article - The Pat Hearn and Colin de Land Cancer Foundation

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PAT HEARN
COLIN DE LAND
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A TRIBUTE
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Courtesy of the Colin de Land Photo Archive
Pat and Colin were our dear friends. We miss them tremendously and they are always in our
thoughts. This and all future Armory Shows are dedicated to them. — Matthew and Paul
Oh Pat. Oh Colin. How We Knew Them.
B y L i n d a Ya b l o n s k y
Ask who knows what about Pat Hearn and Colin de Land
and everyone talks at once and says the same things, worth
repeating. She was the listener, the best listener ever, the
most eternal optimist. Style for days. Love to spare. He was
the sweetest, the drollest, the winking anti-dealer, tall dark
and handsome in his tartan plaid suit and trademark
trucker's hat. Jerry Saltz called him the Keith Richards of
the art world. John Waters called her the Jackie Kennedy
of the art world. In fact, there was no one in or out of the
art world like either one.
That reminds me of the day I met Pat. She called me out
of the blue. Her friend Jack Pierson had given her my
number, after I wrote him up for Interview. I went down
to her gallery, the big three-story space at 39 Wooster, in
SoHo, where she had moved in 1989. She was wondering if
I could put her in touch with Lydia Lunch, the onetime
punk priestess whose spoken-word act, a sultry and semiabusive rant about female self-empowerment that I had
written about in Interview too.
Pat was wearing a white sleeveless blouse and a pencil-slim
skirt and sling-backs, her hair combed into a modest flip
and held in place with a perky white headband. (Funny I
remember what she was wearing; I haven't the foggiest idea
how I looked.) Lydia habitually dressed in dominatrix
drag. Pat wanted to invite Lydia to do a performance in
her gallery. She thought Lydia was really something. That
was funny, since Pat was clearly really something too.
For three years Pat lived virtually without a functioning
liver, God knows how. Well, she worked at it. Colin scoured
the planet for information on available cancer treatments,
consulted the doctors, vetted the healers, the wand wavers,
the well wishers. He wanted to know about everything and
she wanted to try everything, the conventional and the
alternative, both relying throughout the process on the
pure spit and polish of human resolve.
Lisa Spellman remembers when Pat and Colin met. This
was in 1987, when they all had galleries in the East Village.
(They had opened in '83, '84, somewhere in there.) Pat had
already moved her business from 94 Avenue B — the small
gallery built by her first husband, Thierry Cheverney — to
a kind of urban desert outpost on 9th Street and Avenue D,
a neighborhood seemingly populated mostly by salvage
crews and junkies. She had been showing Phillip Taaffe,
Mark Morrisroe, George Condo, Milan Kunc, Donald
Baechler and Peter Schuyff. Now she added Mary Heilmann,
Jimmy De Sana and Susan Hiller. The limos followed.
Spellman's 303 Gallery was on East 6th between A and B.
Colin had Vox Populi, the deliberately unfinished storefront next door. Spellman says Pat sent him flowers every
day after they starting going out. His gallery filled up with
them. But the same scene was playing out over at Pat's.
Flowers everywhere. He soon moved into her loft on East
11th. Again they exchanged tokens of affection. She gave
him a gun. He gave her a glazed bust of Elvis.
Photo: Sam Grubman
Colin's musical tastes actually ran more to Joan Baez. She
went for Julie London, did the beehive hair, slinky dress,
high heels and frosted pink lips. She also did Patsy Cline
and, especially, Audrey Hepburn. Paul Morris remembers
her coming out for breakfast one summer morning, in
Provincetown, in a Dior-style black dress and black straw hat,
oversized sunglasses, white heels and vintage pocketbook.
Later on, when Daniel Reich went for his job interview at
her Chelsea gallery, she had on white suede, stack-heeled
loafers, brown stockings and a green skirt. Her hair was
pulled taut against her head. Beauty, she said, was one of
requirements for art. She looked it.
She gave me a tour of the gallery, of the exhibition on the
first floor, a long white space with a concrete floor and a
big skylight in the back. Her program now leaned heavily
toward hardcore conceptualism and installation. Jutta
Koether had entered the picture, along with Renee Green,
Joan Jonas and Julia Scher, and Pat reconfigured the space
for each show. On that day and many to come, I loved
listening to her talk about the art she showed. It was not all
that easy to grasp. She not only made it comprehensible.
She made it essential.
