The People’s Art

Photo by Sam Slovick
The People’s Art A grassroots gallery grows in Inglewood.
By
July 14, 2022

When I show up to meet Rick Garzon for the second time at Residency Art Gallery in downtown Inglewood, he calls to tell me to come to the back door. This entails walking through an alley, around the back of the building on Queen Street and through a gravelly, unglamorous parking lot to a row of security screen doors. I figure he’s misplaced the key, but Garzon, looking a little sheepish as he lets us in, confesses he doesn’t have it because he gave it to the artist, Felix Quintana, whose show “Cruising Below Sunset” is currently on exhibit at the gallery.

The snafu feels a bit ironic, given that the theme of Quintana’s photo collage show is Los Angeles as a bright, widely accessible surface that underneath churns with displacement and loss for the people most vulnerable to its inequalities. As a gallerist, Garzon is bright and widely accessible like the cityscapes in Quintana’s art, except Garzon acknowledges them in ways the city (as Quintana depicts) doesn’t always: he trusts his artists implicitly, treats them as equals. He doesn’t seem sure when or how he’ll get the key back, but the uncertainty doesn’t bother him. He knows it’s in good hands.

Inside the single-room but spacious gallery, Garzon settles comfortably on a stool near the door in the area that functions as his office and staging ground. During Quintana’s opening night last month, when I first met Garzon, this was where the DJ mixed up soul and hip-hop and patrons grabbed beer and soda from a giant tub of ice to go with the pupusas sizzling outside on a sidewalk grill. At a house party, this space would be the kitchen.

That night I searched for Garzon in the throng, sure he’d stand out. But it took more than a few inquiries to identify him, a tall man in nondescript sweats, sneakers and baseball cap, an imposing figure, maybe, were it not for his air of modesty and instantly disarming, perpetual smile. At the same time, Garzon radiated a certain energy and purpose that’s on a low-but-constant flame, as much a part of him as the modesty, or maybe it makes the modesty possible. Moving through the crowd that evening, greeting everyone he knows—and he knows everyone– Garzon was also genuinely excited, as glad to be at the party and in the company of artists as everyone else.

I can see that he is, first and foremost, a fan.

***

This might be obvious to say, but the core of Residency is art. Art is Garzon’s love, and so are the artists he’s seeking to promote and enlarge, to give their due. That’s his mission. The presence of a bona fide gallery in Inglewood is a larger story, the swimming-upstream, community improvement story, but Garzon, who is 40, doesn’t use words like “uplift” or “improve” or “change people’s minds,” when he talks about what he’s doing. He talks about who makes the art, who comes to see it and, hopefully, buy it—in that order. The community improvement is a given. He is conspicuously not an activist because he doesn’t need to be. For him, activism is built in.

“If I see it and like it and have the money to buy it, why can’t I just bring it home and enjoy it?”

The enterprise that’s been going since 2015 is not noble, but is neighborhood-first. Garzon is doing what anyone who values the place where they live might do—start a business to enhance the culture that’s already there. The neighborhood just happens to be Inglewood. At the same time, Garzon is conscious this is different, that what he’s doing is generally not done in this town. Still, that doesn’t make it heroic. Garzon views his gallery as entirely normal, part of a progression of Inglewood that was inevitable. He feels to me like a neighbor who’s so clearly invested in the place where he lives, he doesn’t really need to talk about it at all. (Garzon actually is my neighbor, in a sense. We both live in Inglewood and have deep roots here. He was born and raised near the Forum, while I moved with my family from LA to Inglewood—minutes away from the Forum– when I was 16.)

Garzon opened Residency in 2015, after a career in advertising and marketing that took him from LA to New York, where he lived in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. It was there that Garzon, who is not himself an artist, began to indulge his love of art by collecting. Immediately, he hit an obstacle he didn’t anticipate, namely the cultural bureaucracy of an art world that was overwhelmingly white and steeped in the protocol of connections. As in, to acquire pieces you had to travel in certain circles, be in the know.

This made little sense to Garzon. “If I see it and like it and have the money to buy it, why can’t I just bring it home and enjoy it?” he recalls thinking.

inglewood downtown art studio opening

Felix Quintana’s show, which delves beneath the surfaces of LA life, is up until July 16. Photo by Sam Slovick

 

This direct-to-consumer philosophy would become part of the vision for his own gallery. During his years in New York, Garzon became friendly with various artists and steadily gathered knowledge about the business. He was struck by what many artists of color told him about selling their work—a process that should have felt satisfying, but often wasn’t. “They didn’t know where their art went,’” he says. “They gave their art to the gallery, the gallery gave them a check, and that’s about it. Unless it’s a big institution that acquires it, they don’t know where it goes or what collector gets it.”

