New York might be headquarters for the art market, "but LA is the creative center," Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, says in W magazine.
White Flag Projects, St. Louis's new nonprofit gallery, will offer a taste of that LA energy in "modular: New Art from Los Angeles," a show opening Saturday.
Don't dismiss Govan as a provincial booster. He was, until fairly recently, director of the Dia Center, the intellectual heart of the New York art world.
Los Angeles' high-powered art schools turn out thousands of young talents every year — most of whom stay in the sprawling city to develop their ideas, form a community and forge a career. Increasingly, young artists from around the nation and the world migrate there to plug into its uncontained creative energy.
The White Flag show, organized by freelance curator Dana Turkovic, features six young artists, all of whom joined the migration west. Graduates of schools in New York City; Boston; Providence, R.I.; Baltimore; Athens, Ohio; and St. Louis, their work exhibits a fragmented style that Turkovic roots in LA's own de-centeredness.
A St. Louis native, Turkovic knows her material. She spent more than four years in Los Angeles before moving to London, where she earned a master's degree in curating at Goldsmiths College, itself an incredible incubator of new talent. She recently came back to St. Louis to launch a career in freelance curating, a challenge anywhere but especially where there are few venues.
Q: How did you get the idea for the show?
A: I went out to LA after not having been there for a couple of years and was overwhelmed by what had happened since I was away. I went to studios, I went to "Supersonic," the large annual exhibition of recent art school graduates. Those are the places to see what's going on.
Q: How did you choose the artists?
A: I came back with a list of about 20 artists who had struck my fancy. But it's impossible to capture in one show the entirety of the LA art scene. You need to focus, to find a coherent theme.
Q: That theme was "modular"?
A: The term describes, for me, the process of putting an exhibition together, but it also describes the process of artists putting their work together. The words that come to my mind when I hear "modular" are fragments, systems, architecture, geometry. Modular is about how the different parts fit together.
Q: Who are the artists in the show?
A: Hollis Cooper, who is making a site-specific wall piece; Danny Jauregui, who makes abstract architectural drawings; Nichole van Beek, who is sending a collage that hangs from the ceiling; Louisa van Leer, who has sent an enormous wood sculpture; Kevin Wingate, a painter; and Bari Ziperstein, who makes collages. You might not have heard of any of them — yet — but a couple got picked up by galleries at the recent Basel-Miami art fair.
Q: Are any of them coming for the opening?
A: Both Louisa (van Leer) and Nichole (van Beek) are definitely going to be here. And I'm hoping that Hollis (Cooper) will be able to make it.