Jefferson Place Gallery

The Jefferson Place Gallery was an art gallery in Washington, DC. It was founded in 1957, as a cooperative gallery, by five current and former art professors at American University — William H. Calfee, Robert "Bob" F. Gates, Helene (McKinsey) Herzbrun, Mary R. Orwen, and Ben "Joe" Summerford — and Alice Denney, who served as the first director. Other artists who joined the cooperative in 1957 were George Bayliss, Lothar Brabanski, Colin Greenly, Leonard Maurer, Kenneth Noland, and Baltimore-based artist Shelby Shackelford. Nesta Dorrance acquired the gallery from Denney in 1961, when she left to organize the Washington Gallery of Modern Art. Dorrance ran it until it closed in October 1974.

Jefferson Place Gallery with Foam Works by Ed Zerne (1972)

The gallery exhibited "advanced art" and was associated with Washington Color School, color field, post-painterly abstraction and lyrical abstraction for a number of years, and was a major Washington outlet for that art. Some artists who also exhibited at Jefferson Place Gallery: Antoinette "Tony" Bradlee, William Christenberry, Gene Davis, Willem De Looper, William Eggleston, Sam Gilliam, John Gossage, Valerie Hollister, Sheila Isham, Jennie Lea Knight, Rockne Krebs, Blaine Larson, Howard Mehring, Mary Pinchot Meyer, David Moy, Roberto Polo, V.V. Rankine, Paul Reed (artist), Eric Rudd, Yuri Schwebler, Roy Slade, Carroll Sockwell, Jack Solomon, David Staton, Elliot Thompson, Hilda Shapiro Thorpe, Frederic Matys Thursz, Franklin White, John P. Wise, and Ed Zerne.

The competitors in contemporary art with Nesta Dorrance's Jefferson Place Gallery were Henri Gallery [Henrietta Ersham], Pyramid Gallery [Ramon Osuna and Luis Lastra] and later, Protetch-Rivkin Gallery [Max Protetch and Harold Rivkin].