A Bold Beginning
“Dallas refuses to see what is right in its own backyard,” said Linda Samuels. “Dallas people will not accept the fact that good artists live here and not just in New York,” she continued. Samuels (then Surls), spoke these words in an early 1979 interview with poet Bob Trammell, then staff writer for Texas Jazz magazine. Just over three years earlier, she had led the charge among a group of eight women artists, to found D. W. (Dallas Women’s) Co-op, an attempt to correct the tunnel vision these artists attributed to Dallas art dealers, gallerists, and collectors and to create space for emerging artists to show their work in the city. “We didn’t get together so much because we were women,” Samuels explained, “as because we were artists who didn’t have a regular place to exhibit.”[1]
On November 1, 1975, D. W. Co-op opened its doors at 3305 McKinney Ave in Dallas. The gallery space was tiny, consisting of two modest rooms and three closets, and the opening party was packed to the gills. Visitors came to see and celebrate DWG’s first exhibition, a group show of weavings, sculpture, ceramics, painting, and drawing by its eight founding members: Linda Samuels, Barbara Bell, Linnea Glatt, Jean-Marie Hamel, Juliana Heyne, Norma McManaway, Carole Scholder, and Molly Terrill. The first exhibition was reviewed in the Dallas Morning News by art critic Janet Kutner, who would regularly visit and write about DWG shows for the next 13 years. Kutner in particular, but also several successive art writers for the Dallas Times Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, would bring crucial attention to DWG.
With the turn of the new year, additional artists were invited to join the co-op, and by year’s end, the co-op had expanded to include twelve members. Annual dues were $30. Membership entitled artists to one exhibition per year, and it required them to staff and perform administrative, cleaning, and maintenance duties in the gallery, including patching and painting walls when it came time to hang exhibitions. Monthly meetings were held at members’ homes, with the responsibility of hosting rotating among them. At meetings, members made decisions about the exhibition schedule, delegated tasks among one another, and reviewed slides that had been sent to them by outside artists who were seeking membership, guest exhibitions, or status as consignment artists.
By the early summer of 1976, DWG underwent the first of two expansions at 3305 McKinney, acquiring adjacent rooms to its south and roughly doubling their footprint to a total of 1,800 square feet. By the summer of 1976, male artists began to have exhibitions at DWG, the first of which was a show of paintings by Ron Moody and Danny Williams.
Over the summer of 1978, DWG expanded a second time at 3305 McKinney, now acquiring rooms to the north of the original gallery space and nearly doubling their footprint once again. The expansion was celebrated with a group show. In fact, group shows—not only of members works but those of others as well—had become a regular fixture, one of which, the invitational “Miniature” show in December 1976 included works by 113 artists. (The works, of course, were very small.)
Incorporation, Transitions, Moves
DWG met with early critical success. Its solo and group exhibitions were frequently profiled in local news outlets and were even written up in publications with national reach, such as Artweek. Its artists were picked up for solo and juried group shows at museums across Texas, and DWG was consulted by out-of-state curators and gallerists planing major exhibitions as an authority on contemporary art in Dallas. DWG was buzzing with activity.
1979 was a year of transition. By this time, personal circumstances had led most of the earliest members of DWG to leave the co-op. A group of new and eager members had taken their place. Bell and Glatt remained; Samuels, the powerhouse behind so much of the gallery’s early success, was preparing to move to California. DWG’s success and Samuels’s impending departure were among the many reasons that DWG members began to consider a change in structure, one that would see a full-time, permanent Director take over day-to-day operations from the then 14-member co-operative. In the early months of 1979, members voted to incorporate, a legal change that seems to have taken effect around late May or likely on June 1. Samuels was voted to be the first Director, a position she soon shared with MJ Smith, whom she mentored during the first several months of incorporation. The members of the co-op became members of the incorporated gallery’s advisory board. “D. W. Co-op” underwent a name and brand change at this time, becoming “DW Gallery.” Among the ways this transition was marked was with a special exhibition of work by DWG “Exes,” former members who had left the co-op for various reasons; all seven “exes” agreed to participate, including founding members Hamel, Heyne, McManaway, Scholder, and Terrill as well as Cecil Day and Gisela-Heidi Strunk.
By March of 1980, Smith was the sole Director of DWG, but the directorship of DWG seems to have become complicated; financier and board member Lou Lyne Alpert was sending out correspondence on behalf of DWG by late 1980. A search for a new director must have been underway. It seems likely that Diana Block, more recently remembered as the long-time director of the University of North Texas art galleries, was appointed Director of DWG effective January 1, 1981. Block would remain Director until the dissolution of the gallery in 1988. Around the time she assumed the directorship, DWG seems to have undergone another, partial, rebranding, with an official “DWG” logo being used alongside the existing “DW Gallery” wordmark.
