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| Paige Wery director of the Good Luck Gallery, portrait from the Makeover series by Austin Young, 2014 |
MAP: For these
interviews, I have tried to pick women who were working and successful and
seemed like really strong people. I picked a variety of women with different
roles: a gallerist, a fine artist, a video production artist, a student, and
people with different cultural backgrounds.
I want to explore what it means to be a powerful creative woman.
PQ: It's a nice
group to be a part of.
MAP: Definitely.
Well, I thought it was really interesting, when we talked, that I had no idea
that you had been an athlete as well as being an artist and a director of a
gallery. I thought that was such a fascinating, powerful thing that you brought
to the conversation. I guess I was hoping you would talk a little bit about
that: about your background an as athlete and how you became an artist.
PW: I was an
artist. I was always drawing as a kid, but the athletic part was more for fun
until.... What should I say about the athletic part? I'll tell you what, I
enjoyed being an athlete up to a certain point, but it was a really.... It
wasn't my passion like art was. I learned so much from being an athlete and I
highly recommend kids to be athletic, and go out and work on a team, and learn
how to get along with other people, and to learn how to be competitive in a
positive way. I don't know what else to say.
MAP: You played
golf right?
PW: Yeah, I
played golf. I started when I was a kid and it got me into UCLA. I went to UCLA
on a golf scholarship. I was there for three years, but it was... tough. When I
signed up for UCLA, I said that I wanted to go to the art school. They said,
"Sure. Great. Here, sign the paperwork." I signed the paperwork and
then I showed up and I asked where my art classes were and they were like,
"Oh, that's a whole different school." They screwed me over because
they wanted me to play golf and I couldn't play golf and be in the art school
at the same time.
College
athletes miss so much school. When you go to UCLA and you're on an athletic
team--even the women's golf team, which is really low on totem pole--you are
still there to be playing golf. They're paying you to play golf. Your grades
and your desires and things like that really come in second, but you don't know
that until you're there in the middle of it all.
MAP: Then you
dropped out to make art, right?
PW: I did, to go
to art school. I did that for about a year. I took junior college classes down
in San Diego, moved back in with my parents, and then a family friend was
devastated that I wasn't playing golf anymore and sponsored me to go out on a
mini tour. I ended up playing golf for another five years. I also got married
and insisted on going to art school, so we moved up to Northern California.
MAP: It’s an interesting
story. When you first mentioned it to me,
you were working as a co-curator of “Perform Chinatown.” I was picking up my
t-shirt and you were talking about your background as an athlete. I didn't know
anything about that: about you. I guess as long as I’ve known you in the art
world, you have always been this icon.
I've always seen you as being very statuesque. You're taller than most
women in the art world, and you have a loud, gregarious laugh, and you have a
lot of energy and spirit. There always seems to be a party around you. To hear
that you are an athlete makes total sense. I only know you from the art world or in your
role as a director working for Artillery Magazine.
It's always interesting to hear that there's this whole other side to your
life.
PW: It was
everything right up until I was about 27.
MAP: Not only was
there this other side of your life, but you were very successful at it. That
you had a successful career as a golfer and that it was completely of another
world--that's really interesting.
PW: I definitely
had that option. It was on the table.
MAP: It makes you
very confident. I don't know if you directly credit it but, you're very
confident. You’ve switched from
publishing to owning a gallery. You're very clear, quick, and decisive when you
decide to do something.
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| Paige Wery in William Dailey installation, portrait by Marlene Picard |
PW: I do. That's
why I think of my dad, who's an extremely athletic person. When he was 67, he
did Ironman. He's that kind of
athletic. I learned so much by playing golf or just even competing and being on
a team and things like that. You learn a lot. I learned self-confidence through
the experience of going to a big school like UCLA. Being on the traveling team
with them, I was basically forced to go play with these country clubs. I came from
a pretty lower middle class family. My
mom was a secretary, my dad was a high school teacher. I would go to these
fancy country clubs that I had never been to before and I had to play golf with
these people. I actually really learned how to get along with them and I just
learned a lot. Now, I feel like I can talk to whomever on the streets; sit down
on Venice Beach while I'm selling my art, and I can also show up at a fancy
person's house and I feel comfortable in both places. I completely thank golf
for that because I did not know how to handle being around these super rich
people when I first went to UCLA. I was never around anything like it before.
These people had huge houses and had maids and people cooking for them and
everything I never witnessed before.
