For some Los Angeles galleries, home is where the art is. Or in Nina Muccia's laundry room, also known as Quarters Her Gallery, in her two-bedroom Ross Her Ferris duplex. The 32-square-foot space celebrated its first anniversary in March with “Hoarders,” a group exhibition featuring more than 50 pieces about things like clothespins, breaker boxes, and shelves normally reserved for dryer sheets and tide pods. I welcomed you. For the next exhibition in June, artist Sam Dybeck will diffuse Fabuloso from a vintage fabric steamer and install the piece. internal Stacked washers and dryers.
“It definitely has built-in themes and parameters that artists have to work with,” Muccia said of Quarters. The name refers to both the laundromat and the gallery's quarterly schedule. Since she shares her room with a roommate, the exhibition is usually promoted on Instagram and lasts over one weekend. My roommate was walking around the party wearing a robe and holding a basket, huffing and puffing at one of the openings, clearly annoyed. “Of course it's a performance piece,” Muccia said of her actor roommate.
Quarters is part of a new guard experimenting in L.A.'s art scene by bringing exhibits in-house.Dotted with Tudor style mansions mansion and chateau style apartment Up to 5 car formations garage and the backyard cabin Modeled after the Unabomber hideout.A new twist on almost a century of L.A. tradition A number of galleries in the country rely on word of mouth, neighborhood trust, and the perfect host.
“When you own these living spaces, you often want to keep the concept high and the rents low,” says the gallery, located in a converted garage behind the house it rents in Highland Park. says Danny Bowman, who started Bozo Mag. Openings tend to spill onto patios and empty pools. “They stay for three hours instead of 20 minutes,” he said.
High rents and the pandemic have been an unexpected boon for the city's DIY arts and literature scene – unauthorized takeover at ikea gelrHow to read Ira In the Parking Lot — a combination cultural event that sits somewhere between a barrel shop and a 21st century saloon. Angelenos in the art world have become a kind of anchor for all of the art worlds, with new schools intersecting the Venn diagram of curators and patrons, artist-run commercial spaces, and art fair cool kids. Residential galleries are also defined by what they are not: design showrooms, permanent exhibitions, private collections, and endowed artist shrines. Still, they are difficult to track because they either appear suddenly like Whack-A-Mole or stay underground for practical reasons.
Like most residential projects today, Seaview Gallery “takes its reservation system pretty seriously,” said founder Sara Lee Hantman, and its corner of Mount Washington's peak “is sacred.” I'm handling it. Fortunately, this street is an enclave of artists, some of whom open their homes for the Huntsman's dinner receptions. In January, Gumbo Family Style was served two doors down, in the midcentury modern home of a local artist. “You can do so much business in this type of space without feeling like there's business being done,” she said.
It also helps if the structure of the house itself becomes a talking point. In the late 1990s, LA artist Jorge Pardo asked MOCA to sponsor his “Social Sculpture” on Seaview Avenue, an off-site exhibition that served as the artist's home studio. Despite the spatial limitations, “Pardo designed the space so it doesn't have 90-degree angles,” said Hantman, who rents monthly from the artist's family.
Most housing in LA is zoned. “Single family,” home business like this Technically There are visitor limits (one person per hour) and opening hours (8 a.m. to 8 p.m.). “It's definitely a gray area in terms of zoning,” Sam Parker said at his eponymous gallery in his five-bedroom Storybook rental home in Los Feliz. Since 2017, Parker's store openings have created a parking dilemma for residents of the winding hillside neighborhood. “There's a lot of anxiety about how long we can keep this going and get away with this before it becomes a bigger problem,” Parker said.
There are fig vines growing around the entrance to the side of Bozo Mag. (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times)
The entrance to The Bunker, an art gallery on the grounds of Danny Furst's home in Los Angeles. (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times)
His family's housekeeping routines have also changed, with the addition of his wife and two-year-old son. (“He knows what not to touch,'' Mr. Parker said.) To increase his legitimacy in the art world, Mr. Parker traded the models next door for foot traffic and moved his gallery to 6700 Melrose Avenue. The company plans to move to a store at the same address. Hancock Park is scheduled to host the event later this year. “First and foremost, we serve artists who are ready to have a more public-facing gallery,” he said.
