Culver City Art Guide

There’s a version of Los Angeles where you drive from gallery to gallery, spending more time hunting for parking than looking at art. Then there’s Culver City — specifically the stretch of Washington Boulevard and South La Cienega that became, over the course of the 2000s, the closest thing LA has to a walkable gallery district. It’s the kind of place where you can close out a show at Corey Helford, wander two blocks to Paul Loya, loop around to Thinkspace, and catch a mural in progress on your way back to the car. For a city that tends to scatter its culture across forty miles of suburb, that’s genuinely rare.

Culver City’s transformation wasn’t accidental. It was the result of galleries relocating from higher-rent neighborhoods, curators taking chances on new contemporary art when the establishment wasn’t paying attention, and a loose network of artists, collectors, and dealers who kept showing up for each other’s openings.

1. The Washington Boulevard Corridor

Washington Boulevard, Culver City

Washington Boulevard is the spine of the Culver City arts district. The galleries didn’t arrive here by accident — they followed the formula that works in every city where a secondary arts district takes hold: affordable square footage, a few anchor institutions willing to move early, and enough foot traffic between them to make the walk feel worthwhile.

By the early 2010s, Washington Boulevard between La Cienega and National had become one of the denser gallery strips in Southern California. What distinguishes it is the mix — the galleries here skew toward new contemporary and pop surrealism rather than the blue-chip fare of Beverly Hills or Bergamot Station. That means work by street artists crossing over into gallery contexts, figurative painters with graphic roots, and an audience that skews younger and less Sotheby’s.

The strip benefits from its location just off the 10 freeway, reachable from most of LA without the full commitment of a DTLA trip. On gallery opening nights — which the district has never fully coordinated, to the frustration of visitors who want to hit six shows in one evening — Washington Boulevard gets genuinely busy.

2. Corey Helford Gallery

8522 Washington Boulevard, Culver City

Corey Helford is the anchor. Founded in 2006 by Jan Corey Helford and Bruce Helford, the gallery helped establish Culver City as a credible address for new contemporary art before most of the rest of the district caught up. The programming runs deep into pop surrealism and lowbrow-adjacent work — artists like SHAG (Josh Agle), Ron English, Beau Stanton, and a rotating roster of international painters whose work sits at the intersection of street culture, illustration, and fine art.

The gallery is big enough to run multiple shows simultaneously. The main space handles large-scale group exhibitions that function almost as mini fairs, while CHG Circa, also on Washington Boulevard, launched in 2012 as a platform for more focused solo and special projects. The tin ceilings and archway details in the Circa space give it a period flavor that plays well against the often frenetic work on the walls.

Corey Helford has also operated as something of an institution-builder for the New Contemporary movement, lending credibility to a category of art that for years got dismissed by the establishment. A transatlantic collaboration with Bristol’s City Museum helped bring that credibility international scope.

3. Thinkspace Gallery

6009 Washington Boulevard, Culver City

If Corey Helford is the anchor, Thinkspace is the engine. Co-owned and curated by Andrew Hosner, Thinkspace was founded with an explicit mission: push forward, introduce emerging artists, give the New Contemporary movement a curatorial home before the mainstream caught on. It has done exactly that, mounting over 200 exhibitions and turning a Washington Boulevard address into a genuinely international platform.

The programming tends toward the surreal and the narrative — complex, layered work by artists like Nosego (Yis Goodwin), Curiot, and Seth Armstrong, whose figurative paintings of ordinary people in oddly charged moments feel like stills from films that will never get made. Thinkspace also has a print shop that makes the work accessible to collectors not yet dropping five figures on a painting, which matters for building the kind of long-term audience the gallery has cultivated.

Hosner is also the organizer behind Beyond Eden, an annual multi-gallery event bringing together new contemporary galleries from across California. It started modestly and grew to attract thousands of attendees — as good a measure as any of how much the audience for this work has expanded. Thinkspace has taken its program to Honolulu, Berlin, San Francisco, and Miami, but the Washington Boulevard space remains the base.

4. Paul Loya Gallery

2677 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Culver City

Paul Loya sits a few blocks off Washington on South La Cienega, and the slight detour is worth it. The gallery’s programming tends toward the conceptual end of the spectrum relative to its neighbors — solo shows that give artists room to develop ideas rather than group exhibitions built around a theme. Loya has an eye for work that rewards sustained attention: the kind of show where the press release initially sounds like academic boilerplate and then you walk in and it all makes sense.

The stable has included Tom Fruin, whose large-scale recycled Plexiglas sculptures glow like stained glass in daylight; Gordon Holden, whose sardonic paintings comment on pop culture with enough intelligence to avoid feeling like mere illustration; and Corey Smith, whose high-gloss flat paintings interrogate celebrity and leisure with a post-Warholian sharpness. Smith even staged an ongoing performance piece in the gallery — a fictional religion called the Church of Quantum Interconnectedness, complete with a sculptural “Personal Pyramid” healing device and the instruction “Let the Healing Begin.” That’s the kind of thing Paul Loya Gallery tends to do.

The space also runs artist talks with the kind of informality that makes them actually worth attending — a Saturday afternoon conversation over cold beverages, not a formal lecture.

5. The Branded Arts Complex

8810 W. Washington Boulevard, Culver City

The Branded Arts Complex is gone now — demolished in the fall of 2013 — but its legacy is worth understanding because it shaped how Culver City thinks about public art. The complex was a project conceived and managed by Warren Brand, an LA-based entrepreneur and art collector who turned a set of industrial buildings into what became one of the largest collections of murals in Los Angeles.

