{"product_id":"she-wanted-adventure","title":"She Wanted Adventure","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe untold story of five women gallerists whose risky and raucous exhibitions brought art to life and to Los Angeles from the 1960s onward-and whose influence transformed the city and remade the canon.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A Volkswagen microbus sighs to a halt and out tumble nine people. It is 1962, and the passengers-artists, dancers, musicians, eccentrics-are haggard and harried from weeks on the road. They range from the already famous (Merce Cunningham, John Cage) to the soon-to-be (Robert Rauschenberg), and their arrival sets off a series of events that will change Los Angeles and the history of modern art forever.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWho invited them? That would be Virginia Dwan: heiress to a sandpaper fortune, art-school dropout, regal, restrained, twice divorced, and barely thirty years old. Her namesake gallery in Westwood would host the van dwellers and, in the years that followed, serve as a haven and a laboratory for risk-taking, era-defining exhibitions, antiwar activism, and raucous cultural experimentation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDoubly invisible as both a curator and a woman, Dwan and her story have remained largely untold. She wasn't the only one. This is the tale of Dwan and four other women-Eugenia Butler, Riko Mizuno, Suzanne Jackson, and Claire Copley-whose lives converged and collided alongside the rise of the counterculture. Some had money; some did not. All bucked convention to open their own galleries in a time of radical change, a time defined by possibility and paranoia-emptying their bank accounts, escaping from their families, breaking up their marriages, and sometimes breaking the law.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eShe Wanted Adventure\u003c\/i\u003e, Catherine Wagley brings to light the strange, full, obsessive, private, and wonderful lives and works of these women-for whom art was not just a way of living but life itself.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57499227750773,"sku":"9780374613747","price":30.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/products\/she-wanted-adventure","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}