Barbara Gladstone (née Levitt; May 21, 1935 – June 16, 2024) was an American art dealer and film producer. She was owner of Gladstone Gallery, a contemporary art gallery with locations in New York and Brussels.

Background

Barbara Levitt was born in Philadelphia on May 21, 1935. She began collecting in the 1970s, alongside a job teaching art history at Hofstra University. She was married twice, to Elliot Regen and Leonard Gladstone ; both marriages ended in divorce. She had two sons, David and Richard Regen; her third son, Stuart Regen, died in 1998 at USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Career

Gladstone Gallery

In 1980, Gladstone gave up her job at Hofstra to open an art gallery in Manhattan, where she began showing Jenny Holzer. From 1989 to 1992, Gladstone Gallery collaborated with Christian Stein, an Italian art gallerist, on SteinGladstone. Located in a renovated firehouse at 99 Wooster Street in Soho, the gallery concentrated exclusively on rarely seen installation works by both Italian and American artists. Gladstone Gallery staged Matthew Barney's first New York solo show in 1991 and has since introduced many international artists to an American audience. Before moving to Chelsea in 1996, the gallery was located in Soho and on 57th Street in New York City. In 1996, the gallery teamed up with two other galleries – Metro Pictures and Matthew Marks Gallery – to acquire and divide up a 29000 sqft warehouse at 515 West 24th Street. In addition, Gladstone Gallery operates spaces at 530 West 21st Street and at 12 Rue du Grand Cerf in Brussels. The gallery is also a prominent participant in many major art fairs. In 2002, Gladstone brought Curt Marcus on as partner for several years. In 2020, Gladstone Gallery merged with Gavin Brown's Enterprise and made Gavin Brown a partner. Beginning in 2018, Gladstone served on the board of the non-profit Artists Space.

Film production

Stuart Regen Visionaries Fund

In 2008, Gladstone initiated the formation of the Stuart Regen Visionaries Fund at the New Museum, established in honor of her late son the art dealer Stuart Regen. The gift is meant to support a series of public lectures and presentations by cultural visionaries and debuted in 2009 with choreographer Bill T. Jones. It has featured prominent international thinkers in the fields of art, architecture, design and contemporary culture. Past speakers have included Jimmy Wales (2010), Alice Waters (2011), Maya Lin (2013), Hilton Als (2015), and Fran Lebowitz (2016, in conversation with Martin Scorsese).

Personal life and death

From 2005 until 2012, Gladstone maintained a residence at 165 Charles Street, a residential tower designed by Richard Meier. She later moved to a townhouse in Chelsea. Gladstone died from an apparent stroke on June 16, 2024, at a hospital in Paris; she had traveled to the city on a work trip. She was 89.