Image: Courtesy Tom Wiscombe Architecture
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The parallel revitalizations of the Los Angeles art and architecture worlds, and the downtown area in particular, overlap in a great many exciting and controversial ways. This is understandable, given how commercial interests frequently undermine the very presence of the artists and bohemian outposts that make a place attractive in the first place. Now a new cultural institution in the heart of DTLA's historic core, the Main Museum of Los Angeles Art, is poised to bring such diverging interests together.
The completed museum, scheduled to open in 2020, will occupy all or part of three historic buildings on Main and 4th Streets in downtown - the Farmers and Merchants Bank (which will house a gastro-destination restaurant), the Hellman Building (whose street level and lower vaults and engine rooms will be video and exhibition spaces with some rather epic architectural flourishes), and finally the Bankhouse Garage (whose roof will become a sculpture garden, amphitheater, and caf ). What they are calling Beta Main is located in a rather grand shabby chic 100-plus-year-old entrance hall that will later become the Main's front door. In the meantime it will host their first pair of short exhibitions - beginning on Sunday, October 30 with a 10-day performance residency by feminist social practice artists Andrea Bowers and Suzanne Lacy. The Main is another in the trend of boutique art museums - but as its founder, architect, art collector, and real estate developer Tom Gilmore, and its director, curator, public programming veteran, and L.A. history buff Allison Agsten explained in a recent interview with Artbound, the Main truly is like no other museum in town.
Photo: Elon Schoenholz
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First, there's the matter of its almost archeological adaptive reuse architectural approach. Gilmore's development company is known for its commitment to preserving the history of the structures they work with. The Main is part restoration, part re-imagination. It's a way to both honor and interpret these buildings, not just to knock them down and start from nothing. And the architecture alone really is its own reward - with lofty tiled and columned spaces, and subterranean surprises like old-timey wheel-locked bank vaults, brick walls and Rube Goldberg-like engineering gauges, dials and piping, vertiginous catwalks and turbine halls straight out of a Fritz Lang fantasy.
Second, there's the matter of its founding, funding, and curatorial structure. I'm the primary initial benefactor, explains Gilmore, but this is not the Broad. I'm not a fan of naming buildings after yourself. This isn't my museum - it's the Main Museum. When you see the Broad you see Eli's taste in art. When you see the Main it may have nothing to do with my own artistic sensibility. It's designed to be autonomous, to be flexible in how it can to speak to this evolving time and place. It is its own animal, with a template that gets added onto and that will morph over time. It goes way beyond just me.
Image: Courtesy Tom Wiscombe Architecture
That's where the role of its director, Agsten, becomes so paramount. In her previous post as curator of public engagement at the Hammer Museum, and indeed throughout her career, Agsten has been particularly interested in social practice and avant-garde forms of performance art, especially intimate, experiential, immersive and site-responsive formats - making her a well-suited leader for Gilmore's project to explore and celebrate the deep neighborhood history of working artists, while at the same time expanding that conversation to include other kinds of local history, innovations in real-time, ongoing support of the present-day L.A. artist community, and contextualize it all in the wider global cultural dialogue about art's role in civic life. The fact that in contrast to the Broad, which opened with its permanent collection, the Main is opening with a performance piece in a transitional space, immediately followed by an ad hoc locals-only gallery installation, is a gesture specifically meant to set this tone.
It's clear Agsten's influence is rubbing off on Gilmore, when he describes the Main's curatorial approach as a way to redefine what content can be. People can have a myopic focus on the object, and that's a false narrative. Process is also content. This resonates with certain language around ideas like Constantin Brancusi's architecture is inhabited sculpture and its containment of public space as expressive of cultural engagement. The performance engages the process right out of the box, Gilmore continues, and the space is a fundamental component of their performance. They've really been embracing the undone-ness of the place, seeing building it as an act they can help undertake as part of their presence. Agsten points out that Lacy and Bowers specifically operate in the context of endeavor and malleable use, deconstructing ideas about labor through the visible doing of non-art actions. They love the space. I think it hearkens back to the really raw places where they used to stage their works, many of which were in this part of town.
Photo: Courtesy of the Main Museum
During the opening, the artists will build a wall in the space to begin the process of sequestering themselves and to underscore how raw the space is, applying their own creative process to its architecture. This is just the kind of thing that's been getting Gilmore so personally inspired. The anthropological nature of the architecture history here through the years is evolving, but this is what m
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Image: Courtesy Tom Wiscombe Architecture 
