LA Louver, the oldest extant gallery in Los Angeles, will be closing its space in Venice this fall and transitioning to focus on private art dealing and consulting, according to an announcement today, September 16. Alongside this pivot, the gallery will be donating its archive and library spanning 50 years of correspondence, photography, publications, objects, and other ephemera to the Huntington library in San Marino.
LA Louver was founded by Peter and Elizabeth Goulds in 1975 in the same block it still occupies, not far from Venice Beach. When they opened, LA’s art scene looked vastly different from today, with just a handful of galleries, predominantly on the Westside. LA Louver’s mission, said Peter Goulds in a statement, was “to show Southern California artists in an international context, and to introduce international artists to this region.”
Over the past five decades, LA Louver has organized 667 shows featuring more than 430 emerging to established artists, including David Hockney, Edward and Nancy Kienholz, R.B. Kitaj, Alison Saar, Terry Allen, Enrique Martínez Celaya, and Gajin Fujita.
Peter Goulds and David Hockney in 1979 (© David Hockney; photo by Sidney Felsen, courtesy LA Louver)
The news comes in the wake of the recent closures of other LA galleries, most notably Blum, which abruptly ceased operations in July. Clearing Gallery, which had spaces in New York and LA, closed last month, and Tanya Bonakdar recently announced it would shutter its LA location in September. Founded in 1994, Blum (originally Blum & Poe) was one of the galleries associated with LA’s meteoric rise to global art capital over the past few decades. Co-founder Tim Blum said his decision to close his gallery was driven by the art market’s “unsustainable scale,” and the rising costs and shrinking sales of the art fair circuit.
LA Louver will be shifting its operations to a warehouse on Jefferson Boulevard in West Adams that it purchased in 2012, where they will host private viewings by appointment and present special projects.
“We are returning to a model more aligned to the mode in which we operated during the initial years of the gallery, focusing on project-based creative endeavors and away from a regular public-facing cycle of exhibitions,” a spokesperson for LA Louver told Hyperallergic.
Works by Edward and Nancy Kienholz at LA Louver in February 2020 (photo Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)
Its archives and library — totalling 1,076 linear feet of materials and 506 linear feet of publications, respectively — will be donated to the Huntington, where archivists and librarians will spend the next several years processing the collection, with a complete transfer expected by 2029. The archives will join the institution’s growing trove of materials dedicated to the cultural landscape of Southern California, which includes the archives of writers Eve Babitz and Octavia E. Butler, the papers of novelist Christopher Isherwood and drawings by his partner Don Bachardy, and Gusmano Cesaretti’s photographs.
LA Louver’s spokesperson said that conversations about the donation began back in 2022.
“Because of its interdisciplinary and historical mission, we feel the institution’s stewardship of the L.A. Louver Archive & Library will aid in telling our and Los Angeles’ story for generations to come,” Peter Goulds said in a statement.
