Collection: Colin de Land

Colin de Land (1955–2003) was an American gallerist and one of the most influential figures in the New York art world of the 1980s and 1990s. He founded American Fine Arts, Co. (AFA) in New York in 1986, operating the gallery until his death in 2003. AFA became a central venue for conceptually rigorous, often difficult and deliberately anti-commercial work, presenting artists including John Miller, Andrea Fraser, Tom Burr, Cady Noland, Pruitt–Early and many others whose practices resisted easy assimilation into the mainstream art market.

De Land’s approach to running a gallery was itself understood as a form of practice: AFA’s programme was shaped by an acute awareness of the institutional and economic conditions of exhibition-making, and by a commitment to artists whose work engaged critically with those conditions. The gallery maintained close relationships with artist-led and unconventional exhibition contexts internationally, including Fine Rats International in Birmingham, whose Under Spaghetti Junction invitation (1993) was retained in the Colin de Land and Pat Hearn Library.

That library — formed from the personal and working collections of de Land and Pat Hearn — is now held by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. It records printed material distributed through gallery, artist-led, underground and unconventional channels, and stands as one of the most significant archives of ephemera from this period of American and international contemporary art.