For Garzon, relationships are part of the whole point of having a gallery. Building long-term relationships—between him, the artist, and the public that is both reflected and represented in the art—are where his politics and sense of justice lives. He makes a point of introducing artists to potential buyers and is wary of those who want to buy works solely for investment purposes; he’s turned away buyers for that reason. Truly appreciating the art, getting it, is a nonnegotiable part of the deal.

Garzon was feeling done with advertising, but was also moved to return home to Inglewood when his building in Bed-Stuy was bought and rent doubled during the gentrification push that finally reached one of the last bastions of working-class Brooklyn. It was an early sign of the market forces in the process of reshaping all big cities, including LA. At the time, though, LA was still a refuge, of sorts. “It was cheaper to move back here than it was to move anywhere in New York,” is how Garzon puts it.

Being displaced by gentrification, though, turned out to be fortuitous for Garzon: tired of the ad business, he was primed to realize plans for the gallery he’d been mapping out a good eight months before he left the East Coast. For all his modesty and tendency to self-efface, Garzon is undeterrable (“Hard-headed,” he says, with a laugh) once he makes up his mind. Still, before opening Residency, he sought out and got a lot of advice, of which the most memorable was: don’t do it. “It was just no,” says Garzon.

People didn’t bother to detail the reasons why not, as if those reasons were self- evident: a small business is risky, a gallery riskier. A gallery in a town where the demographic is not known for collecting art or having lots of discretionary income—the risk is off the charts. But Garzon says he never thought of quitting or turning back. The decision to open on home ground was not just philosophical, but practical. “I didn’t have the money to be on any traditional gallery row, or on the Westside,” he says. “Not that I really wanted to be there.”

Nor did he consider going to Leimert Park, the acknowledged center of black art in LA. “I wasn’t feeling it,” he says with a shrug. “It was an established scene. It didn’t need another gallery.” Garzon was committed to following his own star, guided by a creed that “if you want to come see our art, you got to come to our neighborhood.”

Inglewood was that neighborhood.

***

Not that art is new to Inglewood. Despite its provincial reputation, the city actually has a longstanding art community clustered in its industrial northern end; an annual open-house art walk that’s been a tradition for decades. A gallery was simply building on that tradition. Which doesn’t mean Garzon got any help from Inglewood City Hall –“not at all,” he says emphatically.

There were more than a few times when Garzon thought those naysayers might have been right. Inglewood in the aughts and early teens wasn’t exactly hitting its stride. Neighborhoods were still reeling from the Great Recession that had devalued the landscape, knocked so many people of color out of their homes, or put them upside down in their mortgages. Incidents of police brutality that fired up the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 were happening too frequently here. For all its longstanding good qualities, Inglewood wasn’t yet known for the right things.

For a while, Garzon was the only business on this short stretch of Queen Street in a downtown that wasn’t exactly hopping. The first year and a half, Queen Street closed completely for construction of a senior center. The fact that the senior center was the most thriving concern going on downtown says a lot about what Inglewood’s priorities were, and what Garzon was up against.

There were more than a few times when Garzon thought those naysayers might have been right.

But he ground on, focusing on the art and what he wanted his new venture to say to the world at large. “Basically I took every skill I’d learned in previous jobs—marketing, branding—and applied it to this,” he says.

He decided he wanted to showcase artists of color in MFA programs, those who were truly emerging and whose work deserved a deeper look. “My main approach to selecting artists is, ‘What kind of story can you tell me?’” he says.

By “story” Garzon doesn’t mean something simplistic or sentimental, or even necessarily straightforward. He means pieces that speak clearly and also subtly to, and about, the intricate lives of people and the things that shape and color them. He means work that explores the gap between the surfaces of daily life and the complex, often troubling realities to which they are tethered.

Garzon gestures to a work on the wall behind him by Devon Tsuno, a lush, vibrant rendering of a riverbank and its environs. “From a distance, this looks like beautiful shrubbery, very aesthetically pleasing,” he says. “But it’s actually horticulture from the LA River, which is disappearing. My thing is, what’s behind the thing that you actually see? Gentrification, displacement, LBGTQ issues. When it gets down to it, all of our shows are pretty deep.”

