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Having spent almost forty years in advertising and marketing related positions, I’ve always enjoyed looking at art, and about twenty-five years ago, began obsessively collecting contemporary art. Never did I contemplate opening an art gallery until four years ago, finding myself without a job and approaching sixty, I moved to downtown LA from Beverly Hills. A friend suggested I open a gallery and I found the most amazing space on street level, in a century old building with twenty-three-foot ceilings. Envisioning what the work I enjoyed would look like in the space, I was sold on the idea almost immediately and began assembling a group of twenty plus artists to work with. My passion drove my commitment to the gallery and I have now organized over thirty solo and group exhibitions, in our two spaces, since we opened in February, 2010. |
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Courtesy of Clyde Beswick, photo by Jorge Colombo.
Having spent almost forty years in advertising and marketing related positions, I’ve always enjoyed looking at art, and about twenty-five years ago, began obsessively collecting contemporary art. Never did I contemplate opening an art gallery until four years ago, finding myself without a job and approaching sixty, I moved to downtown LA from Beverly Hills. A friend suggested I open a gallery and I found the most amazing space on street level, in a century old building with twenty-three-foot ceilings. Envisioning what the work I enjoyed would look like in the space, I was sold on the idea almost immediately and began assembling a group of twenty plus artists to work with. My passion drove my commitment to the gallery and I have now organized over thirty solo and group exhibitions, in our two spaces, since we opened in February, 2010.
I have always been drawn to younger artists and work that may be defined as a bit outside of the current trend circle. Some of the artists I collected have since gone on to be art stars but that was never an initial consideration. CB1 Gallery exhibits and promotes an intellectually demanding yet aesthetically pleasing group of younger and mid-career artists who cross disciplines and political perspectives. We have a fairly large group of younger artists for whom the gallery has provided their first or second commercial gallery solo show. In addition, I wanted to show the work of some more mature artists whose work is, in my mind, under exposed in LA and whose work I respond to. Another thing I am extremely proud is that about half of the artists we exhibit are women.
Installation view of Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, Papel tejido, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and CB1 Gallery.
Someone once asked me how I determine what I show at CB1 Gallery, the answer starts with a simple premise, “I have to love it, respond positively to it and believe in what the artist is trying to do with his or her work.” I’ve always been a fan of painting so we do show a great deal of paintings, but have shown and will continue to show work in other mediums.
Having lived in LA for the past thirty years it’s clear to me that the art being made here is as good as work being made in New York and elsewhere. So the differences between the NY and LA art worlds must be something other than the work created. I think we have to look to the overall culture here in LA versus that of NY for the key difference. In New York, the arts are almost a religion to a large percentage of the residents. Museums, galleries, theaters, concert venues are everywhere and going to them is second nature to many. In LA, and probably because of the vast geography of the city, it seems we don’t do enough to educate people to the value of the artist in general, and visual artists specifically.
One of the main reasons I love being in downtown LA is the ability we have to expose a different audience to the visual arts, many of the people who regularly come to the gallery would never go into the galleries in other parts of the city, where galleries tend to be concentrated. Naturally, we need collectors to come to the gallery in order to survive and we do get them, but some of the highlights of the first three years of CB1 Gallery have been the pleasure I’ve experienced in awaking people to something they have never seen and helping them understand what they are seeing and encouraging them to more fully explore the LA art world.
