Gallery Owner Opts for ‘Reinvention’

Come the first of the year, changes are in store for West Hollywood’s Stuart Regen Gallery and Santa Monica’s Linda Cathcart Gallery.

Regen said he will leave his Almont Drive gallery and begin Stuart Regen Projects, a series of roving exhibitions held in vacant spaces three or four times a year. He is planning the first such show, with British artist Damien Hirst, for February. Regen said the artist will help select the space himself about a month before the show. It will be followed by Richard Prince in May and Charles Ray in the fall.

“The way that this city’s set up there’s no need to have a conventional month-to-month gallery, because there’s no foot traffic,” said Regen, who will keep his roster of artists and maintain an office and viewing room near his current space.

“It’s sort of a reinvention as opposed to going to a smaller space and having normal operations,” said Regen, who said the change is in part due to the recession. But even if things pick up, he will continue the roving plan, which he hopes will lead to more exciting projects because the spaces will be tailored to specific artists.

Meanwhile, Cathcart has bought a Frank Gehry-designed building at 12th and Olympic, where she plans to relocate when her Colorado Avenue lease is up Jan. 1.

In other news, members of the Los Angeles Art Galleries have discontinued their Wednesday evening hours because of a lack of attendance. However, about 20 of them will hold a free brunch in their spaces from 9 a.m. to noon on Dec. 5 in conjunction with ART/LA92. Participating galleries include Thomas Solomon’s Garage, Kiyo Higashi, Ovsey, Louis Newman, Jan Kesner, Tobey C. Moss, Space, Manny Silverman, Paul Kopeikin and Studio Raid. Information: (213) 933-5557.

ART/LA UPDATE: Artist Patssi Valdez has undertaken a new type of canvas. She has been commissioned to paint a newly designed 1993 BMW 740i for ART/LA92 at the L.A. Convention Center. The work will be unveiled Dec. 2, during the opening-night preview for the international art fair. . . . In other art fair news, David Hockney has been announced as the recipient of the 1992 L.A. International Art Award, which will be presented at the preview. In addition, a special award will go to publisher Gemini G.E.L. in recognition of its 25th anniversary.

GRANTS: Los Angeles photographer Willie Middlebrook is among the recipients in the most recent batch of National Endowment for the Arts visual arts fellowships, which this year were limited to artists working in photography and crafts.

Middlebrook will receive a $20,000 award, as will several other California artists, including John C. Freeman of San Diego.

Organizational project grant recipients include USC’s Museum Studies Program ($23,000), Plaza de la Raza ($20,000), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions ($19,330), the NAMES Project Foundation ($15,000), San Francisco’s Capp Street Project ($30,000) and Mexican Museum ($26,000) and UC Berkeley’s University Art Museum ($10,800).

In the NEA’s design arts program, L.A. artists B. J. Krivanek, John E. Kaliski and Robert E. Mangurian each received $15,000 project grants.

MURAL: Eva Cockcroft’s 79-foot-by-16-foot environmentally themed mural “The Chain Undone” is scheduled to be dedicated Saturday at the Florence Gardner Gallery Building, 10534 W. Pico Blvd., Rancho Park. The mural, part of SPARC’s 1992 “Great Walls Unlimited” program, depicts a colorful natural subtropical wetlands, flanked on each side by black-and-white scenes of what the artist sees as the consequences of uncontrolled development--a refinery spewing pollutants and a crumbling war-torn city.

OPEN HOUSES: Forty-six emerging artists working in the 10,000-square-foot Santa Monica Fine Art Studios are holding open studios daily from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., through Nov. 30. The center, conceived in 1985 by painter Ute Gruenwald and sculptor Yossi Govrin, is at 1834 Franklin St. Information: (310) 453-3632.

David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, Frank Stella, Larry Bell, Lita Albuquerque, Dennis Hopper and Man Ray are among the nearly 100 artists whose works are on view at “The Venice Art House,” a new residential development at 113 Ocean Front Walk, through Jan. 8. Galleries including James Corcoran, Kiyo Higashi, L.A. Louver, Jan Turner, Dorothy Goldeen and the Gallery of Functional Art have lent works for the exhibition.

The space is open most days, but viewing appointments are suggested. Information: (310) 827-0171 or 399-0708.

EVENTS: Laddie John Dill, Robbie Conal, Sandow Birk, Chris Cox, Judy Coleman and Donald Fergusson are among the artists donating work for “Art From Ashes,” a fund-raiser to restore and restock the Junipero Serra and John Muir branches of the L.A. Public Library, both of which were destroyed by fire during the riots.

The event will be held at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion on Friday, with a silent art auction from 4 to 8 p.m. and a live auction of rare books from 5 to 6 p.m. Tickets are $50. A subsequent free auction of art created by children from South-Central Los Angeles is planned for Dec. 12 at the Museum of African-American Art in the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza. Information: (213) 612-3320.

Two films on Tewa-Hopi artist Dan Namingha will be shown at the Southwest Museum next Sunday beginning at 2 p.m. The films complement the museum’s current exhibition of Namingha’s work, on view through Dec. 6. Information: (213) 221-2164.

PERSONNEL: Thomas W. Lentz, founder of the L.A. County Museum of Art’s department of ancient and Islamic art, has been named assistant director for research and collections for the Smithsonian Institution’s two national museums of Asian art, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art.

Lentz, who organized LACMA’s current exhibition “Art of the Persian Courts: Selections From the Art and History Trust,” as well as the international loan exhibition “Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the 15th Century,” starts his Washington job Dec. 7.