Deep, but not obscure. Garzon wants stories to be “easily consumable to the neighborhood at large,” not just exclaimed over by art-world aficionados. Quintana’s “Cruising Below Sunset” is an example of a good story: lively yet nostalgic photocollages of little-known places and moments in LA, awash in cyanotypes that are bright Dodger blue. Taken together, the pieces in the exhibit form a narrative that highlights resistance and Latino culture but one that also tracks the surveillance and dislocation happening in largely Black and Latino neighborhoods.

Residency’s first show, “Model Migration,” explored the polarizing idea of hardworking immigrants striving to become model citizens, or not. “Reverberations,” which ran earlier this year, was ostensibly about basketball. “But really, it was about how basketball hits all these throughlines in our lives as minorities—the beauty of it, the capitalist heart of it, the social struggle, the gender roles,” says Garzon, who is at his most animated when talking about art. “Why do WNBA players get paid less than men? (Related question: Why isn’t it a national outrage that Brittney Griner has been held hostage for months in Russia, where she went to supplement her comparatively paltry wages) It’s also about all the mental health issues that come with the game.”

***

Garzon’s commitment to showing both Black and brown artists is unique—LA has its ethnic siloes, especially in cultural spaces. Black and brown spaces are no exceptions. In LA, the Black-brown connection is often idealized, or taken for granted, but outside staged political events and sociological studies, it is rarely seen. For Garzon the connection was always a no-brainer; for one thing, he’s a mix of Black and Ecuadoran himself. Full representation was baked into the idea of the gallery. More to the point, Black and brown is what Inglewood is.

My thing is, what’s behind the thing that you actually see?

When I still insist his gallery is a model, Garzon says, sincerely, “I don’t even notice,” adding, “I focus on the community story, not just ethnicity.” He doesn’t oppose galleries that show exclusively Black art; he gets that. It’s just not him. This is likely why Leimert Park, a center not just of Black art but of Black activism, didn’t quite appeal. Part of Garzon’s singlemindedness, and his advertising sense, is that he doesn’t like to be on trend. “Everybody wants to focus on the Black figurative right now –it’s a wave,” he says. “I could do that. But is that the story I want to tell? (Focusing only on that) feels like a cash grab more than anything.”

Our conversation is interrupted by a man standing outside the front window who’s been trying to come in and take a look. Garzon brings him through the back, apologizing about the key. The man is from the nearby senior center, and says he’s an artist himself. He seems surprised and not a little delighted to see a gallery here, just a few steps away. Residency does have that oasis feel, though other businesses have joined Garzon on Queen in the last few years and formed what feels like a real hub: a bookstore, a coffee shop, a Black-owned consignment store. A juice bar is in the works. There is another gallery space on Market, around the corner, yet another on Crenshaw near Manchester, a converted drive-in dairy that Black Lives Matter co-founder and artist Patrisse Cullors made instantly famous. All of it is evidence to Garzon that Inglewood is flowering, redefining Black presence in LA at a moment when the future of that presence feels especially precarious.

inglewood opening supporting the arts

Quintana (left) and Garzon talk about life Below Sunset. Photo by Sam Slovick

 

I hope Garzon is right. As a reporter and a resident I’ve been tracking Inglewood for years, and the last time I felt truly encouraged was way back in 2001, when Howling Monk, a boutique-brand coffeehouse featuring live jazz, opened at the far end of Market Street, a few months after 9/11. Proprietor Kenneth Moore, like Garzon, was a longtime Inglewoodian. Tired of his day job in accounting, Moore had long dreamt of opening a Black arts spot in the community. As it happens, Moore is also a visual artist. Howling Monk Café realized his dream, but as a business it couldn’t survive without a supporting context. Politicians ignored its potential, downtown stayed fallow, and Moore closed a few years later. Garzon says that will not happen this time.

While that’s mostly a statement of faith, not fact, it also isn’t just wishful thinking. Against the odds, change has started to percolate here. The Youth Orchestra of LA, the celebrated youth programming arm of the LA Philharmonic championed by Gustavo Dudemel, opened its new center on Market Street last year. Market Street and Inglewood as a whole has gotten a big media boost from actor/producer Issa Rae, another local-made-good whose breakthrough HBO series Insecure elevated Inglewood and other Black LA enclaves from stereotypically marginal ‘hoods to places where denizens of young, ambitious, middle-income Black people live, dream, go out to eat, and… buy art.

