Finkel’s survey of Los Angeles galleries run by working artists names Big Pictures L.A. among the city’s more established examples — alongside Smart Objects, Five Car Garage, Moskowitz Bayse, Night Gallery, Commonwealth and Council, the Pit and Bel Ami — as a counternarrative to the idea that the city’s visual culture is defined by the recent influx of New York and international mega-galleries.
The piece opens with the dealer Steve Hanson, a founder of the pioneering Chinatown gallery China Art Objects, showing surreal, cloud-dappled landscapes at M+B under the alias Leo Mock — his uncle’s first name, his mother’s maiden name, and a jab at the market besides. “People don’t like artists having two careers,” he says. “I’m an old punk rocker and all of those musicians take pseudonyms.” How to exhibit your own work, Finkel writes, is only the first of the problems facing artists who open up shop as dealers; the other is running two careers, neither known for reliable revenue. “The Home Depot-fication of galleries is one reason why artist-run spaces are so important,” Hanson says.
These galleries run the gamut from weekend-only apartment venues to larger spaces with regular hours, but as a whole they share a more adventurous spirit. 2019 alone brought Real Pain Fine Arts, opened by Peter Harkawik near the Underground Museum; Murmurs, the gallery-cafe complex downtown founded by Morgan Elder and Allison Littrell; and La Loma Projects, which Kirk Nelson runs out of his living room and garage in Pasadena, not far from Dani Tull’s Odd Ark. Most keep a traditional 50-50 sales split with their artists, but none carry the overhead or the profit motive of the blue-chip galleries now in town.
“L.A. has a long history of artist-run galleries — it’s where so much experimentation and innovation take place,” says Bettina Korek, then director of Frieze Los Angeles, who calls the model an alternative to the usual white cube and “a great reminder that art can happen anywhere.” The painter and sculptor Amy Bessone, who shows with Salon 94 in New York, credits these spaces with a “sense of solidarity and community,” and openings that make room for “children, dogs, friends of friends, and sometimes tacos,” minus the fancy after-opening dinners.
Chadwick Gibson opened Smart Objects in Echo Park at the end of 2012 specifically to show his own work — screen shots of gallery and museum interiors printed from Google Art Project, where the operator’s camera is caught in the frame, turning the Google eye on itself. “Making art makes you more attuned to what’s going on,” he says. “A lot of galleries will say they show new or emerging artists, but if you go back you’ll find that they showed at three artist-run spaces first.”
Devon Oder and Adam D. Miller, who met while getting their M.F.A.s at ArtCenter and both worked for the artist Sterling Ruby, opened the Pit in 2014 in a former mechanic’s garage in Glendale, next to their studios; the mechanics’ pit is still a visible feature of the space. They produce zines in-house for many of their shows and are known for their flexibility in scheduling: “Instead of hammering artists about deadlines, we are more likely to pivot and accommodate the creative process,” Miller says.
Emma Gray, a figurative painter, founded Five Car Garage in Santa Monica in 2013 after moving to a house with a garage built for a car collector; her old-fashioned training in portraiture at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London — “no electric lighting was allowed” — helps her “talk to painters about painting.” Eve Fowler co-founded the seminomadic Artist Curated Projects out of her own apartment in 2008 with Lucas Michael, inviting artists to share the decision-making. “We had so many friends who were good artists and didn’t have shows,” she says. “We also felt like artists don’t have any power.”
Some artist-gallerists postpone their own practice, perhaps permanently. Davida Nemeroff of Night Gallery stopped making work in 2016, when her gallery partner left and she took over operations: “I realized from my own artists how much time and energy you need to put into your practice, and I just didn’t have that.” Young Chung of Commonwealth & Council says he “went back in the closet as an artist” in 2012, after a Getty curator came to see one of his artists’ work and the conversation drifted to his own — “in that moment, I realized I had a conflict of interest.”
Every artist-dealer in the piece acknowledges the same question: whose work are you really promoting? Most will include their own work in an occasional group show but not give themselves a solo, with Gray calling it “largely unethical to cross the line.” Gibson, who opened his space precisely to show his Google project, concedes, “I understand why people might think it’s tacky,” adding, “it’s O.K. if the artists you show are good with it.”
Robert Gunderman rarely showed his own work in the 22 years he ran ACME with Randy Sommer; after the gallery closed in 2017 he reinvented himself as a painter, with two shows organized by the curator Lauri Firstenberg. He had been painting all along, discreetly. “Only a few people knew I had a studio,” he says. “And I would tell them I had six cats there” to keep them away. Hanson, meanwhile, is painting in Mérida, Mexico, where he and his wife, Tuesday Yates, are rehabbing part of an old bus depot — to be called, still confounding the art world, China Art Objects.