Los Angeles, it seems, is a good place for experiments. "I think of Public Fiction as a cabinet of curiosity, getting a bunch of different ideas on one topic, taking the temperature, including the found along with the made," Mackler says.
Other spaces around town attempt other new models for showing and making art. Workspace and Monte Vista are more traditionally run artist spaces: open a couple hours a week, usually connected to someone's studio, with neither driven by so clear a program. That said, they've done their share of amazing projects, like Dawn Kasper's studio performance at Monte Vista and Lesley Moon's installation and Nikki Darling and Kate Wolf's reading series at Workspace.
749 Ave. 50
Highland Park, CA 90042
Category: Performing Arts Venues
Region: Northeast L.A.
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Named after a famed Ed Ruscha painting from 1962 owned by LACMA, the collectively run Actual Size Los Angeles is off New High Street in Chinatown, and many of its curatorial ventures are defined by the limits of its microspace.
Human Resources was the biggest and most serious of the new artist-run spaces, housed in a former movie theater on Cottage Home Street near Broadway. Though it has a robust exhibition program, the space's primary focus is on the intersection of performance and visual art, and how these two often disparate communities can come together and learn from one another. It has graduated from the humble beginnings of an artist-run space into one of the few possibilities beyond, a nonprofit where the stakes and the costs are much higher, and the rules (federal tax rules) much stricter.
With Human Resources becoming a nonprofit, it raises the question of how long Night Gallery and Public Fiction can sustain their artist-run status while also trying to grow beyond the short term. They are by their very experimental nature meant to effervesce briefly and disappear, leaving behind only a legend. While Mackler says Public Fiction is resolutely a no-profit, artist-run space, Night Gallery has plans to turn more commercial. In talking to Nemeroff, I offhandedly used the word "alternative," to which she quickly riposted: "It's not an alternative, it's a new standard."
THE MUSEUM OF PUBLIC FICTION | 749 Avenue 50, Highland Park | publicfiction.org
NIGHT GALLERY | 204 S. Avenue 19, Lincoln Heights| nightgallery.ca
No mention of RAID Projects? It's been artist run and in Lincoln Heights for almost 10 years, and has been maintaining an international artist residency. Most of these spaces (including RAID) will be at the Co/Lab event at Art Platform this year. The gist of the article is right, though, the east side is where a lot of these places are....
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