For the work, Farrag has affixed ceramic sculptures, via zipties, onto several R/C cars that resemble large rats. Each is adorned with several iron-on patches meant to match the personality of each ceramic sculpture, including car numbers, license plates, and other decal-like symbols.

“I made the ceramics first and when I was picking out patches for each one I was thinking, how do I create a personality for each head,” Farrag told ARTnews as a race was going on.

For the performance, Farrag and his team, dressed in custom-designed white jumpsuits, line up six ceramic rats at the starting line and count down for the race. After three laps, a winner is declared. Oftentimes, the cars crash into each other and, by Thursday afternoon, a few of the rat sculptures had lost their ears. The first-place winner receives a trophy, topped with an orange ceramic cone made by Farrag, who presents it and takes a photo with the winner, just as if they had won a Formula One race.

“I wanted to build up energy by creating an incentive, so people actually wanted to win,” he said. “I’m learning that it actually makes a difference.”

I partook in one of the races-cum-performances, choosing the ceramic rat with a patch of Ghostface, called Ozone. Even with a practice run, I wasn’t very good, crashing into the cones that demarcated the track, hitting peoples’ feet, and even managing to run into the two-row bleacher that was not that close to the track.

Rat Race is Farrag’s first public project and builds on his ongoing body of work involving abstracted cars and motorcycles made in clay. “I wanted to try out making sculptures that could be interactive and activated by other people,” he said. “Then the rat race idea came up as a way to make fun of competition—winning, losing. … I think it’s also a way to address survival within competition.”

As with a number of LA artists, like Jason Rhoades (whose car-related works are currently the subject of an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in downtown LA), Farrag, who grew up in the Valley neighborhood of Reseda, said his interest in cars stems from the necessity of having to drive everywhere as an Angeleno, as well as his experience of being a food delivery person several years ago.

“Cars and transportation are a big part of my life—it’s why I keep making them [car-related sculptures], not because I love a [certain] brand of car,” he said. “I’m always in a Prius, going into zones while I drive. I come up with a lot of my ideas in the car. This is just another aspect of driving, just the race-side of it.”

There’s also a sense of humor imbued in the performance, which isn’t necessarily intentional, according to the artist. “The funny part is that I’m not even trying to be humorous, but I’m open to people laughing,” he said, beginning to laugh. “It’s just who I am; it’s kind of been that way all my life: ‘Oh yeah, that way funny? I said something serious.’”

But Farrag drew a comparison between his project and the high stakes of what was happening just inside the tent, especially on the fair’s first day where collectors are rushing to buy works (likely ones they had put on hold based on PDF previews), galleries aiming for a prime spot in the fair’s layout, or even artists showing with the right gallery.

“Being at an art fair, competition is prevalent.vThere are all these competitive parts [to an art fair] that are often overlooked. I wanted to address that competition and make fun of it,’ he said. Then, he added, “Today, people have been having fun. It’s also, in a way, a way to let off some steam from the fair.”

The aisles were thrumming during the opening minutes, and the works on view were strong. Dealers reported numerous sales by day’s end. And, of course, because this is Los Angeles, there were celebrity sightings made throughout the day.

Below, a look at the best booths at the 2024 edition of Frieze Los Angeles, which runs through March 3.

Located in Melrose Hill (a real-estate term that refers to a neighborhood better known locally as East Hollywood), Southern Guild’s space is near Zwirner, Morán Morán, James Fuentes, and Rele, which was founded in Lagos in 2015. Other galleries are a short drive away.

Taking over a 5,000-square-foot former laundromat, Southern Guild is opening with two exhibitions, a solo show for Zizipho Powsa, whose recent residency in Long Beach was a catalyst of sorts for the gallery’s expansion to LA, and a group exhibition titled “Mother Tongues,” featuring 26 artists on the gallery’s roster, including Zanele Muholi, Andile Dyalvane, Manyaku Mashilo, Jody Paulsen, andJozua Gerrard.

To learn more about Southern Guild’s history and expansion to LA, ARTnews spoke with Trevyn McGowan, the gallery’s cofounder and CEO, during a walkthrough of the gallery’s new outpost in LA.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

ARTnews: How did your expansion to Los Angeles come about?

Trevyn McGowan: We arrived in January [2023], thinking: We’ll see what this feels like. I had this singular vision: we’re opening in America, we’re opening in LA, and we’re opening like soon as we possibly can. We were introduced to this space by very close friends, the Haas Brothers. The whole idea of what they are doing here, how community-focused this development is, how visionary Zach Lasry has been in trying to create something that breaks the difficult parts of LA while embracing the best parts of LA, I think that’s what he’s achieved in Melrose Hill. The people who have been attracted to the district are likeminded in their desire for community, collaboration, breaking that stereotype of hierarchical monolithic galleries.

Had you traveled to Los Angeles a lot previously to deciding to open here in late 2022?

