Featured in What Makes Artist-Run Spaces Flourish
Brian Butler, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and Diana Theater discuss why LA has been home to so many experimental venues over the last 40 years
Diana Thater The bedrock of the LA arts scene has always been its schools: CalArts, UCLA, ArtCenter College of Design. When my generation was starting to show work in the early 1990s, we were very ambitious because we had teachers like John Baldessari, Mike Kelley, Patti Podesta, Charles Ray and Nancy Rubins. None of us had any money but we didn’t care. Why not just have a show in your living room?
Artists and writers reflect on domestic exhibition spaces in Los Angeles, from 1940 to the present
Since the dawn of the 20th century, artists pursuing their dreams in Los Angeles have found a city rich in creative possibilities but often short on creative infrastructure. In response, they’ve built their own, tucked away in the abundant private homes, apartments and gardens of the city’s fertile plain. Exhibitions in closets, bathrooms and garden sheds are amongst the most interesting in a metropolis increasingly at the centre of the globalized art world. Charting a partial map of these domestic spaces over the past 80 years, this special section looks into what architectural historian Reyner Banham called, in