The ‘Art Mall’ Blossoms in Santa Monica

When art librarian Annette Masling was in Southern California recently, her must-see list included a light-industrial mall in the 900 block of Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica.

She didn’t go there to have her car repaired, despite the plethora of body shops in the area.

Masling, who directs the library at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y.--one of the oldest modern art museums in the country--headed for Colorado Avenue to check out the latest offerings at what has become the center of the West Coast’s contemporary art gallery scene.

“This is the hub,” said Christopher Ford, director of the Pence Gallery, one of six modern art venues in what many observers refer to as Santa Monica’s “art mall.”

Ford was interviewed recently by Art & Auction magazine, one of the leading gallery trade journals, about the contemporary art scene in Los Angeles.

“Twenty years ago, it all started in West Hollywood,” he said. “Now that’s dying. By moving into new spaces in Santa Monica, people can reinvent themselves, which is really what Los Angeles is all about.”

Art dealer James Corcoran moved to 5th Street in Santa Monica in 1986 after more than a decade in West Hollywood, pioneering the local modern art gallery boom.

But it was the decision by Irving Blum to open a gallery on Colorado Avenue later that year that really ignited the current explosion. Blum’s BlumHelman Gallery (co-owned by Joseph Helman), the Pence Gallery and Fred Hoffman, all of which opened in December, 1986, were the original tenants of the art mall.

“Blum coming after Corcoran was really the snowball beginning to roll downhill,” said Henry Korn, Santa Monica’s arts administrator.

Blum is a legend among contemporary art dealers. He was one of the owners of Los Angeles’ Ferus Gallery, which gave its imprimatur in the 1950s and ‘60s to new artists such as Andy Warhol. After the Ferus closed in 1967, Blum ran his own gallery in West Hollywood until he moved to Manhattan in 1973. Blum’s decision to return to the West Coast in 1986 is seen by many as a turning point in Los Angeles’ recent ascent to major art-city status.

Deborah McLeod, director of the BlumHelman Gallery, said Blum originally scouted for gallery space on La Brea and Melrose avenues but rejected them because of sky-high rentals and lack of parking.

Blum decided to look in Santa Monica because it “was the pleasantest place around here,” McLeod said.

While hunting, the art dealer discovered a recently built light-industrial mall on Colorado whose tenants included a swimwear manufacturer. Blum peered in a window, McLeod said, and saw a 15-foot ceiling, poured concrete floors and a roll-up door in the rear that facilitated unpacking goods from the alley.

Ford remembers being tipped off early in 1986 that Blum was considering moving into the Colorado Avenue complex. Ford had come from New York to open a gallery and had already signed up for space on La Brea. He drove around until he finally found the unglamorous 900 block of Colorado.

Ford couldn’t believe that this was where an art dealer of Blum’s stature was going to settle. “I looked around, and I said: ‘Irving Blum has a major gallery on 57th Street. He’s not going to open next to a Shakey’s Pizza and a Laundromat.’ Then I told myself to stop thinking like a New Yorker.”

Once Ford had chastised himself, he saw what Blum had seen--a new building with interior space that could be shaped according to the tenant’s needs, an abundance of parking and a freeway-close location. In short, he saw a great place for an art gallery in a city that, unlike New York, is dominated by the automobile.

The opening of BlumHelman, the Pence Gallery and Fred Hoffman “was very propitious time-wise,” Ford said. The gallery debuts coincided with the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Grand Avenue building, the opening of the modern Anderson wing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the first Los Angeles Art Fair.

The art mall was an instant hit. Ford said the gallery soon had 500 visitors or more on a good day.

McLeod said the key to its success was that “it’s easy. You fall off the freeway and you’re here, which makes it different from Venice.” Parking is a cinch, especially on Saturdays, a big gallery day when most of the non-art businesses in the complex are closed.

The gallery group also benefits from its relative isolation from other retail businesses, McLeod said. “Every person who comes to the gallery came to come to the gallery. They aren’t someone who was next door buying an ice cream cone or shoelaces.”

Most of her visitors, McLeod said, are people who keep up with contemporary art, regulars who go from gallery to gallery and “make a half-day of it.”

The only time she recalls being inundated with what she called “non-art people” was during the gallery’s recent show of photographs by the late, controversial Robert Mapplethorpe. “I found it unmanageable,” she said. “Generally we have a highly filtered group of visitors. They are respectful of and knowledgeable about art and a pleasure to work with.”

Visitors can park their cars once and walk to nine different galleries, including four in industrial-style spaces across the street from the mall. Gallery owners often coordinate their openings.

On opening nights, patrons, many wearing running shoes, wander from show to show, carrying bottles of Corona beer or plastic glasses of the Soave Bolla and Australian wine so many of the galleries serve. Some wear costumes. Some carry babies.

On rare occasions, a stray homeless person wanders into one of the galleries from elsewhere in Santa Monica. One gallery staffer remembers being visited by an addled, barefoot man with a valise on his head. The man was assured that he was welcome to look at the show but then would have to leave or “I’ll have to pick up Mr. Telephone.”

Dorothy Goldeen, who opened her gallery across from the mall at 9th and Colorado in the fall of 1987, said she moved from San Francisco to Santa Monica because “I thought the future for the contemporary art world on the West Coast would be here.”

She still does. Goldeen said the unlikely, heavy-duty look of the gallery neighborhood is part of its charm. “It’s a wonderful world to discover--you’re not aware of it until you find it. That sense of discovery is part of the excitement.”

After four years in West Hollywood, Richard Kuhlenschmidt opened his gallery in February at 1634 17th St., half a block south of Colorado. A major impetus was the difficulty of parking in West Hollywood. “People would get tickets, and that was very uncomfortable for me,” he said.

Kuhlenschmidt and other gallery owners in the area are hoping the 17th Street complex will grow into another art mall and become a regular stop on the Saturday circuit.