I had not. I’d been to LA twice, once in 1986 and once in 2011. But we had been talking to [ceramicist] Tony Marsh about Zizipho Powsa doing a residency here [at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at California State University, Long Beach]. She was invited to do the residency in 2018. It was going to be in 2019, then it was pushed to 2020, and we were going to do a three-month pop-up and just hang out in the city. I had a little fantasy in the back of my head [about opening here]. It’s a very romantic city for me, especially the hills and the art history of the ’60s.

We were also spending so much time in Miami, Chicago, and New York. We love all those cities, but none of them felt like it would make sense. We struggled to see how we would fit into New York, even though we did a fantastic show last April, with Galerie 56 and [founder] Lee Mindel for Zizipho Poswa, and we’ve got another one opening April 30, called “No Bats, No Chocolate” with Porky Hefer. Look, the client base in New York is extraordinary. Nobody is going to debate that. But we’re happy to have a longer, deeper, more engaged way of working with people. Those relationships feel like they could be quite authentically developed in this city, potentially more so than in New York. There’s so many people here that feel authentically aligned with what we’re doing.

What about LA felt right? Is it a similar vibe to Cape Town, where the gallery is based?

LA’s a bit of a mixture between Cape Town and Johannesburg, but it’s more like Johannesburg, which is where I’m from. The cities are very similar in age. They were built up for the same reasons—people heading west [in the US] and people heading north [in South Africa] who were literally pioneering. The architecture has a lot of similarities, with its hodgepodge nature. The plants are exactly the same; the weather is very similar. The only thing that we don’t have in Joburg are mountains and palm trees—that’s Cape Town. But LA has that kind of hustle and bustle, friendliness, and openness, and that wanting to make things happen, so that all felt very familiar.

But we also need a space that is as big as this. This is how big our gallery is in Cape Town. Whenever we do booths at fairs, we get very big booths because the work we show is big and the scale of our vision is large. People’s houses are bigger here, people are more experimental.

What made you want to start Southern Guild 16 years ago, and what was South Africa’s art scene like at the time?

Julian [McGowan, the gallery’s other cofounder] and I tend to be quite impulsive. We bought a house in three days [in the early 2000s] when we moved back to South Africa in a place called Wilderness, six hours outside Cape Town, on the spur of the moment after living in London for 22 years. I got back to South Africa after being away for 22 years. Julian was an acclaimed theater designer in London, and I had had an architectural and interiors practice. When we got back to South Africa, on the holiday that we bought the house, I was aware of this incredible creative capacity of people making things there.

In London, I had been sourcing pieces from South Africa. I just realized that there were things going on that were very different there than they were anywhere else. It wasn’t a logical or commercial decision to start a business doing this. It was a passion—falling in love with the makers, the artists, the creatives, and wanting to articulate what they were doing, and be the conduit for them to a global audience.

It was true that that we learned a language that we wanted to help articulate. There wasn’t a collectible design industry on the African continent, really. And to be honest, I didn’t even know that there was such a thing [elsewhere]. We launched in 2008, and our first big exhibition featured 36 designers at the Joburg Art Fair. Then, nine months later, I went to Design Miami/ and realized, Oh, so this is actually a thing that works in this category. So, it started from an impulse and a passion and just being blown away, rather than sort of sort of calculated. We helped to articulate and propel that category absolutely.

We have continued to help facilitate people making and collaborating. We’ve got a residency program. We’ve got a big campus that measures around 32,000 square feet. Some of our artists have their studios there, with the ceramic kilns and painting studios. There are also two bronze foundries. We’re located in the ports in a dead end, so we’ve got this whole street with five different buildings, with all of this creative community going on. We help to produce for international artists. We’ve collaborated with Marc Quinn, the Haas Brothers, Misha Kahn, and other makers here. We really are a bonded pack and a family. A lot of our artists have been with us from the beginning. It has been a wonderful thing to be part of a guild that’s supportive and holding each other up.

We showed contemporary art right from the beginning in 2008. At that time, we made a rule that it was going to be three-dimensional, so it would be wall hangings or sculptural objects. We simply wouldn’t show painting. Then about six years ago, we were like, Why did we put this binary in place? As we progressed, the design has become less furniture—not that it was ever classic furniture. The works we show have become more sculptural, more abstracted, and more things that you interact with rather than just use.

How has the gallery grown since its founding?

About six years ago, we expanded quite dramatically. There are 36 people on our team in Cape Town, and there are four in LA already. That is because of the amount of projects we do. Opening in LA feels like the next decade of major development, ambition, and desire to further broaden the particular way that we do things. I don’t think we’re the same as other galleries. We have aspects of a lot of galleries have. But, this is Southern Guild, encapsulating people who we think are contributing to what it means to be human and to address the issues of the past, what’s currently happening, and how we navigate a better future and more equitable future.

We’ve got such a scarred past coming from South Africa. A lot of our practice has to do with healing and forgiving each other’s ancestors for the responsibility they had in the past. How do we authentically try to eradicate any sense of disparity within our group and within the people that we stand amongst and alongside? Hopefully, through that articulation and through those discussions, that helps to make a difference in the world.

