Have you ever walked down the aisle of a supermarket to get one of your favorite food items only to find that it’s been discontinued? That’s when you run through all of Elsabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of loss and grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Well folks, our city is closing Barnsdall Municipal Gallery come December 31st.  I made sure to attend the last exhibit comprised of part sculpture, part photography, and part collage works juried by the Gallery’s current Curator-Director Scott Canty. At this last exhibit, Canty truly outdid himself by selecting many strong artists, the best being John Leighton and Barry Krammes. Strong, impeccably constructed wooden and ceramic sculptural pieces by Leighton based on objects, patterns, and designs from the traditional Orient and Krammes’ miniature assemblage artworks that he considers “Doppelgangers of real life…” were truly surrealistic worlds that I thoroughly enjoyed exploring.

The rumor that MOCA would take over the space has finally been put to rest, but I hear another rumor that a top New York Gallery plans to open a branch in Los Angeles, so I could easily compound rumors by suggesting that the Barnsdall space is where they’re headed. That I have not one shred of evidence to support this notion is beside the point, a good rumor is always better than nothing.

I’m certain that throughout the years, most of you, like myself, have seen some magnificent exhibits at the Barnsdall Municipal Gallery. But the tragedy of this grand space closing its doors will hit the hardest many less dexterous or connected artists who will no longer have available this outstanding exhibition environment in which to display their art works. No more annual open call shows (affectionately referred by some as “the cattle call”) displaying a mass hanging (no pun intended) of art works invariably resulting in a visual cacophony from the divine to the banal, a symbolic proclamation that our Republic was indeed a healthy and happy one. Hundreds if not thousands of artists had the opportunity to see their art hung in a magnificent space where the sun could shine upon them for at least a long fifteen minutes; what a splendid counter balance to the normally exclusionary nature of the art world; what a wonderful testament to our democratic ideals.

At this point I’ve already gone through the denial and anger parts of Kubler-Ross’s five stages and am currently at the point of bargaining, that is, ferociously bargaining with the collective minds of the city: I’ll eat a lot more spinach if they promise to reopen the Gallery in the near future.

UPDATE:

A correction just came in from Mark Steven Greenfield, the newly retired Director of the Barnsdall Municipal Gallery, that it’s not yet a goodbye but that the threat still remains real. In other words, the Barnsdall Gallery will remain open at least until July but its existence for most artists is still very much in jeopardy.

Mark clarifies the Gallery’s current situation and lets us know what we can do to try to prevent its loss to most of us artists, writing me:

“The City has approved funds to keep it going through the rest of the fiscal year (July). They are trying to find an operator through the RFP process and MoCA is almost certain to be submitting a proposal. The board is fighting the idea of MoCa as an operator because it will surely be the end of local artists having access to the space. Join the fight and call out the troops. Write your city councilperson. Go to lamag.org for information.”