The Box LA, Beloved Risk-Taking Art Space, Closes After 19 Years
The gallery was known for its fearless, playful programming and support of unconventional work and exhibitions.
LOS ANGELES — The Box LA, the risk-taking experimental space that nurtured unconventional art forms, is closing after 19 years. Although it was established as a commercial gallery, The Box’s programming often evoked the freedom of a nonprofit, presenting work not typically embraced by the market, especially performance art. Its final exhibition, a retrospective of the mercurial artist Wally Hedrick presented with Parker Gallery, ran through April 4. A closing celebration will take place on June 6, with a fashion show of costumes by Johanna Went, in collaboration with Asher Hartman.
“It feels right to end this way, with the kind of work we always existed to support: radical, enlightening, and not easily contained by the commercial marketplace,” The Box’s founder, Mara McCarthy, wrote in an announcement.
The Box was founded in 2007 in LA’s Chinatown (later moving to the Arts District) by McCarthy, daughter of the artist Paul McCarthy. From its inception, the gallery defined itself as an “artist-formed space.” It championed the work of influential but underrecognized artists of her father’s generation — including Barbara T. Smith, Simone Forti, Kim Jones, and Eugenia P. Butler — alongside younger, emerging artists, such as Naotaka Hiro, Anna Betbeze, Nathaniel Mellors, and Marwa Abdul-Rahman.
“At the time, I had confidence in those works, but I had never shown them publicly. The Box had a condition that made it possible to present things before they were fully situated,” said Hiro, who had his first solo show with The Box in 2008, in an email to Hyperallergic. “That kind of space, where you can present something for the first time without having to resolve it in advance, is not easy to find.”
Artist Corazón del Sol participated in several exhibitions at The Box with her own work; that of her mother Eugenia P. Butler and her grandmother, pioneering gallerist Eugenia Butler; and organized a group show of artists from Colombia.
“Instead of saying, ‘I don’t think we could sell that,’ they would say, ‘make it weirder.’ There was never a limitation. There was always support for the wildest ideas,” she told Hyperallergic.
Johanna Went, who got her start in the punk clubs and scrappy art spaces of early ’80s downtown LA, recalled meeting with McCarthy a few days each week for a year in the lead-up to her 2020 retrospective at The Box, Passion Container. “I’d never worked with someone who understands performance art as much as she does,” she said.
Alongside supporting transgressive and less commercially viable artwork, The Box also enthusiastically engaged with provocative, incendiary content that many galleries would shy away from. These included Judith Bernstein’s “ball busting political works”; Burn Me!, a show that addressed both the recent LA wildfires and the country’s rising authoritarianism; and Phallus :: Fascinum :: Fascism, a radically inclusive exploration of sexual and social states of liberation and repression.
Like many galleries that have shuttered recently, The Box cited financial struggles as one reason behind the decision. According to McCarthy’s statement, the program had been “sustained in large part” by the support of McCarthy Studios, her father’s creative production company. “The support around my father’s work that has underwritten this space has shifted in recent years,” she said. The devastating Eaton Fire, which destroyed her own home as well as her brother’s and parents’, also led McCarthy to conclude that “continuing is no longer feasible.”
And while The Box’s closing may recall other recently closed spaces, for many, it represents a more significant loss. “When I moved to LA just over 10 years ago, The Box was universally regarded as one of the very few commercial galleries that championed risky, market-adverse art,” Sam Parker of Parker Gallery told Hyperallergic via email. “In the past decade, this has felt increasingly necessary, now urgent, as an endangered species. This is a profound loss for the city.”
Despite the gallery's impending closure after nearly two decades, McCarthy said she has no plans to exit the art world herself.
“Over the years I have come to understand that supporting artists takes many forms, and exhibitions are only one of them,” she wrote. “What many artists need most is conversation, presence, and genuine engagement, and that will not stop for me.”
