In an April 1984 article, Los Angeles Times society columnist Bunny Mars marveled at Joan Agajanian Quinn’s ability to be everywhere. Under the headline Joan Quinn, Again!, Mars tracked her at a Frank Gehry opening at the Larry Gagosian gallery (which has since dropped “Larry” from the name), where she socialized with friends including Gehry, Guy Dill, and Ed Ruscha. Later that night, at Trumps restaurant, she dined with artists Billy Al Bengston and Peter Alexander. “We would really like to know if Ms. Quinn’s high heels are indeed jet powered, as has been rumored,” wrote Mars. “It would explain her billowing harem pants.”
Quinn, who just celebrated her 88th birthday, is still a ubiquitous presence in Los Angeles’s art scene, though she has retired her pumps in favor of velvet Mary Janes from Paris’s Rue du Bac. “I think it’s just part of my DNA. I like being with people,” says Quinn. “I always want to know what’s the newest thing and what’s happening.”
Recently, she made the rounds at Frieze Los Angeles, then, a few days later, ate dinner at Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills with artist Chaz Guest and gallerist Jeffrey Deitch. Later that week, she visited Armando and Mary Durón, collectors of Chicano art, and attended an event for Evelyn McDonnell’s book The World According to Joan Didion.
Quinn, who was on the same dinner-party circuit as Didion, is quoted in the book saying, “She didn’t eat anything. She would always poke at her food.”
She’s a keen observer, a skill she comes by naturally and honed as the West Coast editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine from 1978 to 1987. (She and Warhol shared a love of jewelry and spent many hours together obsessing over one-of-a-kind 1930s and 1940s pieces.)
After Warhol died, in 1987, she became the society editor for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. “I’d go to three parties a night, and I got the best quotes, plus I knew how to get in through the back door of the Beverly Wilshire hotel.”
Quinn is best known for the art collection she amassed beginning in the 1960s with her late husband, John J. “Jack” Quinn, a prominent Los Angeles attorney. Many in the art world credit them with helping to establish Los Angeles as a vital center of postwar art.
“On the Edge,” a new exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum, gives a rare glimpse into Quinn’s highly personal collection, much of it acquired through her friendships with artists such as Ruscha, Lynda Benglis, Ed Moses, and Robert Graham, just to name a few.
The show also includes some of the nearly 300 portraits of Quinn made in the past 50 years by artists such as David Hockney, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and George Hurrell, as well as contemporary Los Angeles artists including Joey Terrill and Yolanda González.
Quinn’s collection remained mostly private until 2021, when curator and gallerist Rachel McCullah Wainwright courted the reluctant collector, who considers her collection personal rather than as material to exhibit publicly. McCullah Wainwright eventually convinced Quinn to display a fraction of it at the Bakersfield Museum of Art by pointing out the educational value.
“This is not a typical collection,” McCullah Wainwright says, noting that many collectors acquire strategically, as an investment or to fill historic gaps. “Joan is not just a muse for artists, but she’s also a connoisseur who can talk very fluently about art. The collection reveals a concise telling of art-making in Los Angeles that Joan and Jack were right in the middle of.”
Quinn, a Los Angeles native, is the granddaughter of Armenian immigrants who started in the refuse and hog-ranching businesses, then later went into banking. Her father, J. C. Agajanian, was a motorsports promoter whose team won two Indianapolis 500s.
She first met Jack in the 1950s at a drive-in after a University of Southern California fraternity party. They didn’t start dating until a few years later, after she finished her undergraduate degree at the school and was working as an assistant registrar at U.S.C.’s law school, where he was a student. They married in 1961, and Quinn, who was already immersing herself in the local art scene, brought her husband into the crowd.
The Los Angeles art world was small and congenial. There were only a handful of galleries and collectors, and everyone knew each other. “New York would always flaunt itself,” Quinn says. “We were kind of like second-class citizens, but we were all very close, and the artists weren’t competitive.”
Their Beverly Hills home, where Quinn still lives today, was a place where social worlds collided—Jack’s law colleagues and creative types—which provided a gateway for artists to find new collectors. At their theatrical dinner parties, Quinn might be seen making her entrance in a purple chiffon dress designed by her friend Dame Zandra Rhodes, with four vintage Cartier watches on one wrist.
Jack became the artists’ de facto lawyer and exchanged his legal services for works of art. “It wasn’t a time when we were thinking a lot about money when it came to art,” painter and sculptor Chuck Arnoldi says. “They just cared about us personally and took care of us.”
Arnoldi remembers a night in the 1970s when he, Bengston, Graham, and Ken Price were drinking with the Quinns before his show at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery. “One drink would lead to another, and finally I said, ‘We better go to the opening,’” he recalls. “I got there, and Nick said, ‘Where have you been? You just missed the Beatles.’”
When their twin daughters, Amanda Quinn Olivar and Jennifer Quinn Gowey, were born in 1967, Bengston, Quinn’s high-school best friend, held one in each hand. Graham was named their godfather, which brought his wife, Anjelica Huston, into Quinn’s tight-knit circle. Over the years, the Quinns, who attended Mass most Sundays, could be seen at their Beverly Hills church with an entourage of out-of-town guests, including Divine, Andy Warhol, British artist Duggie Fields, sculptor Andrew Logan, and Pop artist Allen Jones.
“They were an adventurous couple, soulful people, who were willing to look at things no one was looking at,” says Laddie John Dill, a pioneer of the Light and Space movement who met the Quinns after he graduated from art school, in the late 1960s. One time, Dill brought drawings to their house. “I just stacked them against the wall near a Carl Andre and a Hockney,” he says. “They’re still in that position.”
Quinn never purchased art as an investment; she acquired what she liked from her friends. A few years after Jack died, in 2019, Quinn sold a piece for the first time. Christie’s handled the auction of Ruscha’s 1964 painting Hurting the Word Radio #2. It broke Ruscha’s previous sales record, selling for $52.4 million.
One artist Quinn didn’t collect was Warhol. “Jack and I just never thought Warhol was a great artist,” she says, noting he was more of a visual aggregator. “Jack used to say he was like a sponge. He’d sit there and absorb everything around him.” While today a Warhol may sell for more than a Picasso, Quinn says her one regret isn’t financial. Had she bought his work, “he would be on my walls as a friend who was a painter.”
“On the Edge: Los Angeles Art from the Joan and Jack Quinn Family Collection” is on view at the Laguna Art Museum through September 2
Stacie Stukin is a Los Angeles–based writer
