Pick up a copy of this week's LA Weekly. Its a wonderful, informed article about us and our position in the LA Artworld. It also goes into the history of the neighborhood and our vision for what we'd like to contribute to it. A snippet below.
Leimert Park Village is a stretch of storefronts that looks like a small town square tucked into a big city. That's where Michelle Papillion has a new gallery, and she titled its debut show "Open."
"It's really sort of an inside joke," she says. "Even the day before we had our grand opening, people were like, 'Are you sure you're going to be open?' Because there was still stuff on the floors, a big construction mess."
The space, like a lot of storefronts in the village that's just east of Crenshaw Boulevard, had been vacant for three years before Papillion arrived. "Mother Nature had taken over," she says. She had to patch up walls and tile the floors before installing the show.
But on the evening of Feb. 15, as scheduled, she had a pink neon sign saying "Papillion" above the entrance and work by eight emerging artists installed inside, including David Sigmund's wood-laminate sculptures in the window; colorful keyboards by Nzuji de Magalhaes against the sidewall of the first room; and Raksha Parekh's sugarcane-paper tendons hanging from the ceiling in the second room.
About 500 people came through that night, among them London dealer Jay Jopling; former MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch; neighborhood residents; and artists' parents and siblings. Papillion planned to close by 9 p.m. Instead, she was locking up a little after midnight.
Danielle Dean, a London-born L.A. artist whose work is elegantly populistic and who has a video in "Open," went for post-opening drinks with friends. She recalls one of those friends announcing, "I just want to propose a toast to what I think is an emerging scene."