Are all the artists represented by the gallery based in South Africa or on the African continent? With the move to LA, do you plan to start working with LA-based artists?

Our artists are predominantly from Africa, but we also represent African diasporic artists. We’re going to do a show with Marc Quinn and Zizipho Poswa. We’re going to do a show with the Haas Brothers. But these are all people who have strong links to the continent, who are authentically working and producing there. For us to suddenly represent a Danish artist, for example, has no authenticity to it for us. But we hope to work with LA artists either who are tied to Africa through diaspora or even just through an authentic collaboration. If people want to work in Africa and we feel they add to our voice, then yes, we will [show them].

You hinted at this before, but the gallery’s name comes from a desire to create a guild of artists, correct?

We wanted to come up with something that was about uniting a band of people who share common principles and goals. A guild, like the blacksmiths guild from 1422, is about those same principles. We think that united we’re stronger. We want to have a voice that speaks for us. With “Southern” at that point [of our founding], we wanted to articulate coming from the Global South. We wanted to get away from the idea of a hierarchical system. That goes for our team as well. We’ve got an incredibly democratic organization with people who work for us. They have a lot of autonomy, and we promote people quickly. We’re not the McGowan Gallery.

Can you talk about how South Africa’s art scene has grown over the past 16 years since Southern Guild’s founding?

One of the reasons why we didn’t open broadly across all categories when we started in 2008 was we’d been in the country for five years. We thought, We’re specialists in this arena. Let’s focus on that—nobody else is doing this. Then, the landscape rapidly grew, and fantastic younger galleries started cooperatives, curators banded together. It has become an incredibly vital and dynamic space, particularly in Cape Town, a wonderfully dynamic, creative environment. And in 2017, two contemporary art museums opened in the city, the Norval Foundation and Zeitz MOCAA, which Thomas Heatherwick designed. That’s when groups from the Tate and SFMOMA started visiting. Any creative landscape needs that kind of rigorous interaction.

The Cape Town Art Fair has gotten better and better each year. We did three booths there this year. Just in general, there is so much more activity, and it’s very interesting to see the stretch from what we would consider our masters [in South African contemporary art] to the very experimental artists, who are breaking the mold and are coming up now. As we became more authentically involved in the landscape, we saw within this whole group artists who, we believe, form a part of what our mandate is.

Can you talk about the LA gallery’s two inaugural shows, a solo for Zizipho Poswa and the group show “Mother Tongues”?

Because Zizi had done this residency, it was always obvious that we would show these works here. The ceramic bases were produced at Cal State Long Beach under Tony Marsh. A lot of very famous artists, like Simone Leigh, have passed through that residency over the past 35 years. Zizi created the bronze pieces [that rest on top of the ceramic pieces] once she was back in South Africa. So they were united about a week ago. They’re inspired by her travels through Africa, through residencies she’s gone to Ethiopia and Tanzania. She has a very positive, uplifting, and visionary take on what she wants to say with the work she produces, which is about honoring greatness in the everyday—caring for objects, the hairstyles she’s worn. In a way, they represent the time that women spend in hairdressing studios and the community and bond that’s formed. It’s also about raising the objects of adornment—a simple bracelet, a comb, or an earring—that gives the wearer the ability to feel elevated, confident, regal about themselves, give them the stature. It’s this moment of pleasure, joy, and affirmation. They’re honoring these objects to this scale and this elevation. She’s saying we need to look to the everyday to realize how important we are.

Regarding “Mother Tongues,” there are 12 official languages in South Africa, but there are many more that are spoken there. It’s a country that is full of different languages and different kinds of people from different backgrounds. How do we come together as one? There are artists between the ages of 22 and 68 in the show, so it spans a lot of viewpoints and generational opinions.

One of our most exciting young artists is Jozua Gerrard, who is 22 and who we’ve worked with for four years already. We showed him at Untitled in Miami Beach this past December and sold several works. The work is hand-painted on the back of glass, so it’s quite labor intensive because the paint moves. They’re photographs of his friends that he then translates into paintings. It’s on glass because it refers to how we’re always looking at things through this glass filter, via Instagram and social media.

This sculpture is by Andile Dyalvane, and it’s a topographical map, flying over the Eastern Cape, where he was born. He achieves these recesses by putting little firecrackers into the clay, and then, when it heats up in the kiln, they explode. This piece is older, from 2016; it’s one that I think is one of his most important.

A lot of what you see around us [in this exhibition] is work in which the use of material is very labor intensive. Everything has a lot of hand in it, but also reuse and repetition, like pieces by Patrick Bongoy with the inner part of tires, Usha Seejarim with clothes pegs, or Ranti Bam with glazed terracotta that is fragmented yet fine like porcelain. Or even in works by Ayotunde Ojo, who is painting his own studio. Often in his paintings, his work is half in progress behind him, so there’s this intimacy and this tenderness. Compare that to an artist like Tony Gum, whose photographs are bold and confident and are talking about the rape of the African continent: the milk bags representing money bags that become cheese and then cash. The jewels represent how we objectify the beauty of Africa when we’re not robbing and pirating its wealth of the natural resources. All of these voices come together in something that is cohesively communicating our perspective.