Now I
feel comfortable being around it because I got to know them and they were
friendly and everything was fine. It did help me a lot with who I am.
MAP: How did you
wind up at Artillery? What was the story behind that? And then you decided to leave and found your
gallery. Do you want to start with Artillery?
PW: Sure I'll
start with Artillery. A friend of
mine was writing for them in their very second issue. The second issue that
they ever published. I wrote for the first time--a little review, a 500 word
review. I wrote for them for about a year and I really didn't have the art
history background because I'm an art school dropout. I started feeling really
uncomfortable because I was trying to be an artist and I was trying to write
about this stuff, but it was taking so much time to do all the history. I just
felt like I wasn't a good enough writer.
“I quit,”
I told Tulsa, the editor and founder of Artillery.
I told her that I wasn't going to write anymore. She came back to me two weeks
later and said, "Are you interested in being a publisher?" I said,
"Well, let me think about that." Because I didn't even know what that
job was! I literally went home and Googled “publisher.” I was like, "I can
talk about art. I like the magazine. We'll just try it for 3 months." 6
years later, I had brought in a lot of money to the magazine. I'm really proud
of what I did with that magazine. I'm still a huge supporter. I still buy ads.
I think it's a really important thing in Los Angeles. We need more art
magazines covering what's happening here because there's so many important
things happening here and all the newspapers--they're all getting cut. The
budgets are all getting cut.
I loved that job.
It was a real good job and I had more responsibility than I had ever had. I'd
been an artist when I was working in a frame store part time and when Tulsa
asked me to do it I had never done anything like it before. I think that that
was good, too, because we're going to make up our own rules. I made up my own
rules. I didn't really know what a publisher was really, how they were really
supposed to do it. We just made it work. By the time I left we had raised ad sales 300 -400 percent.
PW: We worked
really well together and I feel like we accomplished a lot. At a certain point, I felt it was time to move on and I started thinking of what else I wanted to do.
Having
been an artist and having run the magazine, I felt capable of opening up a
gallery. I also saw a huge gap in the fact that there was no self-taught artist
galleries in Los Angeles that focused on outsider art. Sometimes when I was
with Artillery and going around to all the galleries, the artwork was just
really looking all the same to me and I just wanted to shake it up a little
bit.
MAP: Before your
gallery, “Good Luck Gallery,” no one in Los Angeles was focused on outsider
art. I’m from the midwest and in Chicago
there's such a huge outsider art presence. It's because of the aesthetic of
Chicago Imagism and artists, like Ed Paschke and Barbara Rossi. They were really interested in looking at
outsider art. There have also been outsider art superstars like Henry Darger
and Mr. Imagination. Mr. Imagination has a huge career as an artist in Chicago.
Nationally, there is a huge collector pool of people who are fascinated by
outsider art and I've never seen it exhibited anywhere in Los Angeles. When you
announced that's what the focus of your gallery was I thought, "That's so
smart." It's such an interesting area of research. There are so many
people who are fascinated with just that one genre of painting, drawing and
sculpture. And then there are Simon Rodia’s
Watts Towers. The Watts Towers are an icon of that whole genre and they are
right here in the city. The idea of an outsider Los Angeles gallery seemed just
perfect and really very timely.
PW: I'm pushing
the limit. I'm not just focused on that. I'm also showing collectors as artist.
I felt justified in doing that because of the Venice Biennale only just last
year which I didn't get to go to. I was supposed to go, but I couldn't--I
didn't. I wasn't able to make it. He showed, for the first time--the curator of
the Venice Biennale, last summer--he showed outsider art for the first time and
next to contemporary artists. He also showed collectors work. A rock collection
and people that have collected little tiny ceramic figures and all of a sudden
I was like, "Duh." I'm reading the catalog. I love the catalog. All
the essays that were written about the stuff. It totally clicked; that's an art
form. It's very personal.
I love opening that door because they're not trained to be a collector. You don't
go to school to learn how to collect art. I'm opening up the door for that,
too, in the gallery and I'm really enjoying that. It's been fun.
MAP: It totally
makes sense, too, because when I think about the biggest aesthetes in my life,
they were my grandmother and my aunt and any woman that I grew up with who was
making little arrangements of things or had a glass menagerie--some kind of
collection of things--was always going on. Whether they collect turkey plates,
like Mat Gleason’s mom, or Lladro figurines. There's something that is really
fascinating about that form of culture that doesn't get talked about because it
is overtly feminine. It's really fascinating because it's something that every
woman knows how to do, which is to create a home. That feeling of “this has not
just been cleaned, it has been
organized for your pleasure,” which I think is fascinating.