In 1983, DWG left 3305 McKinney for 3200 Main St, a larger space in the Deep Ellum neighborhood of Dallas. Landlord and financial backer John Tatum wanted to reclaim the McKinney space for other purposes; the Main St location, which he also owned, would bring DWG to an area of the city that that had been characterized as a Dallas SoHo.[2] DWG was given a second-floor space where, despite diminished foot traffic, the gallery flourished nonetheless. At the Main St location, an area of the gallery was given over to a new initiative—the DW Bookstore, a feature that would continue to be part of DWG until its eventual closure in 1988.
In late 1986, Tatum forced another location change upon DWG. The gallery moved to just a few blocks away to 2909c Canton St. Still in the Deep Ellum, this large, street-level space designed by architectural team Harvey Phillips and Frank Ryburn would be the last home of DWG.
Exhibitions and Impact
From its inception as a humble co-op, DWG was conceived of as a refuge for artists who struggled to find venues where they could show their work. While some of the challenge arose from systemic biases that continued to privilege male artists within the Texas and American art scenes, in other cases, artists were making work that was less commercially viable.
DWG became known as a space where experimental art could be shown without concern for its profitability.[3] For instance, Video Oral Histories with DWG artists recall musical and performances held in the tiny closets of the 3305 McKinney location.[4] Houston performance artist Jon Powell also created work in the space. The very successful “Rooms” show of 1979 gave a handful of invited artists the opportunity to transform the McKinney space into a series of immersive spaces. Meanwhile, the work of core DWG artists whose art could be challenging for casual collectors to acquire and display, such as the large-scale concrete and metal sculptures of Linnea Glatt, continued to develop their work and ideas across years of exhibitions at the gallery.[5]
Not long after DWG was founded, other art collectives began to appear in Dallas. The woman’s collaborative Toxic Shock, which had the stated aim of producing art at the nexus of politics and gender, was founded in 1980 by Frances Bagley, Julie Cohn, Debora Hunter, Linda Finnell, and Susan Magilow, all of whom were or would become affiliated with DWG. In 1978, 500X Gallery opened, a co-operative that would be known for its avant-garde, experimental art and raucous parties. DWG, by contrast, remained a quieter counterpart, where experimental art could be shown, without self-consciousness, to an established viewership ready to receive it with a critical but eager eye.
The number of artists who had early shows at DWG and would go on to critical acclaim or move to representation by more established commercial galleries, whether in Dallas, Houston, or New York, attests to the status of DWG as a proving ground for emerging artists in the city. Some of the most prominent artists in Texas art today, including David Bates, Clyde Connell, Linea Glatt, Billy Hassell, John Hernanzez, Linda Ridgway, Lee N. Smith III, and Ann Stautberg had their earliest shows with DWG. Works by DWG artists were routinely selected for inclusion at juried shows or for acquisitions by major museums in Texas, including the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. From 1987 to 1988, six DWG artists were recipients of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Closing
In early 1988, the board met several times to discuss the future of DWG. Longtime financial backers, Lou Alpert and John Tatum, were at odds about the future of the gallery. DWG’s operating budget had increased from $24,000 to $100,000 from 1981 to 1988; nevertheless, in the 1987 fiscal year, investor contributions accounted for less than a quarter of that budget. As Tatum noted, although DWG had never once broken even since incorporating, gallery sales had increased since the move to Canton Street in the Deep Ellum. Nevertheless, DWG was behind on its rent. Alpert, now the majority shareholder, seemed ready to move on.
On March 3, 1988, Lou Alpert, Susie Phillips, Susan Magilow, Jody Cohen, Linda Finnell, Tracy Harris, Julie Cohn, Susan Teegardin, and Diana Block met to discuss the situation. There was concern that DWG should be granted the courtesy of a gradual and orderly closure, and the group drew up a plan that was sent to Tatum the next day. Though Block drafted a letter of resignation at this time, DWG correspondence suggests she remained in her role until the end of August.
In July, letters were sent to artists to inform them that DWG would officially close on September 30, 1988. To mark the end of the gallery, a final exhibition was planned for September, and Linda Samuels was invited back from California to be guest curator, a fitting gesture that neatly book-ended the life of DWG. The show consisted of recent work by DWG artists as well as a wall of postcard art made by many of the over 450 artists who had shown at DWG over its 13-year run. Samuels remarked, “I’ve made the complete karmic circle—the opening and closing of the gallery.”[6]
[1] Bob Trammell, “Other Possibilities: 3-D Weaving,” Texas Jazz, [date TBC], p. 19.
[2] The Dallas Morning News (Dallas), March 20, 1983, NewsBank.
[3] Ann Jarmusch, “Influential DW Gallery in Deep Ellum to Close in September,” Dallas Times Herald (Dallas), August 6, 1988.
[4] Ron Lowe, “Art Notes,” E, Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Fort Worth), April 11, 1982, NewsBank.
[5] Janet Kutner, “Glatt Has Expanded Her Concepts Along With Size of Her Sculpture,” C, Art, The Dallas Morning News (Dallas), March 11, 1982, NewsBank.
[6] Colleen O’Connor, “Opening or Closing, Galleries Make a Fresh Start,” E, The Dallas Morning News, September 18, 1988.