The concept for L.A.'s domestic art museum began as a home for voracious art collectors in the 1920s. Louise and Walter ArensbergAccording to Mark Nelson, co-author of “Hollywood Arensberg: Avant-Garde Collecting in Mid-Century L.A.,'' the Arensberg home is where artists and art enthusiasts can collect nearly 1,000 works by pre-Columbian and contemporary artists. We maintained an open door policy for viewing. Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and their favorite, Marcel Duchamp. “There were also some Paul Klee pieces hanging on the towel rack in the bathroom,” Nelson said.
Their jam-packed Hollywood home at 7065 Hillside Avenue inspired artist and dealer William Copley and his short-lived but seminal Copley Gallery. For the past four years, Nelson has been rebuilding his Beverly Hills bungalow, Copley's. surrealism gallery, “There were probably as many Max Ernst paintings squeezed into this bungalow as there were in the entire Metropolitan Museum of Art.” retrospective'' Nelson surmised.
After the Ahrensburgs died in the 1950s, the art dealer Count Stendahl, who lived next door, bought the property and opened his third reconstruction. gallery It started inside the Ambassador Hotel. Stendahl's grandson Ron Daman and his wife April moved in around his 1970s to help him continue the business and raise his two children.
“Downstairs, a toddler's birthday party was being held with a collection of fragile pre-Columbian art,” April Dunman recalled. “They were playing pin-the-donkey tails, and one missing dart could cost them $10,000.” The gallery that had been running there was closed and relocated from the historic museum. Arensberg Stendal Home — Complete with sunroom by Richard Neutra and carport by John Lautner.
Whether it's the sprawl, the architecture, the light, or the climate, Los Angeles is playing a leading role in hosting experimental spaces that go beyond the white cube model. These DIY concepts are pool to LA river, said Christine Messineo, director of Frieze LA and Frieze New York, “an important element of the Los Angeles art scene” that began in the 1970s.of inflow The past decade has seen an increase in the number of well-funded blue-chip galleries, putting the city in competition with top art hubs such as New York, Berlin and London.
Art on display at Jay Ezra Nathan's home in Santa Monica, where the 2022 Frieze LA exhibition preview party/dinner was held. (Jason Almond/Los Angeles Times)
In response to, or perhaps in opposition to, the gallery boom, curator Jay Ezra Nathan launched the Del Vaz Project in 2014 out of his West Los Angeles apartment. “Everyone eats, everyone drinks, everyone is invited,” Nathan said.his nonprofit santa monica house with his partner Max Goldstein. “We do not operate in the realm of exclusivity and scarcity that is typical of today's commercial art world.”
Joseph Geegan, a painter in the New York and Berlin art worlds, doesn't think his bustling penthouse gallery in Koreatown's landmark Gaylord Apartments would have worked anywhere else. “There's still an element of the Wild West here for experimentation,” he said of his “spooky, 'The Shining'-esque” building. turning 100 years old this year. That's a myth that Guegan didn't bother competing with. Mansion and Gallery have the same name. (Exhibition goers typically go downstairs to the HMS Bounty Dive Bar after the show.) He has been running the Gaylord Apartments since 2021 with his boyfriend, John Tuitt. Their living room offers a glittering view of Koreatown. You can see the Hollywood sign and the Griffith Observatory from the window. In the next room. It's more of a social gathering than a money-maker, and Gigan customarily guides early- or mid-career artist friends from outside of Los Angeles, with most of his expenses coming from shipping and travel expenses. “Of course, I'll rent it,” he said.
Inspired by the low barrier to entry, Harley Wertheimer opened Castle Gallery in her dining room two years ago. He has since quit his job as vice president of A&R at Columbia Records and expanded his showroom into a spare room downstairs, with weekend morning receptions featuring latte carts and bagels in the courtyard. Named after his historic 1920s chateau-style building, the Castle is a treasure chest of prewar charm, with lattice windows, crown moldings, wainscoting, and Art Deco tiles.
Wertheimer thinks of residential and commercial galleries as a so-called California double, like surfing in the ocean and snowboarding in the mountains on the same day, where one is just as fun as the other ( and I believe that it is effective). Democratizing business doesn't have to mean weakening business, and art sold at home is more than just decoration. “There's definitely a desire for me and my colleagues to be treated like any other gallery,” he says.