What’s next for the gallery’s program?

Our second show in LA, opening on May 11, is for Zanele Muholi, who will have the whole space. Her solo show is currently on view at SFMOMA. She has her second career retrospective coming to the Tate next year. She’s very focused on education and public programming. We did a lot with 18 public walkabouts, interactions, and panel discussions for her show in Cape Town last summer last. It was a cross-section—kids, teens, people in their 20s, and established collectors— talking about sexual health, gender-based violence, empowerment as a woman, and the quality of life in where you were born in the country. People have said they leave feeling like they’ve been through some sort of therapeutic experience. We will do the same kind of programming here, which is to engage the immediate environment, the audience, the community that used to use this space as a laundromat. We invite them to come and share something that could contribute to their lives in a different kind of way.

We have found a very strong audience in South Africa, but South Africa is a very small art buying population. But we see that what we do there is very important for our community, both for our artists and for each other but also as a place of education—it’s important for us to have rigorous exhibition programming.

“El Playon” of the work’s title refers to a black scar that a volcanic eruption left in the earth more than a hundred years ago, just outside El Salvador’s capital city. The same area was used as a dumping ground for the bodies of the disappeared during the country’s 1980–92 civil war. Matching the shape of El Playon, 601ft² comprises some 1,500 pounds of molten amber that mimics flowing lava as it’s poured over a collection of various objects: volcanic stones, specially fabricated ceramic bones, and various items found in MacArthur Park, a main hub for the Salvadorean community in LA. It also includes letters and newspaper clippings related to the civil war that are difficult to read through the amber shell. After the show opened, Aparicio learned that the body of his half-sister had been discovered in El Playon by their father, artist Juan Edgar Aparicio, who fled El Salvador shortly afterward.

Now, Aparicio is working on a new amber work for this year’s Whitney Biennial. He is drawn to amber that trees secrete as a healing mechanism. But he also plans eventually to reiterate 601ft². Each new version will be, literally, darker: the artist plans to add a new layer of poured amber, further obscuring the documents and objects. “This is the most visible it’ll ever be,” Aparicio said. “That’s how memory works, how time works: you forget about it, archives are erased or destroyed.”

This impulse to capture something before it’s gone also appears in another ongoing series, “Caucho (Rubber).” In 2016 Aparicio started casting the bottom portions of Ficus trees, a non-native genus ubiquitous across LA, where, for decades, it has been subject to removal efforts. He applies a layer of rubber made from the Indigenous Salvadorean Castilla elastica, or Panama rubber tree. Aparicio leaves the rubber on the tree for several weeks before slowly pulling it off, creating a realistic impression of the tree’s bark: the knots and whorls, man-made carvings and graffiti, the discoloration from car exhaust and other pollution. At first, the “Caucho” works were faithful reproductions of the trees that hung from the wall like unstretched paintings. More recently, they are becoming more sculptural, as he’s started to incorporate new elements in them, like shards of glass or ceramic thorns. Now, he’s painting on their surfaces and stuffing some with the cotton fibers from ceiba (kapok) tree seeds.

These works powerfully evoke the unique Los Angeles cityscape. Aparicio was “interested in levels of human interaction that are recorded on the surface,” he said. Most of the trees he cast have since been cut down, and these works now serve as the only record of their existence, their previous lives, the marks imprinted on them. Ficus trees still abound across Los Angeles. There’s a municipal waiting list for the trimming of Ficus trees; the wait is upward of 10 years. The wait for tree removal is much longer. Aparicio added, “All to say, they can’t get rid of us even if they wanted to.”  

But this Frieze week marks a special kind of opening for The Pit, since the gallery is now preparing to relocate to a 13,000-square-foot industrial building in LA’s Atwater Village neighborhood. Sited at 3015 Dolores Street, a short drive from the original location, the new space will include 8,000 square feet of exhibition space across three galleries, offices, on-site storage, a private viewing room, a ceramics studio for Miller, and, very important, a parking lot.

“When we walked in, both of us were like, this has so much potential,” Oder told ARTnews. “It was perfect for the growth that we want to make.”

Miller added, “it echoes a lot of the original sort of sentiments of the original space.”

Since its founding in 2014, The Pit has always been something of an island unto itself. Glendale is a neighborhood where many artists have their studios, but it’s not exactly a destination for viewing art, since few other galleries are there. Generally, most dealers have opted to instead open up shop in the Downtown Arts District or Hollywood.

But Oder and Miller said they wanted to stay in Northeast Los Angeles, specifically because of their proximity to other artists, which Miller said could be “of more importance or greater value than collectors and people than it might be on the West Side. We started in Glendale; we are exhibiting artists. It would seem odd for us to just pop up on Santa Monica Boulevard on the West Side.”

After getting their MFAs in 2008 from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Miller and Oder worked as studio assistants for artist Sterling Ruby and, in their spare time, began organizing group shows (accompanied by zines) at various venues across the city. They did that for about five years before they considered opening their own space. “We literally ran out of spaces,” Oder said.

