Irving Blum and Peggy Moffitt, 1964, photo of the art dealer Blum and model/muse Moffitt. Photo by Dennis Hopper

Irving Blum’s Ferus Gallery Announcements (and Interview with Dave Hickey)

Tonight, July 30th at 6:30 SITE Santa Fe presents critic Dave Hickey interviewing Irving Blum. I was going online to look for Ferus Gallery documentation, as well as a backstory to the art dealer who changed everything (Blum). I arrived via Archives of American Art digitized collections at these terrific examples of the invitations to Blum’s shows, which the Guerrilla Girls might assert were not so terrific based on the fact that (at least in this archive) there is only one mention of a woman artist, Jay DeFeo. (The artist whose work The Rose is owned permanently by the Whitney; and whose starting career point was a 1951 UC Berkeley fellowship that took her, after graduation, to Europe and North Africa for a year and a half. DeFeo herself speculated that having the first name that could have been mistaken for that of a man, might have played a part in the fellowship.)

As they say, never mind. Or at least don’t mind enough not to peruse these great show invites. Because you wouldn’t know from graphic design by the ghastly London 2012 logo at the Olympics.