Lea Lion
Lists
Downtown art galleries
When Lorraine Molina and Jose Caballer opened Bank in a former bank building on Main Street in 2003, they were among the original settlers of Downtown's now-thriving gallery scene. In 2006, Bank moved to a space with 19-foot-high ceilings and stark white walls intermittently punctuated by historic columns in the Banco Popular Building.
When Bert Green closed Circle Elephant Art in Los Feliz and moved Downtown in 2004, there were only a handful of galleries in the area. Located on the ground floor of the Rosslyn Hotel in the heart of Gallery Row, Bert Green Fine Art features 2,800 square feet of high-ceilinged, white-walled exhibition space.
Considering its location in the historic Higgins Building, de Soto is decidedly modern with stark white modular walls and exposed pipes. The only throwback to the building's architectural roots is a single oversized wooden window frame embedded in a wall.
Conceived of as a laboratory of sorts, REDCAT is best known for presenting genre-bending performance art in its black box theater. But the subterranean space in Walt Disney Concert Hall also hosts avant-garde art shows in an adjoining gallery.
The Happy Lion represents a rigorous program of emerging and established artists from Los Angeles, New York and Germany.
Opened in 2002 by lawyer-turned-gallery owner Javier Peres, the Chinatown-based gallery has outposts in Berlin and New York.
Located on the corner of Fifth and Main streets, Pharmaka is a non-profit gallery space founded by 14 painters, two art dealers, a writer and an architect in 2005.
Housed in a quarter-mile long former freight depot, SCi-Arc is as long as the Empire State Building is tall. Thanks to its open floor plan, students frequently ride from one end of the building to the other on skateboards. But for a college without walls, there are several well-defined gallery spaces.