They were also inspired by artist Laura Owens, who opened 356 Mission, an artist-run space in Boyle Heights, in 2013; it closed in 2018 after members of the community protested, claiming that the space had played a significant role in gentrifying a historically Latinx neighborhood. (The Pit itself faced similar protests in 2018 from community members who accused it of doing the same in Glendale. Miller and Oder apologized and vowed to “do better” after the outcry.)

“Back then, there were so many preconceived notions of what artists could and couldn’t do,” Miller said. “We had gallerists tell us, ‘No one’s ever going to take you seriously if you curate and you’re an artist.’ I felt like we were going against that by organizing these alternative shows.”

Despite this pushback, Miller and Oder launched The Pit in July 2014 with a group show of eight LA-based artists with studios near the gallery, including Mary Weatherford, Shana Lutker, Mungo Thomson, and Jon Pestoni. Initially, the gallery’s space was a converted garage located in an alley. “We really ended up there by happenstance,” Miller said. “The original space felt like it had this magical presence. It was just very unassuming.”

Curators from across the country soon came to closely watch the gallery’s programming. The Pit’s third show, for example, looked at H.C. Westermann’s influence on contemporary artists, bringing together pieces by established LA-based artists like Billy Al Bengston, Laura Owens, and Meg Cranston and emerging artists such as Miller, Andrew Sexton, and Matt Paweski.

The Pit’s specificity to Los Angeles was also key to its early success. Oder said, “Hands down, we never would have been able to do what we have done in New York. We were able to organically grow.”

Miller added, “So much of our careers developing is because of access to space. We didn’t set out to be commercial gallerists. We set out to throw cool parties and organize interesting shows.”

But soon, the gallery became a more formalized venture, mounting exhibitions on a regular schedule, representing artists, participating in art fairs, and ultimately taking over several other spaces in that Glendale building, including The Pit II, a 100-square-foot micro-gallery meant for solo shows that opened in 2015 with an Erik Frydenborg outing.

“Since the first show, it’s been a running joke that we have made use of every inch of that space,” Oder said. “In the last couple of years, we felt that we’ve done the most we possibly could do with this building. It was time.”

Around the five-year mark, Miller and Oder decided that they would eventually move the gallery to an expanded space, but they were always waiting for the right location, one that would maintain the “DIY-like vibe” on which they had long prided themselves, Miller said. And they didn’t want to follow the trends initiated by other galleries, and end up in Downtown Los Angeles or Hollywood or in some new construction.

“Pretty early on, we started talking about leaving and expanding to a different area,” Miller said. “That charm of being off the beaten path didn’t feel like it was providing as much for those artists and for their careers in the long term as it was doing for the reputation of the gallery when we first started.”

Ahead of their eventual move to a larger gallery in LA, Miller and Oder decided to open a satellite space in Palm Springs, near where they spent much of the pandemic lockdown. Miller noticed that the city’s main downtown strips had empty storefronts from businesses that had shuttered because of Covid. He started scanning listings for a potential new gallery outpost.

“I’m always like, OK, I’ll entertain this, but it’s not going to happen,” Oder said, as they both began to laugh. “But with this space, I was like, Oh, this is a great space—this makes sense. New York has the Hamptons”—where many blue-chip dealers operated temporary spaces in 2020—“and Palm Springs is like LA’s little spot.”

Miller said that the Palm Springs space is more intimate, and that it allows the gallery to mount different kinds of shows than in their new LA digs while also attracting a different audience. “Even though we get big crowds to come to our shows in LA, sometimes it feels insular,” he said. “You have to be aware of the art world to know about The Pit, but in Palm Springs, we’re right on the strip, next to a public parking lot. I love that in theory, someone could park in the parking lot, and they could walk by with a little kid, who could look in the windows and see the art and have a powerful experience with it.”

Miller and Oder said that by moving the LA flagship, they hope it will signal a maturation of the gallery, potentially allowing them to start adding more artists’ estates and more established artists to its roster. Last December, for example, the gallery mounted an exhibition for the late ceramicist Viola Frey.

The gallery’s two opening group shows are indicative of that as well. “Cognitive Surge: Coach Stage” will pair the work of iconic LA artist Paul McCarthy and Benjamin Weissman, who was Miller and Oder’s art professor at ArtCenter. Meanwhile the larger group show, “Halfway to Sanity,” will feature new and recent work by some 50 artists from the gallery’s “past, present, and future,” including Sterling Ruby, Laura Owens, Erik Frydenborg, Amanda Ross-Ho, Shana Lutker, Mindy Shapero, Aaron Curry, Umar Rashid, Amir H. Fallah, Joel Gaitan, Blair Saxon-Hill, and Tamara Gonzales.

“We find such value in providing a context where emerging artists can show work alongside someone who has been a profound influence to them,” Miller said. “We want the program itself to be more indicative of that as a whole, rather than project to project.”

