10.7282/T3-HS6G-3492
Gillespie, Dorothy
Dorothy Gillespie papers, box 11 folder 39 (Sculpture, 1990s)
No Publisher Supplied
1990
Dorothy Gillespie was an artist, a feminist activist, and a philanthropist. Her artwork, except for a few early paintings and several happenings in the 1960s, was entirely abstract. Gillespie was influenced by Abstract Expressionism, Happenings, Pop Art, and Feminism. In the 1970s, she became involved in the Women’s Interart Center, New York Professional Women Artists, and the feminist art movement. She organized exhibitions, created a collection of women’s art, compiled statistics, and took part in protests against galleries. The bright and fun style of her sculptural abstractions was a hallmark and created various public art opportunities for her in the 1980s. In the 1980s and 1990s, she donated many pieces from her own art collection, as well as her own artwork, to various universities in order to create university art collections. In the 1990s, Gillespie created smaller sculptures that were more accessible for beginning collectors. The collection documents her art production from roughly the early 1940s through 2010, her involvement in New York artists associations and galleries, her pioneer course at the New School for Social Research “Functioning in the Art World,” correspondence between her and art institutions, and her public and commercial artworks.