winsor, and others in the 1970s and 1980s when ardent support was not a given. At the time, art dealing ‘was a male-dominated world’: In a famous Irving Penn image that ran in Vogue in 1970, illustrating the hottest up-and-coming art dealers in the city, Cooper was the sole woman. ‘But I didn’t care,’ she said. ‘I just did it.’

Longevity

At age 17, Cooper already knew that she wanted, in her words, ‘to help artists.’ Her mother was an amateur painter, and Cooper spent her late teens seeing as much art as possible in Paris and beyond. In her 20s she learned the trade working in galleries. Many colleagues and artists have noted her singularity of vision and the ‘firmness’ of her personality.

Even amid choppier waters, Paula Cooper Gallery was ‘never, ever’ on the brink of closing. Broad economic downturns such as the stock market crash in 1987 barely registered, the gallerist has said, because the business was lean and nimble. For one of her senior partners, Steve Henry, a consistent thread has been the gallery’s ‘belief in the radical, however one defines that.’ Cooper has often risked the unknown and promoted the avant-garde, always encouraging artistic evolution over mere production. Another thread might be patience – she understands that markets ebb and flow, as do the conditions of artists’ lives. Cooper has also made it a mission, she says, to ‘help people see things differently, open their minds, infuse their lives with a wholeness, at least while looking at a particular work of art – to work magic of a sort.’ In 2022 in The New York Times, M.H. Miller wrote that the gallery’s longevity was due to ‘some combination of integrity, taste, and sheer willpower.’

Now, legacy

In 2021, Cooper named her son Lucas and three longtime gallery directors – Steve Henry, Alexis Johnson, and Anthony Allen – as partners. Even now, the octogenarian has not yet officially stepped away from the business she built, but is less involved with daily operations. Cooper clearly trusts the partners with whatever decisions they might make going forward. ‘They can change the name of the gallery; they can do whatever they want,’ she says. ‘I have no idea of perpetuating a dynasty.’

As part of the Gallery Legacy Award, Cooper has chosen to support a younger gallery, as she has so often supported artists. At next year’s Art Basel in Basel, Chapter NY, founded by Nicole Russo, will receive up to USD 50,000. A gallerist known for her thoughtful approach to installing work, operating with a lean staff and focused on a small roster of artists, it’s easy to see how Russo’s philosophy aligns with Cooper’s.

In 2007, Cooper donated the gallery’s archives to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. ‘The gallery will be forgotten. It’s the artists who survive,’ Cooper said in 2021. The Gallery Legacy Award respectfully disagrees.