The rise of the Los Angeles art scene, in charts

The galleries came first. Felix Landau opened on La Cienega Boulevard in 1951 and Ferus in 1957, and by July 1963 Time magazine could count 22 exhibitions open on the boulevard on a single Monday night, the evening the dealers held their openings together. Ferus gave Andy Warhol his first solo show of Pop paintings in 1962, the 32 soup cans, and the next year Walter Hopps, one of its founders, organized Marcel Duchamp’s first retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. The county museum did not open on Wilshire Boulevard until 1965.

That first scene did not last. Ferus closed in 1966, Virginia Dwan’s gallery in Westwood in 1967 and Nicholas Wilder’s in 1979; Dwan and Wilder both went to New York. What followed was a move from district to district as rents and fashion changed: West Hollywood and Venice in the 1970s, Santa Monica and Bergamot Station in the 1990s, Chinatown from 1999, Culver City from 2003, Hollywood from 2012, downtown from 2013, and Melrose Hill, around David Zwirner’s block of Western Avenue, from 2021.

The timeline has 105 events of five kinds: galleries, museums, exhibitions, auctions and sales, and art fairs. The strip at its top shows where they fall: three in five of them come after 2010, and nearly half after 2016. A full dot is an opening or an expansion, a ring a closing, and a diamond anything else: a show, a sale, a fire. Of the 14 gallery closings marked, 10 have come since May 2024. Open a decade to read its events, each with the page it was read on.

For most of its history, a Los Angeles gallery was a local business. The exceptions were brief. Ferus merged with New York’s Pace for two years after 1966; Luhring Augustine of New York and Max Hetzler of Cologne ran a joint gallery in Santa Monica from 1989 to 1992; Pace opened in Beverly Hills in 1995 and left in 2000. Larry Gagosian, who had started with a print shop in Westwood in 1974 and moved to New York in the 1980s, came back in 1995 with a building by Richard Meier in Beverly Hills. For the rest of the 2000s his was the only gallery from elsewhere on this chart.

That changed in 2010. L&M Arts came from New York that year and Matthew Marks in 2012, and six more arrived in 2014 and 2015, among them Maccarone, with 35,000 square feet in Boyle Heights. In February and March 2016 Sprüth Magers of Berlin and Hauser & Wirth of Zurich opened within three weeks of each other, and the rest followed: Jeffrey Deitch and Tanya Bonakdar in 2018, Karma in 2021, Pace, again, and Sean Kelly in 2022, Lisson, David Zwirner and Marian Goodman in 2023, Perrotin and Michael Werner in 2024. Twenty galleries from elsewhere opened in Los Angeles between 2021 and 2024, and at the end of 2023 and of 2024, 26 had a space here.

Then they began to leave. Nino Mier, who had grown from one gallery in West Hollywood to four, closed them all in May 2024, three weeks after a report that the gallery had underpaid artists; Praz-Delavallade of Paris went that July. In January 2025 the Palisades and Eaton fires burned the homes and studios of artists, dealers and collectors. From that July, in five months, Blum (the former Blum & Poe, founded in 1994), Clearing, Tanya Bonakdar, The Hole, Sean Kelly and Southern Guild closed or stopped showing, and L.A. Louver, in Venice since 1975, turned to private dealing. Michael Werner and Marian Goodman followed early in 2026, and The Box, after 19 years, that June.

Few of them blamed Los Angeles. Tim Blum said it was the system, not the market; Tanya Bonakdar’s lease had ended; Southern Guild moved to New York. But the years coincide with a falling market, in which global art sales dropped 12% in 2024 by Art Basel and UBS’s count, and with the cost of running a second gallery a continent from the first. Only The Box, whose founder’s family lost homes in the Eaton fire, named the fires among its reasons. The membership of Gallery Platform LA, the galleries’ own association, tells the same story from the other side: 124 galleries and museums in March 2024, 96 today.

The galleries that grew up in the city have held on better than the visitors. Regen Projects, David Kordansky, Vielmetter, François Ghebaly and Night Gallery have each moved to a larger building or added one since 2012, and are still in them. So have the largest of the arrivals: Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, Gagosian, Pace, Sprüth Magers, which marked ten years on Wilshire Boulevard this summer, Lisson, Perrotin, Jeffrey Deitch and Karma.

Floor space is the plainest measure of what the galleries have committed to the city. Counting the spaces whose size was reported when they opened (39 of them, at 33 galleries), the leading galleries had about 50,000 square feet between them in 2000, of which 30,000 was Ace Gallery’s floor of the Wilshire Tower. By 2010 they had 108,000. Then Regen Projects built 20,000 square feet in Hollywood (2012), David Kordansky 13,000 in Mid-City (2014) and Maccarone 35,000 in Boyle Heights (2015).