You had a
show of basically a book collection, which is a beautiful show. I don't
remember the name of the collector.
PW: William
Daley, who retired about 5, 6 years ago. He closed his bookshop. He brought in
all of these books, including books from 1717 and out-of-state art or out-of-print
art catalogs and first edition novels. No gloves required; every one was
allowed to just hang out and look through the books. We brought in his
furniture, his table, his chairs, his rugs, his lights. Everything was beautiful
because he's an amazing collector all the way across the board. In that show,
which I had no idea what was going to happen--it was amazing. We brought in
really great people into the gallery. I had an NYU retired librarian come in
who's come back to the shows since, too, and has come to our readings. I just
ended up meeting all these people that aren’t typically going to walk into an
art gallery, but they love books. It was really great.
Something
else that I think is important, too, is that when I ended up going at art
school up in San Francisco, right before I dropped out of art school, I had an
instructor that actually said, "You guys think you're artists? You're not
artists. The artists are in the studio right now, painting." The next day,
I quit school. That guy is singing my song right now. I'm out of here. I'm
tired of being graded on my art. Whatever. I moved back down to L.A. and I
refused to wait tables, which is what I had been doing while I was going at art
school. I went down to Venice Beach and sat on the boardwalk with all of these
other people, selling my artwork. That was when I really had my first taste of
outsider art. It wasn't that I learned about outsider art in school. They
hardly ever even touch on it at the colleges.
There were
homeless people and people with mental problems and people that were just doing
it because they just loved it and it had nothing to do with... they were making
this art for something that they could hardly even explain. They were stealing
tubes of paint instead of stealing food to make this art and it was a passion
that I did not see at California College of the Arts where everyone is paying
$48,000 to get graded by (a lot of times) miserable instructors that didn't
want to be there. Then here I was out on the beach with these people and it
just became a club of artists.
Because I had a
car and I had an apartment. Once a month I would go down and say, "If
you're here Saturday, meet me down there." At 9:00 I would show up with my
truck. Everybody was allowed to bring one painting and then I would take it to
a coffee shop and curate shows with everybody from Venice. Nobody had ever
approached them for anything like that before. That's really how I started
curating with outsider work. It wasn't that the artwork was fabulous, it was
just that it was passionate and it was amazing. We would put prices on them and
sometimes it would sell and they would come back for the opening. I would
always have an opening for them and they would get as dressed up as they could.
They would invite their family. They would all take their buses from all over
the city. I'm talking about homeless people finding ties and showing up at
their first art opening at a coffee shop and treating it like it was a godsend.
It was so fun and beautiful and amazing.
That's
really how I first started. That's when I was first introduced to outsider art.
I was sitting on Venice Beach and meeting these people and working with them.
It stuck with me. I did that for a year. I sat down there for a full year with
a friend of mine that was also selling her paintings. After a year, it was time
for me to move on. I'm still in touch with two of them and I'm still friends
with them, but I just had to tell everybody, "I'm sorry, I have to go do
my own thing." I'm not making enough money selling paintings on Venice
Beach for a buck and pay my rent. I had to leave. But that's always stuck in my
mind. Helping these people that never consider themselves worthy of hanging
their work in a coffee shop. Even though they worked on it every day and that
was their whole life.
MAP: I guess you
have a whole other idea about what is successful and what's creative and all
kinds of really interesting conversations about those ideas.
PW: Yeah. It was
quite an experience to go from CCAC and go sit down on Venice Beach.
MAP: It sounds like
it was fun, too.
PW: It was really
fun. It was intense. It was sad. It was one of those things where you wanted to
take everybody home with you.... There was definitely some guilt with me.
Getting in my truck and driving home and knowing that I had food and shelter. I
think part of that guilt is what drove me to think, "You know what? I got
to do something. I don't want to feel bad about this. Let's work with these
people and I can go out and find a coffee shop and we'll show their work."
I really didn't think anybody would show up at their opening but they all
showed up and then it became a monthly thing.
MAP: That's so
sweet. I didn't know that, actually. That's so connected to what you're doing
now.
PW: It's on a
different level, but ...
MAP: But it's
related.
