Beyond the Living Room : In the last few years, dealers had to retrench, showing art out of their homes. Now they’re back in the public arena, in low-budget spaces.

The pale turquoise industrial building on the corner of Nebraska Avenue and Berkeley Street in Santa Monica has seen better days.

Until you spot a sign for the Dan Bernier Gallery on a side gate and a placard with a big black arrow pointing the way to ACME, you might think the two-story structure is a deserted relic of some light manufacturer’s faded dream. But that doesn’t bother the building’s new tenants--Bernier and Marc Foxx, who have launched galleries under their names, and Randy Sommers and Robert Gunderman, who operate ACME.

The four young dealers spent a couple of months last fall looking at fancier real estate on busier streets, but their new digs provide what they need: affordable space to show new art in three adjoining galleries. And proximity to Bergamot Station--a sprawling arts complex that opened last fall at Olympic Boulevard and 26th Street--is a big plus in a region where gallery hopping can require a lot of driving.

You have to know how to find the new gallery enclave--turn north off Olympic onto Stewart Street, then east on Nebraska Avenue--and you must trek around behind the building to find the action. But that’s not much of a challenge for aficionados of L.A.’s shoestring art scene who have learned to ferret out galleries in apartments, garages and alleys.

Indeed, after a period of retrenchment--when high-profile showcases gave way to obscure outposts and artists took to staging exhibitions at home--the latest crop of galleries is encouraging. Unlike the living-room businesses that sprang up a few years ago, the new galleries have a public face--not to mention regular hours.

Residential showplaces aren’t dead, however. Bill Radawec’s Domestic Setting (3221 Sawtelle Blvd.) and Brian Butler’s 1301 (1301 Franklin St.) continue their exhibition programs. And in mid-January, Bennett Roberts opened a gallery in a refurbished garage at 1718 S. Carmelina Ave. But these establishments operate much like galleries in more conventional locations. Across the board, the trend is once again toward outreach, not retreat.

Take artist/dealer Rory Devine, who has moved his gallery, TRI, from a mid-Wilshire duplex to a Hollywood storefront at 6365 Yucca St.

After five months in the new location, Devine says that enticing clients to a depressing neighborhood remains his biggest challenge, but traffic is beginning to pick up. “I consider this an experiment. If it doesn’t work, I will move,” he says. Meanwhile, he is delighted to have found an affordable space that looks like a real gallery and accommodates two simultaneous shows.

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The dealers at Nebraska and Berkeley are even more upbeat about their new ventures. Foxx, who left Angles Gallery in Santa Monica to hang out his shingle, and Bernier, who formerly ran A/B Gallery on Robertson Boulevard, talk about establishing their identities in a yeasty gallery scene. Along with dealers such as Richard Telles and Sue Spaid, who recently closed her small gallery and hopes to open a larger space in an as yet undetermined location in April, they are attuned to the latest and funkiest of L.A. art. But they are open to a wide variety of artistic expression and refuse to confine themselves to an age group, style or geographic sector.

“I show artists I respond to,” says Bernier, who has exhibited works by Steve Hurd, Russell Crotty and Martin Kersels. “But the great thing about what’s going on now is that there are 12 to 16 youngish galleries all responding in completely different ways.”

As for sales, the new dealers say they do a fairly brisk business in works priced under $1,000 and find buyers for more expensive items as well.

The new galleries are richly supplied with works by graduates of Southern California’s unusually strong group of universities and art schools, according to Bernier, and these artists are attracting attention from near and far. “More and more curators from New York and elsewhere are making regular trips here and shaking the bushes to see what’s going on,” he says, noting that reviews of L.A. art shows are turning up in European and Australian magazines.

Art talk also flows freely. “I have a desk and five chairs, and all of them are often filled,” Bernier says. “When one or two people get up and leave, somebody else sits down. A lot of people are interested in looking at art and talking about it, whether they like what I’m showing or not.”

Interest appears to be equally high in Foxx’s new gallery, which opened a few weeks ago with a show of Amy Drezner’s work. He was too busy setting up shop to send out press announcements, but he has had a steady stream of visitors drawn by his neighbors and word of mouth.

The newest of the newcomers, Foxx has taken a giant leap in leaving employment in a successful gallery to open a low-budget operation of his own. Gunderman and Sommer are relative veterans who joined forces at Food House, a collaborative venture that continues to operate on Colorado Avenue, before opening ACME last November.

“We felt that we had fallen into a regimen of three-week shows at Food House,” Gunderman says. “We wanted to operate in a more organic way. The idea is to provide ourselves with as much of a challenge as possible, and to let the gallery determine its course. We’ve tried to set up a more user-friendly gallery, where the back room is in the center and it’s accessible to the public. We will do film screenings and performances in the front. We’d like to have a non-static element with every show, and we plan to give one gallery to artists to do what they want.”

ACME represents four artists--Chris Finley, Uta Barth, Joyce Lightbody and Jennifer Steinkemp--but Gunderman and Sommers want to give as many people as possible an opportunity to exhibit their work.

And no, the artists don’t have to conform to a style or look. “Variation is the thing I’m most interested in, not a hot trend,” Gunderman says. “The whole thing is in a constant state of flux. Sometimes we think we don’t have a clue to what’s going on. We just want to provide space for some of the most interesting stuff we find.”*