Her office was on the second floor. It had white brick walls
and a white, vinyl-tile floor. It was very well organized,
with a seating area and a couple of office areas, bookshelves everywhere. The top floor was raw space. It looked
like an attic, plank floors, unpainted brick walls, beamed
ceiling. Pat had run out of money before she had a chance
to do anything more than clean it. Would I consider using
the space for a reading?
Now I found out what it was like to be one of Pat's artists,
though I soon found out that she was as much a writer's
advocate as an artist's. There were always books on her desk
and stacked on the floor beside it. They were heavy-duty
books of critical theory and philosophy, art monographs
and biographies. The fiction was sophisticated, or experimental, and none of it was there just for show.
I did arrange a reading for her gallery, in fact a whole
series. How could I say no? How could anyone? Did
anyone? I can't imagine it. We called the series NightLight
Readings and we did one event per month from September
to May 1991. The first one was on the ground floor. We
didn't have chairs, so that's where people sat, on the
concrete floor. The bill included Lydia Lunch. It also had
Fiona Templeton and David Wojnarowicz, who was sick
with AIDS and mad as hell. He could make your hair stand
on end. And that was how it went all the way through.
Somehow she knew, long before I did, that this was
something I could do, and with Pat's blessing NightLight
continued, in nonprofit spaces on Wooster Street, for
eight more years. My first big cultural statement! It
changed my life. Made it better, Pat did. And I do not
think my experience was unique.
Colin had also moved to SoHo (as had other East Village
dealers), only now he called his business American Fine
Arts. The name was only partly ironic. It was in a former
garage at 40 Wooster, right across the street from Pat. A
bit later, he moved down the block, to No. 22. His artists
included Jessica Diamond, Mark Dion, Jessica Stockholder,
Andrea Fraser, Dennis Balk, Cady Noland, Tom Burr,
artists other people had barely heard of, artists who were
doing something new -- John Waters, Nils Norman, Alex
Bag, Art Club 2000, he kept them coming. More than one
would later say they never would have had a career without
Colin. Oddly enough, collectors said the same thing – that
they never would have started collecting if not for him.
Colin stayed in business almost without trying, says his
friend Frank Schroder, also an artist in his gallery, but
that was a ruse. In fact, Colin was always working, as intent
on influencing the public perception of his artists as he
was concerned with the presentation of their art. That was
the reason he never got anywhere on time. That was why he
always did his Christmas shopping on Christmas Day. He
wasn't disorganized. He was busy! He shopped on Canal
Street, the bootlegger's mall. On Christmas, nothing else
was open. One year, says Paul Morris, Colin bought
watches for everyone – "gold," of course.
The other thing Colin was always doing, besides, working,
was taking pictures. Did anyone ever see him without a
camera, especially after the advent of the Elf? Digital
technology was made for Colin de Land. At openings,
dinners, art fairs and simple tete-a-tetes, Colin would be
scanning the room or the table or the faces or profiles,
the hands and the hairdos, with his digital camera, which
he did not have to press to an eye in order to work. It
enabled him to photograph the detail and see the entire
picture of the world around him all at once. Sure, he
affected a distracted air. But Colin never missed a thing.
American Fine Arts, Co.’s artists and staff, photo: Takahiro Imamura, Courtesy American Fine Arts, Co.
He gave classes at his gallery, ten couples at a time who
paid $400 each to listen to him lecture on the history of
art from Cezanne on up. He would speak for ninety
minutes, then pass out sandwiches and introduce a guest
speaker, usually one of his artists. He was unforgettable.
In the early 80s, Colin moonlighted as John Dogg, an
artist as obsessed as Colin with cars and car culture. He
sealed tires inside Donald Judd-type plywood boxes. He
had wheel covers made and emblazoned with the name
"Johnny." He bought a Nova from Richard Prince and
went to car shows. He bought a pickup truck. As J. St.
Bernard, he made dog bones in a rainbow of colors. Who
else would have thought of that? Well, no one else had to.
Colin's whole gallery was an artwork, really, a scourge of
all that was impure in the presentation of art. As a dealer,
he could be more radical than the artists whose work he
showed, and they could be pretty radical. Gareth James
closed the place for a whole month, during his scheduled
exhibition, to throw some light, or cast a shadow, on the
evil, irresistible web spun by art and commerce.
Pat liked to say she developed new markets for artists.
Colin developed new artists regardless of the market. "I
think of myself as an artistic person," Massimo Audiello
will tell you, "but next to Colin I felt like a plumber."
Massimo was one of Pat's closest friends. He had to get
used to Colin. Massimo expected a jealous husband. He
got a brother.
