How The Pit Became the Off-the-Beaten-Path LA Gallery Everyone Won’t Stop Talking About
Photo Ye Rin Mok
This weekend, ahead of the opening of Frieze Los Angeles on February 29, many of the city’s galleries will be opening new exhibitions, showing off the best work they have to offer. One of those galleries is The Pit, the artist-run space founded by Adam D. Miller and Devon Oder in Glendale that has, over the past decade, established itself as a dependable purveyor of off-kilter exhibitions.
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.
Related Articles
“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.”
© 2024 PMC. All rights reserved.