The Los Angeles space will be located at 415 North Camden Drive in Beverly Hills, across the street from Gagosian’s LA space and a few minutes’ drive to UTA Artist Space. Courtney Treut, who has worked for several blue-chip galleries like Hauser & Wirth, Anton Kern, and Sean Kelly, will serve as director of the LA space.

The Athens gallery is located in an apartment building at Leoforos Vasileos Georgiou 10, near the Museum of Cycladic Art and the Zappeion Garden. It will mount two shows each year, with former art adviser Maximos Stergiou serving as director.

Gordon VeneKlasen, a partner of Michael Werner Gallery, has a long history with Los Angeles, having maintained a part-time home in Los Angeles for 15 years, before selling it when the gallery expanded to London in 2012. But it wasn’t until recently that he decided to set up shop in Los Angeles, despite encouragement from his longtime friend Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin.

“I’ve always had a fantasy about California and you know, which sort of goes back to Joan Didion,” he said.

During the pandemic, VeneKlasen launched a seasonal outpost of Michael Werner in East Hampton that he described as having “only limitations” based on the size of the space and that they couldn’t ship works to the space from outside New York.

“It was enormously gratifying for me to make quick shows based on limitations,” he said. “That was kind of the training ground I have for this space. It made me feel a lot freer—put works together that don’t normally go together.”

As the East Hampton space was drawing to an end, VeneKlasen said, he began work on the gallery’s expansion to Los Angeles. He had originally planned to open in another location in Beverly Hills, where iconic LA fashion and design store Mameg had its location. But Mameg recently vacated that space, and its founder Sonia Eram began browsing Google Earth. She eventually found the space on Camden Drive and invited VeneKlasen to once again consider creating an outpost in LA.

The LA gallery, designed by LA-based architectural firm Johnston Marklee, will have two distinct exhibition spaces, as well as a garden and courtyard that will be programmed by LA dealer Hannah Hoffman and designed by landscape architect Eric Nagelmann.

Over the past three years, the commercial market in Los Angeles has grown exponentially, buoyed by the success of Frieze LA, which will open its fifth edition next week. That has led to an influx of New York galleries setting up shop in the city, like Marian Goodman, Lisson, Sean Kelly, James Fuentes, Sargent’s Daughters, and more. But VeneKlasen said this expansion to LA isn’t quite like other recent arrivals.

“A commercial scene for everybody is a wonderful thing, but I would still do it with or without it in a certain sense because I think of this as a long-term project,” VeneKlasen told ARTnews in a phone interview. “I keep saying it’s grafting rather than trying to dominate. I’m interested in taking it in and developing it around the culture of LA.”

He continued, “It didn’t start like, Oh, we’re going to go out to LA and take over LA—it’s not like that. It’s more a way to make interesting projects that fit the layers of culture that are specific to LA. I think there’s a place for us to exist there that’s not just an outpost that shows the artists that you show everywhere else.”

Instead, VeneKlasen pointed out that the gallery represents “all these artists who have history in LA, and LA doesn’t know about their history.” Among those with ties to LA are A.R. Penck, who traveled to Los Angeles for a solo show in 1984 at Ulrike Kantor Gallery; Per Kirkeby, who had two important solo shows at L.A. Louver in 1997 and 2005; or Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart), who was born and raised in the nearby suburb of Glendale and had one of his last shows mounted during his lifetime at David Kordansky Gallery in 2007.

“Generations have changed, and most of those dealers and collectors are all gone,” VeneKlasen said, noting that younger artists on the gallery’s roster, like Issy Wood and Raphaela Simon, have also expressed interest in showing in LA. “But, I believe there’s a way to graft ourselves back onto LA in a way that’s interesting—interesting for these artists and interesting for LA.”

Another such artist is James Lee Byars, the conceptual artist who featured prominently in the acclaimed 1971 exhibition “Art & Technology” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by Maurice Tuchman. Even more curiously, Byars at one point lived in the home of patrons and cofounders of Gemini G.E.L. Stanley and Elyse Grinstein.

“James Lee lived with them, and they let him take over their life in a certain sense. They’d come home from work and find that everything in the house had been moved around because he was doing a Moon Viewing ceremony,” VeneKlasen added.

VeneKlasen also pointed to the beginning days of the gallery’s London space over a decade ago. “We had artists of the gallery who have very little [exhibition] history in the UK, so we started by doing historical shows like we were reinventing a history,” he said. “I think some of that will happen in LA— some historical shows, some shows people will just roll their eyes perhaps I don’t know. But I think artists will find it interesting.”

A case in point is the inaugural show in LA, which will pair the work of the 19th-century French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, who has been influential to artists for generations like Picasso, with Markus Lüpertz, who is represented by the gallery. (The exhibition will also include loans from museums and private collections of Puvis de Chavannes works.)  

In an email, Treut, the director of the LA space, described the city as being “incredibly open and collaborative,” which the new Werner location will aim to embrace. “Each Michael Werner Gallery location has a personality unique to its particular city, and the LA gallery reflects that intentionality. The first show sets the tone for the program as a whole, which will bring compelling discoveries or rediscoveries to Los Angeles.”