Over the course of the complex’s run, Brand organized and sponsored more than 30 mural projects, bringing in artists from across the world: Dabs Myla, Herakut, David Flores, Yoskay Yamamoto, Miss Van, Shark Toof, Bumblebee, Meggs, Gaia, Surge, Cyrcle, Rime, and many others. Behind the smaller of the two buildings on West Washington, the murals covered essentially every available surface — over 25 works in total, ranging from small-scale pieces to massive wall paintings that rivaled anything in the city.

The complex drew comparisons to 5 Pointz in Long Island City, New York — another temporary street art sanctuary that eventually fell to development. The parallel was apt. Like 5 Pointz, the Branded Arts Complex was an unofficial museum, a community gathering point, and a reminder that some of the best art in any city exists outside institutional walls. A documentary was funded to preserve the record before demolition; the walls are gone, but the photographs persist.

6. Kenny Scharf’s Davis Bros. Tires Mural

5931 West Washington Boulevard, Culver City

Kenny Scharf’s relationship with Culver City runs deeper than a single mural. He lives and works in the area, and when Branded Arts brought him in for a project, he painted on a building he’d been driving past for years — Davis Bros. Tires, a shop he’d actually been a customer of. The mural at the corner of La Cienega and West Washington incorporated a pre-existing piece by a younger female artist, wrapping it in Scharf’s signature cartoony characters rendered in the dense, colorful style that made him a fixture of the East Village art scene in the 1980s before he moved west.

What makes Scharf interesting in this context is the continuity between his gallery practice and his street work. The Pop Renaissance paintings he showed at Honor Fraser drew on Renaissance altarpiece iconography; the mural on Washington Boulevard draws on the same visual language but in a setting where anyone waiting for a bus can encounter it. That connection between the gallery interior and the street exterior is part of what gives the Culver City arts district its particular character — the work doesn’t stay inside.

7. Fabien Castanier Gallery

2919 La Cienega Boulevard, Culver City

Fabien Castanier Gallery occupies a slightly different curatorial lane from the Washington Boulevard cluster, showing international artists — particularly European and UK-based painters — who bring a more YBA-adjacent sensibility to a district that skews heavily American. The gallery has staged LA debut exhibitions for artists with significant international profiles, including Stuart Semple, whose exploration of mass culture and youth psychology sits somewhere between Robert Rauschenberg and MTV-era pop imagery. The programming favors artists who combine painting, sculpture, and installation — shows that feel environmental rather than a row of objects on white walls.

8. Luis de Jesus Gallery

2685 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Culver City

Luis de Jesus Gallery runs a more intimate program than some of the larger spaces on the strip, with a project room that hosts focused solo presentations alongside the main gallery. The work tends toward painting and works on paper — Geoffrey Todd Smith’s abstract canvases, which look like collage from across the room but reveal intricate thin linework up close, are a good example of what the gallery does well: work that rewards the extra few steps forward, the slower look.

The gallery’s scale means it never feels overwhelming — on a busy opening night when Corey Helford has two hundred people in it, Luis de Jesus offers something quieter, the kind of space where you can actually spend time with a painting.

9. Arcana: Books on the Arts

8675 Washington Boulevard, Culver City

No gallery district is complete without a bookshop that takes art seriously, and Arcana fills that role for Culver City. The stock runs deep into artist monographs, exhibition catalogs, and out-of-print art books that you won’t find at a general bookstore. The shop has hosted events that connect the district to LA’s broader art history — a signing for Tim Nye’s book on John Altoon, for instance, drew on Arcana’s proximity to the Helms complex and the cultural gravity of the district itself.

Altoon was one of the most electric figures in the Ferus Gallery circle of the 1950s and ’60s — alongside Ed Kienholz, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Larry Bell, and Ed Ruscha — and a book launch on his work finding a natural home here speaks to how the district has become a repository for LA’s art history as well as its present.

10. LA><ART

Corner of La Cienega and Washington Boulevard area, Culver City

LA><ART is the institutional conscience of the district — a nonprofit contemporary art space founded in 2005, committed to experimental exhibitions and public art initiatives rather than the commercial programming that drives the galleries around it. It operates without the pressure of sales, which means it can take risks that galleries can’t: work that isn’t finished, ideas that aren’t resolved, artists at stages in their careers where nobody knows yet what they’ll become.

The organization has run editions sales, public programming, and garage-sale-format events that make art accessible without making it cheap — twenty percent off editions in a parking lot on a Saturday afternoon is a different experience from a white-glove preview, and intentionally so. In a district that can feel commerce-heavy, LA><ART is a reminder that the best reason to be here is the work itself.

The Culver City arts district still has its frustrations. The galleries don’t coordinate their openings, so a full circuit requires multiple trips or a lot of luck with timing. Some of the best spaces have cycled through tenants as rents have climbed. The Branded Arts Complex, which was the most vivid evidence of what the neighborhood could be at its most porous and public, is gone.

But Washington Boulevard on an evening when three or four galleries are open simultaneously is still one of the better experiences available to anyone interested in what contemporary art looks like outside the institutional mainstream. The New Contemporary movement that took root here has grown into something genuinely international, carried by galleries like Thinkspace to Berlin and Miami and back again. The street art that lines the blocks leading up to the gallery cluster is the overture. The shows inside are where it gets complicated, which is exactly how it should be.