For Mary Heilmann, Pat had a magical presence, a star
presence that, Mary says, helped her in business. Yet Pat
nearly lost it all in the recession of the early 90s. Nearly.
But there was something she could do about that. There
were discussions with Colin, with Paul Morris and Matthew
Marks. There were meetings. There were dinners. By May
of 1993, there was the Gramercy International Art Fair.
With Marks and Morris dividing the work with Hearn and
Art Dealers at the Gramercy International Art Fair, Courtesy of the Colin de Land
Photo Archive
de Land, seventy dealers rented rooms at the Gramercy
Hotel to show new art from a suitcase, cash and carry. For
five years, the fair got better, and bigger. It moved into the
Lexington Avenue Armory. It grew into the international
Armory Show we have now. But back in 1993, maintaining
a contemporary art gallery was still a struggle.
With her lease expiring, Pat decided to move to
Chinatown. Paul Morris had another idea. He wanted a
gallery near a museum, a museum like Dia, on West 22nd
Street. Pat liked that idea. Coincidentally, Matthew Marks
was quietly looking for space in the same neighborhood.
Kismet! Marks opened his gallery on West 22nd Street in
October of 1994. Pat and Paul divided a garage a few doors
down and opened a few months later. This time it wasn't
just the limos that followed. It was everyone.
But first, back at 22 Wooster, Colin was holding a three-day
benefit sale to keep his enterprise going. This was really
interesting, a commercial gallery holding a benefit for
itself. In fact, the gallery's program always did resemble a
nonprofit exhibition space more than it did a showroom
for art, a laboratory for the dissemination of an "institutional critique." In fact, AFA was really a clubhouse.
You never came to this place just to look at art. Every day
was a social occasion. The back room looked like a movie
set, and it was a staging area of sorts, but no one pretended
it wasn't a place of business. There were files and desks, art
on the walls, and often on the floor, propped against the
walls and reaching for the ceiling, stacks of paintings and
photos prepared for shipping, or installing. There were
kids on the phone, at the computers, talking to clients, as
was Colin. He was often on the phone – his table at Café
Novecento was virtually a cellphone booth – and it was all
for show, and for sale, to parties patient enough to wait
out his agonized consideration of a price. I don't know, he
would say, a burning cigarette in one hand, the other
scratching his head. Can I get back to you on that? He
would have to get back to you on everything. That was the
de Land way of exercising control.
I became a regular visitor. I saw mysterious things in his
gallery, art I wanted to know more about. I wanted to know
more about a dealer who could put out his hand and have
more than two hundred artists happily sign over their work
for his benefit. I had seen such things happen in the art
world before – that was one reason I wanted to be a part of
the art world – but the AFA benefit was really a harbinger
of things to come, when Pat was ailing and her health
insurer refused to cover the cost of her treatment.
Roberta Smith wrote an article detailing the situation in
The New York Times. Every artist in New York, it seemed,
donated work that was sold by teams of volunteers to
scores of people who flocked to Pat's Gallery every day for
a week. The health insurance company reversed itself. Pat
turned the money from the sale into a trust for emergency
medical care. *
*
Photo: Nan Goldin, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
It is now the Pat Hearn and Colin de Land Cancer Foundation, for the
treatment of artists with cancer.
After each round of chemotherapy, each more debilitating
than the last, Pat would arrive at an opening or a premiere
in yet another new outfit, in gold lame or sequins and
pearls, her head wrapped in a chic turban or topped by a
red or white pageboy wig. Why not? She was proud of how
well she was doing. My tumor has gone down fifty percent!
she would exclaim, her eyes dancing, misting as they met
your own.
from the Pat Hearn mold, in both body and spirit. Colin
and Kembra went to Venice, they took vacations, they
laughed everything off. He hosted evenings with bands like
Actress and Pfahler's Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black.
At the Armory Show last year, he designed the walls of his
booth to spell out the letters, "AFA," in black. There was
art all over them. When the fair opened, customers
swarmed. It only lacked one thing. Colin.
Daniel Reich says that she came to work no matter how she
was feeling. Joan Jonas says she insisted on coming in to
help install her show, even if she had to lie down. I
remember calling in March of '99, when Pat was in the
hospital and everyone thought the end was near. In June
she was on a plane to Basel.
A year later, things were different and also the same.
Twenty friends and colleagues crammed into a tiny room
at City Hall to witness Pat's marriage to Colin. They both
looked smashing. In July, she gave herself a birthday party
in Mary Heilmann's loft. She sent out the invitations and
later, the thank you's – they were love letters, really. She
arranged the food, hired a trio of Moroccan musicians to
play for us. They were wonderful. Where had she found
them? In the Yellow Pages, she said. She called them out
of the blue. Everyone sang "Happy Birthday" with gusto.
