Virginia Dwan: Flowers

Known primarily for her visionary art collecting, Virginia Dwan (born 1931) showed artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt, Joan Mitchell and more at her Los Angeles gallery in the 1960s. But Dwan has her own artistic practice, and has dedicated the last three and a half years to documenting military graves in cemeteries across the United States. This collection of photographs, accompanying an exhibition that will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the LACMA in Los Angeles, serves as striking evidence of the ever-growing number of lives lost as a consequence of war. Though the work is political, the volume is purely visual, without comment—just page after page of headstones. The only text in the book is the late Pete Seeger’s question, “Where have all the flowers gone?” The images speak for themselves.