people · updated 2026-08-11
Dean Fleming
confidence: medium volatility: cold verified: 2026-08-11fresh
Geometric abstractionist painter (b. 1933) who co-founded Park Place Gallery in New York and the Libre commune in Colorado, building a 40-foot geodesic dome studio. Often misidentified as a Drop City co-founder.
Dean Fleming (born October 1, 1933, Santa Monica, CA) is an American painter and communard living in Gardner, Colorado. His career connects the New York avant-garde of the 1960s to the countercultural commune movement and its experiments in alternative shelter.
Art career
Fleming served in the US Army during the Korean War and studied at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City before earning his BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1956-59). His geometric abstractions — hard-edged parallelogram compositions — placed him among the proto-minimalists of the early 1960s.
In 1962 Fleming co-founded Park Place Gallery in New York City with Mark di Suvero and other artists. The cooperative gallery became an important venue for minimalist and geometric work. Fleming’s paintings have been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Guggenheim Museum.
Drop City (correction)
Fleming is frequently but incorrectly identified as a co-founder of Drop City. He visited the commune and was inspired by it, but Drop City was founded in 1965 by Clark Richert, Gene Bernofsky, and JoAnn Bernofsky.
Libre
In 1968, Fleming and Peter Rabbit co-founded the Libre commune on 360 acres near Gardner, Colorado, in the Huerfano Valley. Fleming built a 40-foot geodesic dome as his studio, one of many experimental structures at Libre. Unlike many communes of the era, Libre still functions as an artists’ community today.
Recognition
Fleming received a Tanne Foundation Award in 2002 and recorded a Smithsonian oral history in 2013, documenting the intersection of 1960s art movements and commune-based alternative living.