A number of galleries—among them, David Kordansky, Blum (formerly Blum & Poe), Regen Projects, Roberts Projects, Various Small Fires, Night Gallery, and Commonwealth and Council—have been instrumental in building up the city’s commercial scene for the past decade, and the scene is rich.
As this year’s editions of Frieze Los Angeles at the Santa Monica Airport and Felix Art Fair at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel approach, ARTnews catches up with 10 art dealers to know in Los Angeles, who are actively crafting the scene in the City of Angels.
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Hannah Hoffman
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo Paul Salveson. Hannah Hoffman Gallery’s exhibition program is known for raising the profiles of historically important artists and cutting-edge contemporary ones since its opening in 2013. Historic shows have included the work of Brazilian icon Mira Schendel, American painter and sculptor Paul Thek, and American photographer Alvin Baltrop. The gallery’s roster of contemporary artists is based primarily in the United States, and many have a connection to LA. Notable exhibitions include the first organized show of Paul Thek’s work in the city, as well as an off-site project with Tony Cokes in Paul R. Williams’s private residence that coincided with artist D’Ette Nogle installing a show nearby in a series of public storage units.
“We represent a lot of women, which is an important position of the gallery,” Hoffman told ARTnews. Among the artists who have recently joined the roster are Kate Mosher Hall, Luz Carabaño, Dominique Knowles, Maren Karlson, and Caitlin MacQueen. At Frieze, the gallery will show a number of artists from across its program. “It is exciting to be in dialogue with an artist at the beginning and to help them establish a strong, stable foundation on which a long career can flourish.”
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Paul Soto
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Paul Soto Gallery, Los Angeles and New York. Photo Marten Elder. Paul Soto Gallery has been representing emerging international contemporary artists since 2014. Exhibitions instrumental to the gallery’s trajectory include Autumn Ramsey’s 2017 show at Soto’s first location in MacArthur Park, Na Mira’s 2019 solo presentation at Liste in Basel, Kate Spencer Stewart’s 2019 show at Le Hangar Restaurant in Paris, and Mark Armijo McKnight’s dual exhibition in Brussels and Los Angeles in 2023.
Currently on view is an exhibition of conceptual artist Carlos Reyes’s sculptures in collaboration with London-based gallery Soft Opening. “We are excited to be collaborating with Soft Opening from London, who is currently organizing a series of exhibitions in our Los Angeles space,” Soto told ARTnews.
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Charlie James
Image Credit: Courtesy Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles Collector-turned-gallerist Charlie James opened his space in the city’s Chinatown in 2008. Coming to the scene with a background in CRM application consulting from Microsoft, James said, the gallery follows the idea that “art’s ultimate function is to reveal something true about the time and place of its making. We’re always thinking about this when we decide what to show.”
The program has long championed artists of color. James cites working with artist Jay Lynn Gomez as the catalyst “that broke us out and allowed us to grow.” Influenced by Gomez’s work on topics of labor and luxury, the gallery doubled down on showcasing work with under-told narratives, with the help of artist and curator Ever Velasquez.
Artists on its closely watched roster include Danie Cansino, Patrisse Cullors, Lucia Hierro, Patrick Martinez, and Shizu Saldamando, several of whom he will show at the Felix Art Fair this week. Now, according to James, “we have a very strong generation of artists from LA and beyond making important work about their lived experience and helping viewers to widen their lens in terms of what American life is and consists of.”
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Karen Galloway
Image Credit: Photo Johnny Le Following a more unconventional approach, Sow & Tailor was recently established by dealer Karen Galloway in 2021. Galloway opened the gallery during the pandemic as a creative and fun project, with communal support. Foregoing traditional representation for a more fluid process, Galloway said of her program, “I like to nurture artistic endeavors more organically on a project-to-project basis. I take a tailored approach with the artists and curatorial projects I work on, with a focus on intimate cultivation.”
By way of example, Galloway pointed to recent shows with artists Tidawhitney Lek and Aryo Toh Djojo, as well as Erin Wright and Jasaya Neale, who currently have work on view at Sow & Tailor, and Javier Ramirez, whom the gallery will show at Frieze LA. Derived from Galloway’s personal ethos, Sow & Tailor prides itself on developing the cultural landscape in LA through shared values and personal relationships.
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Anat Ebgi
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photo Mason Kuehler Founded in 2012, Anat Ebgi Gallery prides itself on showcasing the work of underrepresented historical female artists. In honor of the 50-year anniversary of Womanhouse, the feminist art installation and performance space initiated by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, the gallery restaged the work in 2022 during that year’s Frieze LA. This came after a 2019 restaging of Tina Girouard’s 1977 performance Pinwheel, in which four performers, each in a separate quadrant, create an environment using fabric. The created environment enacts a ritual connected to a selected persona.
At this year’s iteration of Frieze LA, Anat Ebgi will show works by Gloria Klein, who was an overlooked abstract painter in New York during the 1970s and ’80s.
