Folk Art With a Touch of Madness Is Thriving at West Hollywood Gallery

It’s Friday night at La Luz de Jesus Folk Art Gallery, and the Elvis impersonator is donning his clerical robes. In 10 minutes, the ordained minister with sideburns will join in holy matrimony Simy Fhima, a waitress at the chic Caribbean restaurant Cha Cha Cha, and Marcus Kuiland, a gallery attendant at La Luz.

Forget about wine and cheese. Openings have a different flavor at this topsy-turvy folk art gallery with the rhyming rap name that perches above the Soap Plant boutique on Melrose Avenue.

“We’re not in the gallery mainstream,” says La Luz owner Billy Shire, a businessman whose colorful garb and long hair make him look more like a primitive medicine man than a hipster.

Shire, who also oversees the burgeoning Soap Plant empire plus retail stores Wacko and Zulu, and his curator Robert Lopez, a former punk rocker with the Los Angeles band The Zeros, have staked out some heady conceptual turf on this psychedelic-colored corner of Melrose and Martel Avenue in West Hollywood.

It’s no more unusual for an Elvis impersonator-cum-minister to pop up at an opening than for a 12-piece gospel choir to descend the stairs belting out hallelujahs. All in keeping with whatever’s hanging on the walls, of course--which ranges from the work of hip cartoonists to new wave rock stars, retired Baptist ministers and entire exhibits of primitive art devoted to the King himself.

Shire isn’t in the haute art business, although some of his older, rarer pieces, such as carved-wood Mexican saints, have fetched $3,000. Paintings range in price from three digits to five.

“I don’t separate the art from the kitsch. I like to mix it all up,” he says.

Shire’s goal is to topple art off its pedestal and deliver it to the masses. In folk form. That means exhibiting Haitian voodoo flags one month and Mexican post cards by Devo front man Mark Mothersbaugh, a former art student, the next. Or comics by Matt “Life in Hell” Groening. Or primitive paintings of wailing walls and fiddlers on the roof by a 75-year-old Romanian immigrant named Maicol Stark whom Lopez “discovered” at a nearby garage sale.

“Art should be by the people and for the people,” Shire says. “It should be something that speaks to you, that entertains and challenges and changes your outlook.”

La Luz gets kudos from more traditional folk art experts.

Laurie Beth Kalb, a folklorist and curator at the Crafts and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, says her museum often directs patrons to La Luz.

“Whether they’re traditional or contemporary doesn’t negate the fact that they’re folk art. The nice thing is that folk art is being acknowledged on Melrose Avenue,” Kalb says.

Kathy Golden, who owns Primitivo, a San Francisco folk art gallery, says the people at La Luz have a discerning eye for spotting strong work by untrained artists.

“There’s no one else in L.A. doing what they’re doing. They’re not dictated to by what’s going on in the art market; they choose it because they like it,” Golden says.

Folk art fanatics like Shire and Golden say that until recently, they felt “almost like a secret society, where people would buy directly from the artist” and the initiated shared a passion that most relegated to the art-world junk heap. No longer.

While few think folk art will eclipse French Impressionism any time soon, many say the genre is coming into its own.

“L.A. is becoming a larger melting pot where every cultural folk style is accepted,” La Luz curator Lopez says. “I like to mix them all up. Catholic, Buddhist, Haitian voodoo, Jewish. There’s an underlying spiritual openness here.”

Shire, whose brother is ceramic artist and furniture designer Peter Shire, says 20% of his patrons come from the film, music or art business.

How much of the art actually sells?

Shire wishes it were more. A recent show of work by Josh Gosfield, a quirky East Coast artist whose work blends cool jazz, the Wild West, Cubism and images from the Mexican Revolution, sold two paintings. But a show by artist Robert Williams sold nine, including a huge $15,000 painting called “Pecos Fiona and Her One Woman Range War Against Troglodytal Hipsters.”

The gallery rarely advertises. There’s no big sign on Melrose to lure patrons. The entrance is on Martel, up a flight of rickety, red-carpeted stairs.

Nonetheless, Lopez has doubled the exhibition space since La Luz opened in October, 1986, as a repository for the one-of-a-kind religious artifacts that Shire unearthed on trips to Mexico.

Shire says La Luz is subsidized by his retail shops and a gallery gift shop that does brisk business, especially in such Day of the Dead memorabilia as dancing skeletons, skulls and gaily painted “Tree of Life” candle holders.

But the main mission remains bringing quirky folk artists into the public eye.

In addition to discovering Stark, whose paintings now hang in the homes of Belinda Carlisle, Tom Waits and Penny Marshall, Shire & Co. also gave Filipino artist Manuel Ocampo--a 23-year-old whose work evokes Russian constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko--his first show. Lopez said that when he met Ocampo, the artist was so poor he was painting over old canvases.

La Luz also gave Jon Bok his first show. Bok is known for his bottle cap-encrusted crosses and handcrafted furniture of wood, hammered tin and mosaic tile sprinkled with glitter or bits of broken glass.

La Luz is booked through April of 1989, and Lopez says he turns away five would-be exhibitors each week.

What he looks for is “something off-the-wall, with that certain edge, slightly wacko-ish, it’s hard to describe.”

Like the surf-art show he’s planning for the near future.

Is it art, is it high kitsch, and does it matter?

“In the long run, it’s not important what Ph.D.s and art historians think,” says Golden, of the San Francisco-based Primitivo.

“Folk art is becoming more accepted, especially with young collectors, and La Luz is part of that. There’s serious collectors going in to see what they do.”