![]() ![]() to the west, and the main entrance on 3rd St. to the north, the loading docks on Garey St. The other three faces of the complex, however, received paint jobs of a more austere order. Kim West’s extended mural on the east facade of Hauser & Wirth, photo: Liz Kuball, New York Times Chipped brick walls and other extant murals provide urban ambiance-a small preserve for the more unruly Arts District of 2010 and before, now largely erased. 6 Bracketed by these two murals, between the east gallery and mill tower is Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s public garden, which, as of this writing, features picnic tables, chickens in a pen, and raised beds of flowers and herbs for the gallery’s “farm-to-table” restaurant, Manuela. 5 For example, in the same alley as West’s piece, spanning the entire outer wall of the east gallery, is a 2010 mural by Out for Action Krew titled One Fallen Angel-an angel-winged woman peers across the jagged, metallic letters of “LOS ANGELES,” frayed into pot-leaf patterns and crowned by a silhouetted L.A. Murals like West’s expanded commission offer a sanitized, curated version of the tags and murals that HWS allowed to remain elsewhere on their building. The centerpiece of the relentless and near-total gentrification of an arts district that has priced out artists, the gallery nonetheless courts a transitional downtown vibe. 4 This newest branch of Swiss gallery Hauser & Wirth declares the city’s place on the global art circuit: “Their new commitment to our renowned contemporary art scene is just the latest piece of LA’s cultural renaissance,” remarked mayor Eric Garcetti, “positioning us squarely at the heart of international creativity.” Yet HWS also tries to equivocate its specific, local presence in a trending neighborhood. Thus Hauser Wirth & Schimmel groomed the grit of its L.A. In the bottom-right corner of the wall is West’s signature. By the time the gallery held its grand opening in March 2016, a melted Northwestern coast of bleeding emerald greens and watery blues spilled down the east alley wall onto an ochre tussle of Lascaux-style wildebeests. ![]() 3 Years later, in late 2015, the troubled bear would become one of the few survivors of the former flour mill’s purchase and restoration by global commercial art enterprise Hauser Wirth & Schimmel (HWS) when the gallery commissioned West to expand her piece across half of the mill’s east elevation. 2 Kim West painted this lonesome scene in 2011, when the new tenant of the complex once known as “The Graffiti Building” invited several artists to spruce up the densely tagged exterior walls with fresh, sanctioned murals. High on the smog-softened masonry of a vacant mill tower, caught between an overheated sunset and a tropical sea, a polar bear stretches an admonishing paw. Walead Beshty, “The Whiteness of the Whale” 1 Perhaps we ought to think of painting as a ghetto waiting to be gentrified. ![]() Graffiti sprayed across the entrance of Nicodim Gallery in Boyle Heights, 2016, photo: Liz O. ![]()
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