How do you wrap up 19 years of boundary-pushing programming in an email, let alone an Instagram carousel? This was the unenviable task faced by Mara McCarthy, the founder of the Box, when she announced the downtown Los Angeles gallery\u2019s closure on 24 April.<\/p>\n
Although non-Angelenos might have lost McCarthy\u2019s announcement amid the year\u2019s good news-bad news shuffle, the Box\u2019s legacy deserves a closer look. On the one hand, the gallery consistently spotlit the under-recognised post-war and contemporary art scene; on the other, it also played a vital role in mapping LA\u2019s present-day gallery terrain.<\/p>\n
The Box opened in 2007, joining an enclave of dealers in LA\u2019s Chinatown neighbourhood. For McCarthy, who had returned from New York at a professional crossroads, the gallery solved two problems\u2014one of which was also vexing her father, the celebrated LA-based artist Paul McCarthy. The latter\u2019s curation of a show at San Francisco\u2019s CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts had just awakened him to how many significant artists of his era \u201cwere not being shown, or only being shown in Europe,\u201d Mara tells The Art Newspaper.<\/p>\n
The Box centred these overlooked artists early on. They included the performance pioneers Barbara T. Smith and Simone Forti, the moving-image pathbreaker Stan Vanderbeek and the political-art firebrand Wally Hedrick. Several informed LA\u2019s artistic legacy; none was particularly marketable. Yet the younger McCarthy also decided the Box had to be a commercial gallery. She understood that private and institutional collectors are incentivised to champion their holdings, by funding monographs, supporting exhibitions and more. Redefining the canon is easier with motivated buyers on board.<\/p>\n
For Mara, however, attitude and community guided the programme. She \u201cwanted to find a slightly punk version\u201d of the galleries she had visited in New York\u2014 a version \u201cmore grounded in humanity\u201d, she says.<\/p>\n
Although LA\u2019s downtown Arts District is now taken as a given, the Box was among the first galleries to move there, to 805 Traction Avenue, in 2012. At that time, McCarthy says, the neighbourhood\u2019s main cultural attractions were the Museum of Contemporary Art\u2019s Geffen Contemporary annexe; the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc); the artisanal sausage restaurant Wurstk\u00fcche; and \u201cone shitty coffee shop\u201d. It would be another four years before Hauser & Wirth\u2019s sprawling complex on East Third Street opened a few blocks away.<\/p>\n
Still, the lineage to LA\u2019s avant-garde past was literally in sight. Across the street from the new Box was a building that once housed Al\u2019s Bar, a landmark venue for punk bands and performance art where her father and other artists in the gallery\u2019s programme performed.<\/p>\n
The Box tapped into this history by opening its new space with a show of the Los Angeles Free Music Society, an avant-garde sound and performance collective founded in 1973. It was an emblem of what made the gallery distinctive and what made it precarious.<\/p>\n
The slow fold<\/p>\n
The Box achieved its ambitions in several LA art professionals\u2019 eyes. Mia Locks, the co-founder and executive director of Museums Moving Forward says it \u201chad a unique and meaningful position in the LA gallery landscape\u201d, partly from being \u201ca curatorial project meets artist-run space as much as it was a commercial gallery\u201d. Curator Andrea Gyorody praises the way the space \u201cconsistently obliterated the limits of good taste and propriety in ways that were risky, raw, grungy and excessive\u201d.<\/p>\n
Yet the Box was always funded partly by sales and partly by McCarthy Studios. As her father\u2019s work has started \u201cto not sell as much\u201d, Mara says, other recent difficulties have compounded\u2014from collectors\u2019 turn away from experimental work during the pandemic to the Eaton Fire, which destroyed Mara and her parents\u2019 homes, as well as her brother\u2019s home and studios, in Altadena in 2025.<\/p>\n
The Box\u2019s last hurrah will be a one-night-only fashion show on 6 June, featuring work by gallery artist Johanna Went in collaboration with the artist-author Asher Hartman. Went is known for what the younger McCarthy calls \u201cbad-ass, crazy punk performances: screaming onstage, a lot of costumes, very feminist, very gore-heavy\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019ll be a little bit of a ruckus,\u201d McCarthy says. \u201cJohanna said, \u2018I feel like it should end with a little bit of a brawl.\u2019\u201d For a gallery so dedicated to jarring work, it would be a fitting conclusion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How do you wrap up 19 years of boundary-pushing programming in an email, let alone an Instagram carousel?…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":347835,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[9388,48,52,51,47,50,49,97347],"class_list":["post-347834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-commercial-galleries","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-the-insiders"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347834\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}