As Ben McGinty prepares for the final show at his iconic Gallery, he has a lot to say on the business of art and the art of business in Altadena.
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(Pictured: Ben McGinty inside the indoor/outdoor Gallery)
The Gallery at the End of the World not only displays art, it's a work of art in itself. Yes, there’s an actual gallery building, but what was once a small parking lot is now an indoor/outdoor assemblage of gallery space, stage area, kitchen, bar, and an intertwining trumpet vine that seems to be taking over everything. A canopy of magnifying glasses dangle from the ceiling like bats in a crowded cave. It’s busy-looking, yet strangely calming at the same time. Altadena author Laura Randall put the gallery on her list in her book, Peaceful Places Los Angeles.
But the clock is ticking on this Altadena landmark at 2475 N. Lake Ave. Gallery owner Ben McGinty is readying his last weekend art show (or “art bender”), and then will prepare to close the gallery’s doors forever.
“it’s really funny, because the landlord saying ‘I want to sell’ -- it’s what started the ball," McGinty said. "It’s what made it fall into place, like: whoa, what am I doing, and where am I going?”
When the owner of the property said she was considering selling, it started a whole process for McGinty -- did he want to buy it? Did he want to continue to do this anymore? It was a process that ended when he decided to close the gallery and take the next step in life.
“It’s been a good run, 16 years in the location,” McGinty said. “I mean, it would’ve been great if it did pick up -- it would be great if it had done what I hoped it had done. It provided me [an opportunity] to be a lot more experimental than I would be normally, if it had been a traditional retail establishment. It would’ve been great -- but now it’s time to change."
McGinty said that in the end, the expenses of running the gallery were becoming a burden -- he was falling behind financially, and he’d never made a living or taken a salary from it.
“If I was in Venice, it would have been crazy,” McGinty said. “I mean, I would be busier than I want to be. I like it like it is -- I don’t like it so busy that you don’t have time for yourself, that you can’t even think. You fall into the whole rat race game. So I’m kind of glad it worked out the way it is, and had done what it’s done -- the business would have been more successful. But I don’t consider it NOT a success.”
McGinty located the gallery in Altadena because it’s where he was raised, and where he still lives. His first venture on Lake Avenue started in 1994, running a vintage shop with a buddy in the now-closed building next to the gallery space, which morphed into an underground (i.e. not exactly permitted) cafe. The problem with running a cafe, McGinty said, was that it becomes a hangout for people who occupy space for the day but may not buy enough to make it worth the owner's while.
“The cafe just barely broke even. That’s where I learned it’s fun, but it becomes a hangout .. and that gets old, where people aren’t buying anything, they’re just hanging out,” McGinty said. “Come here and work on a project, come here and add to the environment, don’t come here and just watch everything going on.”
The vintage shop/cafe closed in 1997, but in the meantime McGinty's business took over the space that is now the Gallery in 1995, opening it as the Underground Art Society in 2002. Even as he ran the gallery, he continued -- and still does today -- making a living as a vintage items and antique dealer at flea markets.
A contrarian view
But running a gallery on declining Lake Avenue was becoming a frustrating experience for McGinty: “Part of it is that I don’t think [Lake Ave.] has ever been pushed to redevelop. Once it started fading out, it faded out.”
(Pictured: McGinty with some of his own art: a shadowbox and pendant using a dentist's antique artificial teeth)
McGinty holds a contrarian view to many Altadena merchants and residents, in that he thinks chain stores can have a place here: “I can see, where there isn’t anything up here, that a Starbucks would’ve revamped this business district. Single-handedly, a Starbuck's would’ve brought in like-minded other retail that the community would actually shop at, and not just, oh, yeah, I know it’s there, but you know, I’ll go to it once in awhile.
“Instead, it’ll be like: Oh, I’ll get a cup of coffee, I’ll go to a hardware store. I’ll see what the Gallery’s got going, because they always have such interesting art there. Oh, yeah, there’s the little scrapbooking store, I’ll get some cards and things and make a fun little note for someone -- and that’s how it starts.
“If there was a Starbuck's at Mariposa and Lake, the people who go to Websters will go across the street ... or actually patronize the stores on this side of the street.”
Besides a lack of attractions, McGinty also says the conversion of retail into office space along Lake hurts merchants. Offices don’t invite people to come in and shop the neighborhood: “That’s why they build office buildings -- office buildings are for offices. Buildings on the main street are for retail.”
And another factor is the spread-out nature of the Altadena business districts: “Altadena has four thoroughfares: it has Allen, Lake, Fair Oaks, and Lincoln. Having four separate districts completely splits it up, and they don’t interconnect. They leave Altadena out of the loop as far as having a viable business district, and I don’t see that changing. I don’t see it really becoming this little Larchmont Village, or like Myrtle Avenue in Monrovia. It’s just too spread apart, and there’s not enough. I don’t think there are enough storefronts.”
(Pictured: Renaissance woman Micki Mills belly-dancing at the Gallery's July 17 benefit for the Light Bringer Project. Photo by Gary Altadena)
The greatest assemblage
In the meantime, he’s preparing for the Gallery’s last hurrah: the final Art Bender, which will be Dec. 3-5. “December is the last art show, and I will be working on trying to get together a kind of liquidation sale of a lot of the props, the doors, windows, fixtures, things that are here that I really don’t have a need to keep. Probably bring in stuff in storage I don’t have to keep any longer, do a little housecleaning, and then dismantle.”
“My livelihood has always come from flea markets -- the Gallery has never paid me a salary. So I’ll continue to do the antiquing and junking and flea-marketing as my livelihood, and work on art. I want to work on my tiles -- I haven’t worked on my tilemaking in a long time -- and assemblage. It’ll provide me with some time and space to play around with what I want to do and where i want to go I won’t be leaving Altadena, I’ll just be leaving Lake Avenue."
In the meantime, he's sanguine about the dismantling of what may be his greatest assemblage: “I’m kind of excited. When someone does an installation piece for an exhibit, installation pieces are there for viewing then. When the show is over, that installation comes apart and either goes on to another location, or gets dismantled. and it’s just for that time.
"I feel like this is one big installation piece. And it’s an installation that’s housed many artists, and it’s given people a place to come to and experience art in a way and in a vision I had for showing art. And now it’s time for it to be dismantled, and the space returned back to where it came to the parking lot that it was. What someone else comes and does, it’s theirs, but it’s provided me with 16 years of being experimental. It’s kind of fun to have some closure.
"Ironically, it will be so fun to watch when people walk here, and it’s just a parking lot -- that’s the art, that you can make such a magical place for a space and time and then it becomes back to being what it was, a parking lot. And at least it’s documented. The greatest thing is that ... I’ve been so fortunate to have so much press and that it's worthy to be written about, and it’s done so much for the community. It’s on the books, it was here."
Note: There are lots of photos of the Gallery and its activity on the web, but none so unique as this 360 degree panorama of the entrance by Altadena-based actor/artist Carel Struyken.
