In October of 1964, ground was broken on what would be the Whitney Museum’s third home, on the corner of Madison Avenue and East 75th Street.

Fifty years ago, Peter Saul’s first two major history paintings went on view at Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York. The pair, one based on Edgar Paxson’s Custer’s Last Stand and the other after Picasso’s Guernica, were the culmination of an evolving line of thinking that Saul underwent in the years prior.

Without a doubt, Peter Selz’s 1967 exhibition, Funk at the University of California Berkeley, Art Museum made waves. It was an ambitious, era-defining group show by the recent California transplant (by way of the Museum of Modern Art, New York), seeking to set the tone for his tenure at the museum going forward.

Roche’s most important and frequent model was his mother, María, to whom he was very close. Their collaborations are an expression of his love for her, of her trust in him and the familial bond they share.

In the late 1950’s, the San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) began a series of exhibitions under the heading of ‘The Arts of San Francisco.’ Occurring roughly every four years, the Summer of 1971 marked the fourth such undertaking.

In the winter of 1951, a young, aspiring art dealer traveled to Europe. With an eye to opening a gallery in his home city of Chicago, he familiarized himself with a generation of surrealist painters and sculptors, meeting an international cohort of artists in Paris, Rome and beyond.

Group exhibitions have been a summer staple of the New York art scene for decades - an opportunity for lighter fare during the hottest days of the year.

In 1958, the sculptor Jeremy Anderson showed two of his students a catalogue of work by H. C. Westermann, whose sculpture Anderson was familiar through their shared dealer, Allan Frumkin. The experience was revelatory to the two young artists, Robert Hudson and William T. Wiley and would impact their careers in different ways.

The 1968 season reads as a who’s who of Northern California art, with the addition of the two recent arrivals of Nutt and Nilsson.

Gregory Gillespie began at Cooper Union in 1954 - initially to study commercial art but the attraction of painting and fine arts eventually lead him to enroll as a full time student.

In 1975, Maryan shot a black and white film with the help of Kenny Schneider, in his room at the Chelsea Hotel. Titled Ecce Homo - as he called a series of sketchbooks begun in 1971 - the film is a highly personal meditation on the “world of hatred and violence” he witnessed first hand.

Sixty years ago this month, Peter Saul’s debut exhibition of ten recent paintings (and some drawings) opened at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in Chicago, IL.

Since the start of his career, Lenaghan has chosen to do most of his painting from life - and as his subject has long been the city of New York, his studio is the sidewalk.

When making the decision to move the gallery in 2005, it was both a simple and difficult choice. For decades its home had been on 57th Street, moving between three locations around the intersection of 57th and Fifth avenue since opening in New York in 1959.

A sudden and significant increase in studio space in the mid-1980s meant that Azaceta was not only able to paint on a much larger scale than before, but also allowed him to explore the themes of his paintings and drawings in three dimensions.

Arneson began experimenting with himself as a subject in the early 1970s – by 1975 the artist in various guises and expressions had become a defining aspect of his career.

Sims, the recently appointed curator of the collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art paid a visit to Westermann’s Connecticut studio in December of 1976 to look at new work.

Joan Brown’s handwritten checklist of drawings sent to Frumkin/Adams Gallery in March of 1990 for an exhibition in the fall of that year.

In December of 1981, the gallery mounted its sixth exhibition of Wiley's work, including new paintings, drawings and sculpture completed since his first retrospective at the Walker Art Center a year prior.

An enduring focus of the gallery has long been self-portraits and indeed many of the artists who have shown here over the years, both regularly and occasionally, have experimented with the format if not made it a staple of their practice.

Grooms' wide-ranging activities coalesced in the late 60s with the formation of his production company, Ruckus Construction Co with his then-wife, Mimi Gross. One of the company's first major undertakings was an immersive, 25 foot square sculptural installation of the city of Chicago.

For his installations at the gallery, Jose Bedia would either work directly on the wall or large rolls of canvas, as he is here, and often with little to no preparatory drawings.

In the summer of 1949, Elmer Bischoff, David Park and Hassel Smith presented their recent paintings in an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art.

In the fall of 2005, after 45 years on 57th Street, the gallery moved to West 26th in Chelsea. One of the first exhibitions at the new location was of new paintings by Roy De Forest.

In 1975, Peter Saul relocated from California to Chappaqua, New York. This photo was taken during a studio visit soon after his move, while Peter was working on his version of Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Sometimes the best way to look at art is with the artist’s words in mind. For decades Gillespie kept a regular journal, filling it with his thoughts about life, painting and being an artist.

Galleries are communities: this photo from our archives encapsulates that better than most.