Steven Leiber Catalogs 2017

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I met Steven in 1995 with my husband, Ted Purves, who moved to San Francisco from Chicago in 1993, inspired by his first meetings with Steven. Ted slowly began collecting books by 60s and 70s conceptual/performance artists, as well as multiples and ephemera, developing a unique collection that includes earth and land art. We spent 20 years visiting “the basement”, eating good food, and luring Steven into our artwork and teaching projects.

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Steven Leiber was a pioneering San Francisco art dealer, collector, and gallerist who specialized in the dematerialized art practices of the 1960s and 1970s and the ephemera and documentation spawned by conceptual art and other postwar movements. To sell this material, Leiber produced a series of 52 iconic catalogs between 1992 and 2010. Far from your ordinary dealer catalog, Leiber’s catalogs paid homage to the kind of historic printed matter he bought and sold, mimicking iconic publications such as Wallace Berman’s Semina journal and the exhibition catalog for Documenta V (1972). Leiber’s reputation spread via these unique volumes, which included works by John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Ray Johnson, Lucy Lippard, Allan Kaprow, Yayoi Kusama, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Weiner and many more. 

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