And then there is So-Fi Stadium, the billion-dollar-plus pro football venue in the middle of town that’s been touted as the draw that will put Inglewood above the line, as they say in Hollywood. A new arena for the LA Clippers, the Intuit Dome, is under construction just a few blocks away. In between is a behemoth mixed-use retail/condo development, also under construction, on the sprawling grounds of the old Hollywood Park race track.

But pricey, high-profile sports venues and adjacent amenities are also what many residents fear will put home prices in the stratosphere and spur gentrification to its logical end—the point at which Inglewood hollows out and becomes yet another place where the benefits of change ultimately accrue to a new, whiter demographic. When I raise this scenario (already underway), Garzon responds that he is not worried “at all”—a tag line he uses a lot. With low-key but ironclad confidence, he says that Inglewood will not only beat gentrification, it will benefit from it.

He says it’s already happening. Yes, renters will suffer from the higher prices—unfortunately, that’s happened—but he thinks homeowners, who comprise much of Inglewood and have a resolutely small-town mentality, will stay put. Inglewood, he predicts, will remain Inglewood. The new venues that many assume will attract new homebuyers will actually repel them (“Who really wants to live next to a stadium?”) Change will accrue to us, he says, and in the meantime, “downtown will revitalize drastically over the next two to three years. I know it’s coming. Small Black and brown businesses are going to grow.” He thinks they will grow alongside the big developments, not be pushed out by them, per the usual dynamics of rising real estate.

inglewood art walk

Window display: Ricky Garzon looks out from the inside and likes what he sees. Photo by Sam Slovick

 

As if to make that point, Garzon co-curated a show in June at So-Fi with Khalil Kinsey, son of longtime Black art patrons Bernard and Shirley Kinsey. Titled “Continuum,” it combined signature pieces from the vast Kinsey collection with pieces chosen by Garzon. Those selections were initially going to be limited, “but I kind of went crazy,” he says, chuckling.

I turn to a piece on the wall that’s had my attention intermittently during our conversation. The piece, by Joseph Sherman, whose work was featured in the “Reverberations” show, is a striking, somewhat exaggerated portrait of a basketball player, his back to the viewer, the most distinct feature his three-dimensional sneakers. Garzon lights up. “It’s really haunting,” he says. “It’s a player—maybe Wilt—performing basketball acts. The artist filters out every number, stat and focuses purely on movement. But the deeper layer is the way the audience’s eyes are exposed within the camera – you have to go up and see it. It’s all in there.”

Garzon moves close to the piece, searches, then points. “You see the suit, and see the two eyes, the two eyes, two eyes. White, haunting, chilling eyes.” He nods, satisfied. He reiterates what’s become the mantra of the afternoon: “Yeah, you see the piece. But what’s the actual story?”

Garzon wants the stories of the artists to be pulled from beneath the surface too, to make them not just known but visible, appreciated for the singular experiences and perspectives that forges their work. But—and this is the former ad and numbers man talking–he also wants them to get paid. He is proud of the fact that several of the artists who have shown at Residency have gone on to wider notoriety and commercial success. A piece by Devin Johnson, who had his first solo show here, is currently selling for $100,000. I suggest to Garzon that as a gallerist he’s arrived, that he’s amassed enough cred over enough time to be part of the circle of tastemakers and gatekeepers who cloister art, but who can also expand it. That wouldn’t be a bad thing, yes? It might even be progress.

Garzon laughs, as if flattered by the idea. He looks almost pleased. Then he shrugs. “I don’t care about being perceived as a successful gallerist,” he says. “If I did, I’d have my name on the door.”

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Erin Aubry Kaplan
Erin Aubry Kaplan
Erin Aubry Kaplan is a Los Angeles journalist and columnist who writes regularly for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. She was the first African American to hold the position of weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times. She is a former staff writer for the LA Weekly and the author of the books: Black Talk, Blue Thoughts and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista, and I Heart Obama. She lives in Inglewood, California, with her six dogs.

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Help us sustain independent journalism…

Our team is working hard every day to bring you compelling, carefully-crafted pieces that shed light on the pressing issues of our time. We rely on caring supporters like you to help us sustain our mission. Your support ensures that we can continue to provide deeply-reported, independent, ad-free journalism without fear, favor or pandering. Support us today and make a lasting investment in the future.