Was a song ever more bittersweet? Pat's eyes had begun to
sink into her head. I have never seen fiercer eyes – except
maybe Colin's. She was so thin it was hard to believe she
could even stand upright. Yet she came to the party with
her hair done, in full makeup and in glamorous new dress.
She was elegance itself. She died a month later.
Was he sick then too? Hard to tell – with those dark circles
under his eyes and his olive skin, he never did look quite
healthy. He drank. He doubled his work-load, moved his
gallery into Pat's in Chelsea. He didn't want to be alone
for a minute. He hooked up with Kembra Pfahler, a
Dada-esque rocker who performed with her band in a
costume of blue body paint and seemed uncannily cut
Drawing of the American Fine Arts, Co. booth at The Armory Show 2003;
Colin de Land and Ken Saylor
The Pat Hearn and Colin de Land Cancer Foundation
From February 26 – March 9,1996, friends of Pat Hearn organized an “Emergency Art Sale to
Benefit Pat Hearn”. Hundreds of works of art were donated by artists and as many collectors
bought the art to raise money for Pat to cover her medical expenses in her battle with liver
cancer. At the time, her insurance company refused coverage, claiming her cancer was a preexisting condition. The publicity surrounding the benefit helped pressure her carrier which
eventually relaxed its disavowal of responsibility to provide coverage.
Pat established the Emergency Art Fund Trust to which she contributed the monies that were
raised for her benefit. The Trust funded Pat’s medical expenses that were not reimbursable by
insurance. The Trustees of the Trust included Pat, Colin de Land, Barbara Morse, Jack
Pierson and Sam Grubman. After Pat’s death, the Trustees began work on establishing a Pat
Hearn Foundation that would fulfill Pat’s express wishes to use the balance of her Trust funds
to provide medical care to individuals in the visual arts community with cancer.
After the untimely death from cancer of Pat’s beloved husband Colin de Land, the trustees
decided to add Colin’s name to the Foundation.
The Pat Hearn and Colin de Land Acquisition Fund
Pat Hearn and Colin de Land were founders of The Gramercy International Art Fair and its
successor, The Armory Show, and were leading figures in the contemporary art world for two
decades. After Pat’s death in 2000, the three remaining founders of The Armory Show established The Pat Hearn Acquisition Fund at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, for the
sole purpose of acquiring works in all media by artists who, in the opinion of the Museum’s
curators, have not received the recognition they deserve. Upon the death of Pat’s beloved husband, Colin de Land, in 2003, the surviving founders asked that the Fund be renamed to
include Colin. The founders encourage you to support The Pat Hearn and Colin de Land
Acquisition Fund generously. To learn more or to make a gift, please contact
The Pat Hearn and Colin de Land Cancer Foundation is a not-for-profit Foundation whose
mission is to provide financial assistance with medical expenses to members of the visual arts
community with cancer. Money is to be distributed based on financial need. Financial assistance may be provided for by the Foundation for standard conventional care, unconventional
and experimental therapies, hospice care, palliative care and home care.
To learn more about the Foundation, please contact Sam Grubman, MD at
The Pat Hearn and Colin de Land Cancer Foundation, Inc.,
405 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022 or via e-mail at [email protected].
The following individuals serve on the Board of Directors of the Foundation:
Sam Grubman, MD; Marie Hearn, Michael Hort, Susan Hort, Brice Marden, Helen Marden,
Matthew Marks, Paul Morris, Barbara Morse, Howard Morse, Jack Pierson, Christine
Tsvetanov and John Waters.
Emmett S. Watson at The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019.
Phone 212.708.9404 or email [email protected]
Photo Credits
Page 3: clockwise from upper left corner: Nan Goldin, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery; middle left: Tom Warren;
middle right: Courtesy of the Colin de Land Photo Archive; upper right: Sam Grubman; middle and bottom right and
left: Courtesy of the Colin de Land Photo Archive; middle left: Tom Warren; center: Mark Morrisroe Page 4: Colin de
Land Photo Archive; poster design by Dennis Balk Page 5: clockwise from upper left corner: Baird James, Courtesy of
the Colin de Land Photo Archive; middle and upper right: Courtesy of the Colin de Land Photo Archive; middle right:
Mary Heilmann; bottom and middle left: Courtesy of the Colin de Land Photo Archive Page 6: © The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Page 13: Tom Warren Back Cover: Margaret DeLuccia