VeneKlasen added, “So many painters I know are excited and interested in Puvis de Chavannes. Markus is 82 years old, and he’s a source for a lot of young painters. So I think it’s an interesting place to start.”

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Frieze New York Names 68 Galleries for Upcoming Edition in May

The Best Booths at NADA New York 2023

The fair, which will once again align with Frieze New York, will return to 548 West, the 50,000-square-foot venue on West 22nd Street in Chelsea that was once home to the Dia building.

Among the galleries lined up to participate are several New York–based galleries including, Dimin, Dinner Gallery, Entrance, Hannah Traore Gallery, Harper’s, Kapp Kapp, Rachel Uffner Gallery, Situations, and the Hole. There are 34 first-time exhibitors.

Other national and international participants include Montreal’s Bradley Ertaskiran, San Francisco’s Et al., Minneapolis’s Hair + Nails, Chicago’s Volume, Miami’s KDR, Martha’s of Austin, and de boer of Los Angeles and Antwerp.

In the NADA Projects section, which is for small-scale projects, participants include Marta of Los Angeles, No Gallery of New York, _VIGILGONZALEZ of Buenos Aires, IAH of Seoul, Rivalry Projects of Buffalo, and N.A.S.A.L. of Mexico City and Guayaquil.

In a statement, NADA executive director Heather Hubbs said, “We are delighted to celebrate our tenth anniversary of NADA New York with our brilliant community of artists, dealers, and supporters.”

The full exhibitor list follows below.

NADA Projects

Sculpture Projects

The partnership will see closely watched artists partner with top fashion brands, including Oscar Tuazon with Comme des Garçons and Felix, KAWS with Sky High Farm Workwear and Nike, David Hammons with Denim Tears, Sterling Ruby with Vans, and the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts with Brain Dead. There will also be a collaboration between Levi’s and OTTO 958, a project by London-based fashion designer Kiko Kostadinov and LA art dealer Al Morán, who is also a cofounder of Felix.

At the fair, the DSM store will be located in a site-specific structure created by Tuazon in the hotel’s ballroom.

Similarly, Total Luxury Spa Artist Series will present T-shirts and hoodies with designs by the likes of Lauren Halsey, Cauleen Smith, Cyprien Gaillard, and Meriem Bennani, while Parley for the Oceans will offer tote bags made from ocean plastic by artists like Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer, Katherina Grosse, Julian Schnabel, Doug Aitken, and David LaChappelle.

The fair, which runs February 28 to March 3 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, will also feature a dedicated space, designed by Kawakubo, to showcase wares from Comme des Garçon’s Black Market, which sells the brand’s black-colored collaborations.

Also available within this curated shopping section are pieces from the Spring/Summer 2024 collections of several Comme des Garçon labels, as well as Barbara Sánchez-Kane, Rick Owens, JW Anderson, Marc Jacobs, Charles Jeffrey, Chopova Lowena, Adidas, and more.

“Dover Street Market has a rich history of integrating art, and artists, into its world and the thought of blending their community with our community felt very exciting to me,” Morán told ARTnews. “Every decision made throughout this process has centered around art. Specifically, in respecting Oscar Tuazon’s vision for his sculptural installation which is at the heart of this project. It feels like we are breaking new ground with this partnership, and I’m genuinely thrilled to welcome visitors to experience this collaboration between Felix and Dover Street Market.”

After a visit to Mexico, I often return to the immortal words of Gloria E. Anzaldúa, whose groundbreaking 1998 essay-memoir-poetry collection Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza articulated what it means to be Chicanx and live on the US-side of the US-Mexico border. “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them,” she wrote nearly three decades ago. While a border serves as “a dividing line,” a borderland is “a vague and undetermined place,” one that is in “a constant state of transition.” 

What does it mean to be in diaspora when one’s ancestral land is so close it can be in spitting distance? And what does it mean to return to that land? In a way, that is the premise of a two-person exhibition at Commonwealth and Council gallery’s location in Mexico City (away from its home base in Los Angeles). For a show titled “WACHA: viajes transtemporales” (on view through March 30), rafa esparza and Guadalupe Rosales, both raised in LA and now based there, consider their respective relationships to Mexico for a collaboration, their second in the past six months. (With Mario Ayala, they mounted a joint exhibition at SFMOMA that looked at their relationship to cruising, both in low riders and of people.)

Memory plays a key role. The exhibition opens with a two-panel painting on adobe by esparza titled Colosio en lomas taurinas, despues del guardado (2024). The dense composition depicts Mexican politician Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta during a 1994 presidential campaign rally in the Tijuana neighborhood of Lomas Taurinas. A joyous crowd looks at an empty silhouette suggesting the presence of Colosio, who was assassinated that day and whose death was deeply felt on both sides of the border. Is the scene in the painting the moment right before joy turns into terror? esparza leaves it vague. All that remains is the ghostly specter of Colosio’s silhouette.

