When Esther Kim Varet opened her gallery Various Small Fires in 2012, LA’s gallery ecosystem was “very small and very local,” she says. Initially operating out of the first floor of her townhome on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, Varet attributes her early success to her connections to New York’s art world. “A lot of my early shows were bringing New York artists to LA that were doing really well in New York but hadn't shown in LA yet, and the LA scene was very hungry to see these works and practices,” she says.
LA's gallery landscape has long wrestled with the burden and blessing of being seen as slightly removed from the big-money art scenes of New York and London. Yet it’s exactly this distance that enabled the development of a curious, diverse, and now mature market whose range—from the mega-gallery to the midsize dealer to the upstart experiment—mirrors the variety of Los Angeles’s neighborhoods.
The newly minted “Melrose Hill” area has become an oasis for fresh galleries in the city’s decidedly decentralized arts ecosystem, including Southern Guild, Sebastian Gladstone, and Fernberger. At the same time, a number of midsize LA galleries have closed their doors since 2023, including Vito Schnabel, Lorin Gallery, Nino Mier, Carlye Packer, Praz-Delavallade, Harper’s, and Gavlak, citing a slowing market post-pandemic buying craze and a smaller pool of local buyers.
Against this shifting backdrop and unpredictable market, a wave of smaller, younger galleries have established themselves as cultural bellwethers and resilient businesses. While this generation is looking to dealers just a half generation ahead of them as examples of success, they are also confident enough to carve their own paths—and, in the process, channel a distinctly Angeleno penchant for innovation and imagination. Now, it’s the New York galleries that benefit from their proximity to and connections with LAs’s art world, rather than just the other way around.
Following January’s devastating Palisades and Eaton wildfires that claimed large swaths of Los Angeles County (to the tune of nearly 40,000 combined acres across Altadena and the Pacific Palisades), the LA art scene is poised to enter yet another new chapter. Some homeowners whose properties were claimed by the fires reported losing significant works of fine art; scores of artists lost everything. With Frieze LA opening on Feb. 20, the tight-knit local community has a chance to support its own—though it remains to be seen where art-buying lands on the spectrum of priorities for many in the city.
At this critical juncture, CULTURED spoke with five young, taste-making galleries, all founded within the past five years, who are showing promising maturity and confidence as they establish themselves in LA’s increasingly crowded gallery market. The diversity in their programmatic approaches, curatorial instincts, and artists represents the eclecticism, communal spirit, and interconnectedness that defines the LA scene in an often competitive, trend-led industry.
“It will always be seductive to replicate what others have done successfully, but I do think the best gallerists and dealers that are out there are willing and open to imagine what others have not done yet and how to make that successful,” Varet says. These five galleries are “making new [categories] of success” in their own unique ways: Sea View uses a residential space as a gallery to encourage visitors to see the relationship between art and the domestic sphere, Sebastian Gladstone is reanimating the city’s long history of craft-based practices, Sow & Tailor leans on an outsider perspective to engage diverse audiences, Megan Mulrooney celebrates the homegrown talent of Los Angeles’ creative class, and Fernberger collapses time with intergenerational exhibitions.
Megan Mulrooney Gallery
Megan Mulrooney’s West Hollywood outpost opened in 2024, and centers on amplifying emerging and mid-career artists in Los Angeles and around the globe. The eponymous founder was previously a director at Nino Mier.
What role do you see younger galleries playing in the larger gallery ecosystem, especially as older, more established ones close?
That speaks to a lot of the reasons why younger gallerists are starting their own galleries in the midst of larger galleries closing…you can be more transient. You can be more amiable to changing influences, because you don't have this program that's been developed for years that you have to stick to. So I think it's this understanding that a new generation of collectors is eager for fresh voices and fresh faces. Los Angeles does prioritize their own. So if it's something that is important to Angelenos, or if we have someone showing that's from Los Angeles, most people are going to show up.
Do you feel like that flexibility is useful when working in an unstable art market?
I do, especially in a market that is trying to find its feet and understand what’s next. This is the time when the older generation of collectors are phasing out, and now it's time for younger galleries to educate a younger public about how to collect and support artists. How do we create new collectors of this younger generation?
Is there a show that stands out as one that really inspired you, or that you wish you had curated yourself?
My favorite show is this show that I saw in Siena, Italy. It was called "Art, Genius, Madness." It brought together all these different artists—some practicing, working artists, some famous artists, and some who were self-taught, or who were just taking classes—but all of them had been in a mental institution like an asylum or a sanatorium. And it was amazing to view what society has rejected as art, or someone who is not the ideal of who is making art, and then have it on the walls in this kind of art, genius, madness moment where madness breeds genius. Playing with someone's suspicions or superstitions or preconceived notions of what art should be is always so exciting.
What’s the first piece of art you collected?
It was a pastiche of Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. I actually kept it in the glove compartment of my car and would [occasionally] take it out and look at it to remind me why I liked art.
How will the wildfires impact LA’s gallery scene and the selling of art in a city post-disaster?
Artists are visual historians who help society collectively process feelings toward traumatic events like the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires. While unfortunately the hardships faced by displaced community members will continue long after the fires have ended, it has been heartwarming and uplifting to see how those in the arts have banded together to donate and fundraise for artists, galleries, and cultural workers who have suffered the loss of their home, studios, and belongings. The need for art, and the cultural institutions like museums and galleries that show it, has never been greater.