In March 2016 Hauser Wirth & Schimmel opened in all 116,000 square feet of a former flour mill in the Arts District: more than every gallery on this chart had put together six years before. The total passed 300,000 square feet that year and reached 418,000 at the end of 2024, more than eight times the figure for 2000. It has since fallen by 57,000 square feet, about a seventh, with the closing of Blum, Marian Goodman, Sean Kelly, The Hole and Southern Guild.

Gagosian, the first of the large galleries to come, has never been among the largest. Richard Meier’s building for it in Beverly Hills had 6,600 square feet when it opened in 1995 and has had 11,600 since an extension in 2010; from 2021 to 2023 the gallery also showed in the 13,000-square-foot theater of the Marciano Art Foundation, a former Masonic temple on Wilshire Boulevard.

These are reported figures, and of different kinds. Hauser & Wirth’s is the whole complex, with its restaurant, garden and bookshop; David Zwirner’s 30,000 square feet is three buildings on one block. Several large galleries have never given a size (Karma, Tanya Bonakdar and Michael Werner among them), so the totals are a floor. What the buildings were before says as much about the city: a flour mill, a bank, two car showrooms, a power station, a pair of prop shops, a film-storage vault, a body shop and a yoga studio.

One test of a city’s place in the market is to ask of the artists who sell for the most: how many have a gallery there? We took two published rankings. The Hiscox Artist Top 100 ranks contemporary artists by what their work made since 2000 sold for at auction in 2024. The Artprice100 is the hundred artists whose work sold for the most at auction over the five years to 2024; 91 of them were born after 1860, and those are the ones counted here.

Of the Hiscox hundred, 71 are on the roster of a gallery with a space open in Los Angeles today. Gagosian has 22 of them, Hauser & Wirth 13 and David Zwirner 11. Counting each artist from the year they joined such a gallery, or from the year it opened here if that came later, 11 of the hundred had a gallery in the city at the end of 2000, 20 at the end of 2010 and 27 at the end of 2015. Hauser & Wirth and Sprüth Magers took it to 32 in 2016. The largest step came when Pace, David Zwirner, Lisson and Marian Goodman opened: from 45 at the end of 2021 to 66 two years later, and 72 the year after that, when Perrotin arrived. The closures since have cost it little, because nearly all the artists concerned have a second gallery in the city.

The Artprice list gives a lower share, 42 of 91, and for a reason that has little to do with Los Angeles: the rest of that list is mostly modern painters long dead, from Magritte and Chagall to Matisse, and the ink painters who lead the Chinese market, such as Qi Baishi and Fu Baoshi. No gallery here represents them, and few anywhere do.

Having a gallery in a city is not the same as being shown in it. In the archives of 16 leading galleries and four museums, which list 2,262 exhibitions since 2000, the number of the Hiscox hundred given a solo show in Los Angeles in one year has never passed 11. It averaged 5 a year in the 2000s and 7 a year from 2016 to 2025. In 2025, when 72 of the hundred had a gallery here, three had a solo show: Yoshitomo Nara at Blum, in its last months, Richard Prince at Gagosian and Reggie Burrows Hodges at Karma. The galleries have brought their rosters to Los Angeles faster than they have brought the artists.

The three shown most often all made their careers in the city. David Hockney had 17 solo exhibitions in these archives, 12 of them at L.A. Louver; Ed Ruscha had 10 and Mark Grotjahn 9. Jonas Wood, who also works here, had 8, as did Glenn Ligon, Richard Prince and Takashi Murakami. In all, 59 of the hundred have had a solo show at one of these galleries or museums since 2000. The archives are incomplete for Hauser & Wirth and for LACMA, so these counts, too, are a floor.

The museums moved on a longer clock. LACMA opened on Wilshire Boulevard in 1965, MOCA downtown in the 1980s, the Hammer in 1990 and the Getty Center, at $1.3 billion, in 1997. The second wave began with The Broad, which opened on Grand Avenue in 2015 at a cost of $140 million, charged nothing, and counted 820,000 visitors in its first year. The Hammer had dropped its admission charge in 2014 and MOCA did in 2020, which with the Getty made four free museums; The Art Newspaper called Los Angeles the country’s free museum capital.

