Art Center artists show how their majors—and the scholarships that support them—can be powerful investments in creating community.
Photographs by
Jennie Warren PHOT 05
Control Room
Graduating from Art Center, Fine Art alumni Evelena Ruether FINE 09 and
William Kaminski FINE 09 didn’t want to lose track of the many remarkable artists they had met here.
“So often, once you leave school everyone disperses to pursue their individual careers,” Ruether explains. “We wanted to stay in touch with the community we’d created at Art Center. At the same time, we felt that many of our peers were doing work that was as good, or better, than what we were seeing in commercial galleries, and we wanted to create a place for them to exhibit their work.”
In this way was born Control Room, an artist-run gallery occupying part of their live-work space on Seventh Street in downtown Los Angeles near the L.A. River. In its first years, the gallery offered a sense of community and networking opportunities for Fine Art graduates during the important early post-college years.
By sharing the cost of rent and keeping overhead low, Ruether and Kaminski find they don’t have to rely on traditional financial support systems, such as grants, to keep the space going. The result is increased freedom to mount whatever shows most inspire them, from the straightforward and traditional (think photography or drawing against stark white walls) to the out-and-out wacky (think Cheetos, water balloons and a cave into which you throw hotdogs).
It also means a lot of hard work. Ruether and Kaminski share the bulk of responsibilities that might be offloaded to staff in a commercial gallery; they do everything from curate the shows to paint walls to repair fixtures.
Like any healthy organism, the community of artists created by Control Room
is growing and changing right along with its founders. What had started out largely as a place for college grads to show their work has expanded to include artists from graduate programs all over Southern California and beyond, as well as mid-career artists of varying degrees of acclaim.
According to Kaminski, Control Room’s healthy following is in part the result of carefully striking a balance between the freedom of the typical artist-run gallery and the professionalism and precision of museums and commercial galleries. “Our model is always to do what best serves the work,” he says. “Sometimes that means crisp light and immaculate walls. At other times it means fog machines, black lights and puddles on the floor.”