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| With gallery artist Harry Steinberg, 2014, by Eric Minh Swenson |
PW: It's the same
thing. At the gallery I'm showing a lot of people that have never had a show before, and I
love that. I just thought it makes me so happy to have people that just thought
that.... My 103 year old ceramicist, Harry Steinberg--he never thought he would
have a show. I met him when he was 103. He never had a show before. His work is
amazing. It's a group show, I'm taking it to Miami. Now he's 104 and I just
went to his house and picked up a new set of work.
MAP: Oh my God,
that’s amazing.
PW: Yeah. He's so
beautiful and so happy and just making this child-like gorgeous work. It's
thrilling to be working with people like this. So far, so good. I haven't even
been open for a year. I'm talking like I've been doing this forever. It's a new
thing, but it feels like a good fit.
MAO: What's more
like, you'd been around for a year. It's pretty hard to make a gallery fly in
L.A. It’s so awesome that you're doing so well and you're happy and it seems
like your flow is going to the right direction. And you're going to Miami! That's
really exciting.
PW: I'm feeling
very supported, and I got into the Outsider Art Fair. Which is really, really
difficult to get into.
MAP: That's
exciting.
PW: I am so
thrilled.
MAP: It's your
first year. That's awesome.
PW: I know. I
went to it last year, and I hadn't even open up the doors yet, and met the
owner a couple of times, Andrew Edlin, who has a very successful outsider art
gallery in New York. He represents Henry Darger and people like that. He's the
bigwig guy and he's been very helpful. He gave me a booth and invited me in,
which is amazing.
MAP: Yeah, I should
show you mine. I have a Mr. Imagination paintbrush from Chicago. He showed up
when I was in grad school in St Louis and he had a crush on my ex. He would carry these paintbrush sculptures in
his bag and he handed one to him and somehow I got it in the separation. It's
neat, it's really different, and he was really, really neat, too. There's so
many people that make work in Chicago, and it is so loved there and beloved
there. Because Darger’s work was discovered there, I remember seeing those
Darger drawings in the 90s and thinking, "Oh my God. This is so much more
interesting than anything I've seen." There's so much of it, too. These
giant drawings, such beautiful drawings.
PW: They're so
beautiful.
MAP: All sides of
the paper are incredible, beautiful work. And just that obsession when you're
making so much work and...
PW: And never
sharing it.
MAP: Not needing
to. He's amazing.
PW: I hadn't
really thought about that. Not needing to. I was thinking of it as not thinking
anybody else would like it. But I think not
needing to is also a good way to put it. Like the recent female
photographer Vivian Maier, whose work was discovered at a garage sale. Some
people probably just don't need it and don't want to put it out there and deal
with the audience. And then some people don't think that anybody would want to
look at it: it's something so private. I definitely have worked with some
people like that. They just consider themselves hobbyists or something, but
when you look at the work, it's beautiful. I have been turned down for shows.
I've asked people to do shows and they're not interested. They're too nervous.
Some people can't handle putting their work out in front of an audience. It's
way too personal for them. Other people--it's just celebration! It's a
celebration for what they've been doing, which is great. With 103-year-old
Harry Steinberg, I rented a couch. We brought in 103 of his ceramic pieces. It's
his first show. I rented a couch because I figured he was going to have to sit
down and he wasn't sitting down the whole time. I kept looking over, my friends
were drinking on his couch. I was like, "Get up, that's for Harry."
He's like, "I don't want to sit down. I don't want to sit down." He
kept running around and shaking people's hands. That was so great. It's
awesome. There's so many people like that in the world that, just--for whatever
reason--nobody knows about or talks about, but they have such a compelling,
exciting practice that makes the difference in so many people's lives, whether
they know it or not.
MAP: It's great
that you're able to offer people a chance to celebrate that.
PW: Yeah, and for
people to see his work and to hear that his age and still making art, still
with his young, lovely wife, who's 87, who takes care of all the phone calls
and all the emails.
MAP: That's sweet.
PW: They're
adorable. They're just so cute. Such an inspiration for everybody. Looking for
outsider artists is…. It's different. I even want to say it might be a little
bit more difficult because you don't go to the colleges and go culling around
for the young kids. You're looking underneath rocks.
MAP: Right.
PW: And hoping to
hear something word of mouth.
MAP: Yeah, totally.
I could see that.
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| Portrait of Paige Wery by Mary Anna Pomonis 2015 |
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