Rick Garzon is not your typical art world founder. Relaxed, sitting in front of a new work by the artist Ashley Teamer, he’s equally eager to talk about sports and comic books as he is about the new home of Residency Art Gallery, which opened its doors in September. His disposition is one part humble and one part ambitious, all with a gentle but declarative nature.
Joining me—a comic book neophyte and ardent ignorer of sports—over Zoom, Garzon is clear about his goals and how much change is needed in the highly insular gallery ecosystem. He came to art by way of advertising but while working in media planning, he began collecting works by BIPOC artists and found the galleries to be unwelcoming to newcomers.
“I tried to buy a three- or four-thousand-dollar Titus Kaphar piece and they pretty much laughed at me,” said Garzon.
“There is a barrier to collecting artwork and a lot of galleries are apprehensive to sell to new collectors,” he continued. “But why is this artwork going into somebody’s bunker in Germany and not being seen by the people it’s meant to be seen by?”
He founded Residency Art Gallery in 2016 in South Central Los Angeles, which is where he grew up. It’s far from the city’s bustling and brutally pretentious arts districts like West Hollywood and Culver City. That’s by design for Garzon, who wants to bring collectors out of their expected environments.
“When I was living in Brooklyn, you never had to leave a one-mile radius of your house. Then I moved back to L.A. and it was like, I live in this predominantly Black and Brown neighborhood and I don’t really spend my time or money here,” recalled Garzon. “Historically, there’ve been very few commercial art spaces in South Central and I just thought, why not? I can make something here and have it in our neighborhood.”
Earlier this year, Garzon relocated Residency to the newly opened Hollywood Park retail district near SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. Spearheaded by Los Angeles Rams owner, Stan Kroenke, the ambitious development sits on nearly 300 acres and offers 890,000 square feet of retail along with offices and residential units. While, according to Garzon, there are still plenty of vacancies, the potential exposure for the gallery and its artists is significant.
In discussing the reason he joined the development early on, he said, “We’re getting bigger; I wanted to move into a more high-profile space, and I wanted to stay in Inglewood.”
For the inaugural exhibition in the new space, Garzon chose to reprise “The New Contemporaries” series. Volume three opened on September 23 and featured commissions by eighteen artists based in the United States, including Edmund Arevalo, Jonni Cheatwood, Cash Cooper, Maya Fuji, Daniela Garcia Hamilton, Rugiyatou Jallow, Gbenga Komolafe, Spandita Malik, Will Maxen, Nikkolos Mohammed, Kariny Padilla, Ronnie Robinson, Jacob Rochester, LaRissa Rogers, Esperanza Rosas (Runsy), Kristofferson San Pablo, Ashley Teamer and Michael Tran.
Serving as a tactile declaration of the gallery’s mission, the show explored the “various modes through which Black, Latinx, Indigenous and Asian artists define self-authorship in resistance to fetishization, commodification and appropriation within the mainstream media landscape,” according to a release.
By Max McCormack • 12/06/23 1:13pm