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Chris Sharp
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo Ruben Diaz After cutting his teeth with the acclaimed Mexico City gallery Lulu, Chris Sharp recently relocated to Los Angeles and opened his eponymous gallery in 2021. His aim with his new venture is to provide increased visibility and commercial representation to LA artists, including Tom Allen, Ishi Glinsky, and Tyler Vlahovich. The program, however, also extends internationally with artists Sophie Barber, Isabel Nuño de Buen, and Lin May Saeed, who died last August at age 50.
Sharp cited the 2023 solo show for Ishi Glinsky, who was among the breakout stars of the 2023 Made in LA biennial at the Hammer Museum, as one of its most significant. Titled “Monuments to Survival,” the gallery exhibited a single monumental faux-leather jacket in its main space. “I think when people saw this show, they knew we meant business,” Sharp said. At Felix Art Fair, the gallery is featuring the works of LA-based artists Tom Allen and Angeline Rivas.
The program, he added, is “centered around a core of LA-based artists” and committed to “artists who articulate their relationship to art history, politics, and the world through form, materials, color, and texture.”
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Rodney and Taka Nonaka-Hill
Image Credit: Courtesy Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles Centering on Japan, Nonaka-Hill was founded in 2018 in LA by Rodney and Taka Nonaka-Hill. Even the space itself forgoes the traditional white cube, fusing forgotten LA spaces with Japanese-inspired aesthetics.
Keita Matsunaga’s exhibition “Accumulation Flow” offers a poetic layering of raw-material-turned-art-objects. This kind of considered aesthetic is mirrored throughout the gallery’s program. Among its international roster are modern and contemporary Japanese artists, including Kimiyo Mishima, Shomei Tomatsu, Kazuo Kadonaga, Kansuke Yamamoto, Kentaro Kawabata, Toshio Matsumoto, and Tadaaki Kuwayama.
At Frieze LA, Nonaka-Hill will mount paintings in its booths by Koichi Enomoto, Ulala Imai, and Tadaaki Kuwayama, as well as sculptures and ceramics by Rando Aso, Kentaro Kawabata, Michio Koinuma, Kiyomizu Rokubey VIII, Kenzi Shiokava, Jiro Nagase, Takuro Tamayama, and Masaomi Yasunaga.
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Emilia Yin
Image Credit: Courtesy Make Room, Los Angeles Collector and gallerist Emilia Yin founded Make Room Los Angeles in 2018, “with the vision of creating exhibitions that resonate with me and my community personally—those that spotlight female voices, the narratives of diasporas, and both emerging and established talents who merit wider recognition,” she told ARTnews.
Two forthcoming collaborations illustrating this commitment include the first solo show of emerging artist Youngmin Park, whose work portrays her experience growing up in a large Korean family, and sculptor Yeni Mao’s installation for Frieze Los Angeles, which reimagines tunnels running under the border town of Mexicali that Chinese and Chinese-Mexican communities used in the early 20th century, during the Mexican Revolution. Both are prime examples of the narratives and historical contexts at the heart of the gallery’s program.
The alchemy of Make Room’s success can be found in its ethos of cultivating “comprehensive relationships” with artists, collectors, curators, and audiences alike. “Navigating the complexities of the art world necessitates the nurturing of these connections, which remains a critical aspect of my role, especially in supporting the artists beyond the scope of their shows at my gallery,” Yin said.
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Noon Projects
Image Credit: Courtesy Noon Projects, Los Angeles Creative director Ryan Noon started Noon Projects in 2022 in an effort both to support and partner with artists. Offering “hospitality and creating a welcoming and warm environment” in LA’s Chinatown, Noon is interested in artists who engage the questions and concerns of our time “through the exploration of the human condition” by means of the natural world, queerness, sexuality, beauty, hospitality, history, and technology.
Some of the gallery’s pivotal events include its participation in the North American Pavilion at Frieze No. 9 Cork Street in London, which brought together craft, art, and design. Christian Rogers’s 2023 exhibition “Heaven on Earth” highlighted queer joy, memorialized the AIDS epidemic, and celebrated queer life—a move, Noon said, that “forced me to blast away any semblance of shame around queerness and sexuality and brought together the public in a way I’d never experienced before.”
Tapping into the many approaches a gallery can offer, Noon approaches it as a safe and multifunctional creative space.
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David De Boer
Image Credit: Courtesy de boer gallery, Los Angeles. Photo Jacob Phillip In 2020 de boer gallery opened its doors in LA with a Shannon Cartier Lucy solo show, “Woman with Machete,” which reflected on mundane moments in paint. “From the beginning, the gallery has focused on representing a diverse roster of artists from all over the world who emphasize a rigorously technical and conceptual studio practice,” David De Boer told ARTnews of his gallery’s program.
De Boer, who hails from Los Angeles, doubled down on the city in 2021, when he added an additional gallery space, thereby tripling the footprint. This decision, he said, “ended up setting the tone for many things to come, including our first international location which opened in Antwerp, Belgium, in 2023.”