Rent hikes and evictions — is it the last stand for artists in the Arts District?
The knock came on the door just as Michael Parker was talking with a group of German urbanism students about the challenges facing artists in Los Angeles. It was a warm September afternoon and they were in Parker’s Arts District loft, a rambling, sculpture-filled space he shares with four fellow artists, including his wife, conceptual artist Alyse Emdur.
A student stood up to answer the door.
“‘There are two men with an envelope and they said they need to see you,’” Parker recalls the student saying. “I was like, ‘Omigod, I am meeting with this group of urban planners and I’m being served eviction papers.’”
Indeed, inside a plain manila envelope was an eviction summons.
“It felt really surreal,” Parker says with a sardonic laugh. “I have all of these urban theorists from abroad asking how Los Angeles works — and this happens.”
Parker isn’t the only artist who faces a tenuous future in the Arts District. Named for the artists who made the neighborhood a creative hub in the 1970s and ’80s, the Arts District could soon find itself with few actual artists living within its borders — no small irony given its name and the fact that Mayor Eric Garcetti likes to regularly tout Los Angeles as an “arts capital” in statements and speeches.
At 800 Traction Ave., a warehouse building that began life as a coffee and spice factory in 1918, residents have received a 60-day quit notice. Just beyond the southern fringes of the Arts District, the Santa Fe Art Colony is expected to start charging market rates after operating for 30 years under a contract with the now-defunct Community Redevelopment Agency as a low- and moderate-income housing site; that contract is now expiring.
This follows the departure of many other Arts District artists, including Michael Winter, who ran the avant-garde musical space the Wulf out of his loft on Santa Fe Avenue until last fall when new owners bought his building.
Art Share L.A., at the corner of Hewitt Street and East 4th Place, is one of the neighborhood’s last artist-focused buildings. A nonprofit that supplies low-income housing, Art Share, with public spaces that include a theater and a gallery, isn’t specifically designated for artists, but that’s who it generally attracts. It’s also one of the few artist spaces with a sense of permanence: the organization owns its building and the site is restricted, by deed, to supply low-income housing for at least half a century.
Altogether, however, artists are an endangered species in the neighborhood they are most closely identified with.
City Councilman Jose Huizar, who represents the neighborhood, says an Arts District devoid of artists “would be a horrible irony and a cruel travesty for that community and for the City of Los Angeles.”
Parker, who is fighting his eviction with the assistance of attorney Elena Popp of the Eviction Defense Network, says it’s a critical moment.
“It feels,” he says, “like a last stand.”
Not all art is created equal
In recent years, the conversation about art and gentrification has principally centered on the role that art and arts institutions can play in the transformation of neighborhoods. And in that narrative, art and community are often portrayed as being on opposite sides of the battlefield.
In Los Angeles, the most visible front line sits right across the river from the Arts District in Boyle Heights, where anti-gentrification protesters have criticized artists and galleries for “art washing” — that is, being complicit in displacement.
But that headline-ready storyline simplifies a more complicated reality, as the changes in the Arts District lay bare. For one, urban planning studies show that the presence of galleries doesn’t so much cause gentrification as mirror the larger forces that shape it — urban policy, development, settlement patterns, the economy.
And not all art is created equal. The presence of a big international gallery with access to capital — such as the 116,000-square-foot Hauser & Wirth — is different than that of individual artists, many of whom cobble a living out of poorly paid adjunct teaching positions. Plus, artists are frequently gentrified themselves, sometimes by developers who like to tout the power of art in their projects.
More significantly, the case of the Arts District raises the question of whether Los Angeles will continue to be a city hospitable to the ad-hoc artist communities from which bubble up groundbreaking ideas that shift currents and shape movements. Think of those paradigm-shifting California light-and-space artists clustered in Venice Beach in the 1960s.
Sylvia Tidwell, who has lived at the Santa Fe Art Colony for almost 20 years and is head of its tenants association, says an Arts District without artists would be “bleak” — “an empty shell.”