Then came 2026. In April LACMA opened the David Geffen Galleries, Peter Zumthor’s building across Wilshire Boulevard: 347,500 square feet, 110,000 of them galleries, at a cost the Los Angeles Times put at $723.8 million. In June Dataland, a museum of art made with artificial intelligence, opened downtown. On September 22 the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened in Exposition Park, with 300,000 square feet and a price the press gives as $1 billion; the museum has published none. With the Academy Museum (2021, $482 million) and the Hammer’s expansion (2023, about $90 million), the buildings opened since 2015 cost about $2.4 billion. The Broad is adding $100 million more, for 2028.

Attendance has not kept pace with the building, not yet. LACMA’s rose from 700,000 in 2009 to 1.6 million in 2016, then fell as its old buildings came down: 802,000 in 2025, its lowest outside the pandemic since 2009. The Getty Center, at 1.3 million, is close to its level before 2020, and The Broad drew 771,000. The first full year of the Geffen Galleries will be 2027, the year the Getty Center is to close for a renovation of about twelve months.

The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time may be the clearest sign of scale. The first edition, in 2011 and 2012, linked 68 exhibitions on art in Los Angeles from 1945 to 1980 and counted about 1.8 million visits. The second, on Latin American and Latino art, counted nearly 2.8 million in 2017 and 2018, and the third, on art and science, 4 million in 2024 and 2025.

Los Angeles makes the art and New York sells it. Of the 37 auction records for Los Angeles artists that we could confirm, 28 were set in New York and none, as far as we can find, in Los Angeles. Christie’s opened a Beverly Hills flagship in 2017 and Phillips a West Hollywood gallery in 2022, both to show work that will be sold elsewhere; of the international houses only Bonhams lists an auction room in the city, on Sunset Boulevard.

The prices themselves have risen with the city’s standing. Ed Ruscha’s record went from $30.4 million in 2014 to $52.5 million in 2019 and $68.3 million in 2024, for Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, a painting of 1964. David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) made $90.3 million in 2018, then the most paid at auction for a work by a living artist. It shows the south of France; the most paid for one of his Los Angeles pictures is the $44.3 million that his double portrait of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy made in November 2025. Hockney died in June 2026. Ernie Barnes’s The Sugar Shack, estimated at $150,000 to $200,000, sold for $15.3 million in 2022.

The younger painters’ prices record the boom and what came after. Jonas Wood’s record ($6.5 million) dates from 2021, and Christina Quarles’s ($4.5 million) and Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s ($4.7 million) from 2022; none has been beaten since. The largest sales by a Los Angeles collector were private: David Geffen sold a Pollock and a de Kooning in 2006 for a reported $140 million and $137.5 million.

The fairs took three tries. Art Los Angeles Contemporary ran from 2010 to 2020; Paris Photo held three editions on the Paramount lot and cancelled the fourth. Frieze opened on the same lot in February 2019 with 70 galleries, moved to Beverly Hills in 2022 and to Santa Monica Airport in 2023, when it had 124, and has settled at about 100. Its attendance has stayed between 30,000 and 35,000 at every edition. The airport is due to close in 2028, so the fair will need another home.

Beside the fairs of other cities, it is a small one. Art Basel had 290 galleries in Basel this June and 283 in Miami Beach last December; Frieze London and Frieze Masters, side by side in Regent’s Park, had more than 280 between them; the Armory Show in New York, which Frieze has owned since 2023, had about 230 in September. Frieze Los Angeles, with about 100, is a third the size of the largest. Of Frieze’s own fairs it is larger only than Frieze New York, which had 68 galleries in May; Frieze Seoul had more than 130.

The crowds are in the same proportion: about 32,000 visitors in Los Angeles, against 90,000 at Art Basel, the same for the two London fairs together, 91,500 in Hong Kong and more than 70,000 in Seoul. Size is not the only measure of a fair, and a new one starts small: Art Basel’s newest, in Doha, opened this February with 87 galleries. But Frieze Los Angeles has had seven editions, and has not grown since 2023.

Where the galleries are has changed with each generation, and the list of districts is a history in itself. On On View’s map today the Arts District, downtown, has the most: 15, among them Hauser & Wirth, Night Gallery, François Ghebaly and Vielmetter. Bergamot Station in Santa Monica still has 13, though the city declared the site surplus land in February 2025 and gave its tenants about two years. West Hollywood has 10 and Hollywood 9. Culver City, which Blum & Poe made a gallery district in 2003, has 7 without it. Melrose Hill, which was not an art address before 2021, has David Zwirner and, by one count this spring, nearly twenty galleries around it.

What comes next is already on the calendar. Pace Prints is to open a workshop and gallery in Hollywood late this autumn. Frieze is listed for February 25 to 28, 2027. The Getty Center closes for its renovation in March 2027 and is to reopen in the spring of 2028, the year of The Broad’s expansion. There are fewer galleries than there were two years ago, and the museums have never had more room.