Collection: Pat Hearn

Pat Hearn (1955–2000) was an American gallerist whose gallery, Pat Hearn Gallery, operated in New York from 1983 until her death in 2000. Alongside Colin de Land’s American Fine Arts, Co., Pat Hearn Gallery was among the most important venues for experimental and conceptually engaged art in New York during the 1980s and 1990s. Hearn was known for her commitment to artists working outside prevailing market trends, and for the rigour and independence of her programme.

Pat Hearn Gallery presented work by artists including Günther Förg, Mary Heilmann, Fabian Marcaccio, Jorge Pardo and many others, maintaining a programme that was simultaneously aesthetically ambitious and resistant to institutional or commercial pressure. Hearn and de Land were partners in life as well as in the New York art world, and their galleries operated in close proximity — both physically and programmatically — throughout the 1990s.

The Colin de Land and Pat Hearn Library, formed from their personal and working collections, is now held by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. It preserves printed material — invitations, announcements, catalogues, artist books and ephemera — distributed through gallery, artist-led and unconventional channels, and constitutes one of the most significant archives of printed matter from this period of American and international contemporary art.