For her contribution, Rosales presents two stunning photographs of the hoods of souped-up low riders that double as hard-edge abstractions in dazzling colors and glitter. The edges of the cars, the pavement below, and the reflections of palm trees onto their glimmering hoods are visions that caught the artist’s eye, something she wanted to remember. Elsewhere in the exhibition, Rosales shows her recent turn to sculpture, including X100PRE (2024), which collages together archival materials beneath a sheet of red plexiglass that is emblazoned with the word FOREVER and topped with eight pairs of black sunglasses arranged in a ring.

The show’s most touching piece is another adobe painting by esparza. Unlike Colosio, it is mostly raw adobe, an empty expanse of brown that frames, at the work’s center, a rendering of a wallet-size photograph showing esparza with his brother and sister as children. His sister died during childhood, and this is a photograph that he carries with him daily. The painting’s title is Y los restos de tu pequeño rostro serán mi conexión más profunda a México (And the remains of your little face will be my deepest connection to Mexico).

In another room by itself is a joint installation that pairs Rosales’s hanging mirrored-glass disco ball in the shape of two pyramids (shipped from her installation in the Hammer Museum’s 2023 Made in L.A. biennial) with a collaborative sculpture below. In that piece, a hand-like armature, made from silver buckles and braided fabric belts, rises from tiles of black obsidian that look like a pool surrounded by a terrace of adobe bricks. Engraved on the obsidian is the work’s title: Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente. Literally, it translates to “Eyes that don’t see, heart that doesn’t feel.” But it can be interpreted in other ways, like “What they don’t know, won’t hurt them” or “Out of sight, out of mind.” When thinking of Mexico and the artists’ relationship to this ancestral land, both make sense—hauntingly beautiful sense.

Harden is among the country’s most closely watched curators. They are a visual arts curator and program manager at the California African American Museum in LA and will also organize the Focus section at Frieze LA, which opens at the end of the month. Their curatorial credits include solo shows for Deborah Roberts, Helen Cammock, and Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, as well as co-curating the 2022 California Biennial, with Elizabeth Armstrong and Gilbert Vicario, at the Orange County Museum of Art.

Recently hired as senior curator at the Hammer, Pobocha has established herself as an influential curator on the East Coast, having worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the past 16 years. Among the exhibitions she has organized at MoMA are major solos for contemporary artists, including Guadalupe Maravilla, Rachel Harrison, Robert Gober, Claes Oldenburg, and Thomas Schütte, whose forthcoming retrospective will open in September.

Pobocha only moved to LA around a month ago, though she has visited more than a dozen times. “The city is foreign to me in a very real way,” she said. “Because Los Angeles is new to me, I’m interested in being here and learning about the city and learning about the art being made in the city. I’m coming at it with very few preconceived notions because I’m not from here.”

On the other hand, Harden, who focused their Ph.D. research on the LA-based artist collective Studio Z that was active in the 1970s, has been based in the city for the past nine years. “My whole curatorial world is very grounded in Los Angeles,” they said. “For me, LA is a type of grammar that I’m interested in: what are the signs and symbols that create the structure by which we come to understand the visual practices that happen here. That’s the guide that I use when I’m thinking of LA.”

Pobocha added, “I feel like we’ve found perfect partners in each other because Essence does know the landscape in a way that I do not. But, our methodologies and our academic training puts us in sync with one another. … I want the exhibition to get at what’s happening, what this work is about, and how does it relate to the other works that we will inevitably include.”

The two curators said they are still early in the process of conducting their research for the exhibition, which includes extensive studio visits across the city, often with emerging artists. One aspect of research Pobocha said she is interested in exploring is “the histories of Los Angeles” and “how much that is informing younger artists working today. One thing that is really particular about Los Angeles is that it’s such an art school city. There’s so many communities and genealogies because of those art schools.”

She added, “Whether we’re conscious of it or not, the history of the city and the history of these art schools come together in a pot to make the kind of art that we’re seeing today.”

While that area of research may or may not impact the exhibition’s theme and the selected works that go on view next year, Harden said they are both approaching the exhibition—and the city of Los Angeles itself—with a sense of openness. “While that is a fledgling idea that I have around how do I consider LA as we approach this, it’s still not defined or confined yet,” they said. “Right now, we don’t have a set of parameters or circumstances that are restricting us. We’re open to just seeing where LA lands. Because Made in L.A. is so time specific often—what is the snapshot in this precise moment as these two people in their own interest as curators—we are excited to approach it in that way.”

Pobocha agreed, “There’s definitely no theme that we’re coming with or a ‘I want to prove this about Los Angeles.’ My training has always been that you start with the art object and see what it tells you. We’re looking at the work, not coming to it with any points to prove, other than the fact that this is a vital city with a lot of incredible artists working here.”

Harden said that because Made in L.A. has been so impactful to the city’s art scene, and its recognition outside of the scene, they are thinking about how the exhibition can be impactful and add to LA’s own art history by presenting a slice of what is being made in greater Los Angeles right now.

Harden added, “The city is gigantic. There are so many artists making work here. There is no way you’re going to show even 10 percent of what happens here.”