Two Lives in Art, and a Collection Tracing Their Trajectory

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Hilarie M. Sheets

Laura Hoptman and Verne Dawson in their Manhattan home in front of, from left, Jim Lambie’s “Psychedelic Soul Stick” (2001); Bill Lynch’s “Family”; and Urs Fischer’s “Untitled.” Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London; Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times

On the day in 1983 when Laura Hoptman graduated from Williams College, she took a bus to Manhattan and moved into an apartment on East 10th Street. “I knew I wanted to be in the contemporary-art world, I knew I wanted to be a curator, but most of all, I knew I just wanted to be around artists,” said Ms. Hoptman, now executive director of the Drawing Center. Over the last three decades, she’s achieved the life she envisioned, and it’s reflected on the walls of the home she shares with her husband, the painter Verne Dawson, at another address on East 10th. The couple’s grown-up bohemian apartment is filled with artworks accumulated from their network of friends and colleagues, including Elizabeth Peyton, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Paul Bloodgood, Trisha Donnelly, Chris Ofili and George Condo. [More]