The Dream Colony: A Life in Art

Art Forum’s Best of the Year List

＂An intimate tour through fifty years of American art history＂ (New Yorker) through the eyes of the visionary curator who helped shape it-with an introduction by legendary artist Ed Ruscha

An innovative, iconoclastic curator of contemporary art, Walter Hopps founded his first gallery at the age of twenty-one. At twenty-four, he opened the Ferus Gallery with then-unknown artist Edward Kienholz. Ferus turned the spotlight on a new generation of West Coast artists, premiered Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, and was at one point shut down by the L.A. vice squad for a show of Wallace Berman’s edgy art. In the sixties, Hopps mounted the first museum retrospectives of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell and the first museum exhibition of Pop Art-before it was even known as Pop Art. When Hopps became the director of Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art at age thirty-four, the New York Times hailed him as ＂the most gifted museum man on the West Coast (and, in the field of contemporary art, possibly in the nation).＂ He was also arguably the most unpredictable, an eccentric genius who was chronically late. (His staff at the Cocoran had a button made that said ＂Walter Hopps will be here in twenty minutes.＂) Erratic in his work habits, he never wavered in his commitment to art.

A few years before his death in 2005, Hopps began work on this book, a vivid, personal, surprising, irreverent, and enlightening account of his life and of some of the greatest artistic minds of the twentieth century.

Walter Hopps (1932-2005) was a curator and museum director who worked at the Pasadena Art Museum, the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian’s National Collection of Fine Arts, the Menil Collection, which he helped create, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Deborah Treisman is the fiction editor of the New Yorker. She hosts the award-winning New Yorker Fiction Podcast and was the editor of the anthology 20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker. She was formerly the managing editor of the art and literary quarterly Grand Street, for which Hopps was the art editor.
Anne Doran has written for Art in America, Artforum, and other publications. She worked as an editor at Grand Street. Her artwork has been shown around the world.