SoLA Gallery

If you haven’t heard about SoLA Gallery, an impressive gallery space in the heart of South Los Angeles, now is the time to discover it. Peggy Sivert Zask and Ben Zask opened the gallery in March 2017 at 3718 W. Slauson Ave., and have in quick order brought high art to the neighborhood.

While the space is relatively new, the inclusive mission of the gallery and the gallerists’ aesthetic is not – it just finally found the right home. According to Peggy Zask, the gallery had a pattern of moving from space to space over a period of ten years.

“When the last notice to move out from the LOFT in San Pedro was received in 2016, one of our supporters, artist and art educator Linda Jo Russell, stepped forward,” Zask explains. “She was ready to invest in a building to serve as her art studio and gallery.”

Zask describes the understated space as a “beautiful, simple building… we only had to redesign a few walls to create a spacious front gallery, Russell’s art studio, and several smaller gallery spaces.” The Zasks found the location perfect, and they’re thrilled at the responsiveness of their new South LA community.

“There is enthusiasm for art and our involvement that we never experienced in the South Bay. The neighborhood may be designated as underserved, but we feel we are in a rich culture with an amazing history. The residents of the local community seem to have great urgency to express their past, present, and future – and we are there to provide a place for this.”

The gallery recently launched programs for just this purpose, including the Black Women Artists Advisory Committee, which helps graft SoLA into the local art community, and an Arts and Literacy Education program that develops free public projects designed to enrich and strengthen local families. The latter program also supports children’s literacy through quality arts education. It includes free weekend art workshops for all ages, which are often conducted by guest curators and draw large crowds.

Every Saturday, the gallery also offers portfolio reviews of local artists’ work for exhibition consideration. They also provide an international monthly artist-in-residence program and support monthly meetings of professional artists’ groups with an annual group gallery exhibition.

SoLA has already hosted 12 exhibitions in the course of their first year, featuring nearly 300 LA-based artists.

Among them were May 2017’s Identity, curated by Lauren Evans, professor of art at LA Southwest College. The show featured the work of art students at the college in a diverse expression of their own identities through visual art, spoken word, theater, and video works. With October 2017’s Diasporagasm, curated by artist and Glendale Community College art professor April Bey, and sponsored by the LA Department of Cultural Affairs, the gallery featured the work of 14 artists who identified as black. Together, they compiled works that were created in, or representative of, their heritage in Los Angeles, Haiti, Ghana, the Caribbean and West Africa. “Working with concepts surrounding collaboration, identity, relationships and politics, this exhibition moved through membranes tarnished by societal labels and preconceptions, flattening experiences down to humanist moments, while still maintaining the self-identifying variations that make us individuals,” Bey says.

Also in October, the gallery presented a small exhibition of art by local artists who participated in SoLA’s portfolio reviews, Artists of South LA.

In March of this year, the gallery showed a truly immersive exhibit of sculpture, TENDER GROUND, with the work of artists Pamela Smith-Hudson and Kristan Marvell, curated by Nicholette Kominos. Zask says the artists used “irreverent techniques and strong gestural momentum,” creating compelling objects that resonate powerfully outside of traditional representation and language.

In this show, Pamela Smith Hudson’s paintings and Kristan Marvell’s sculptures and sculptural wall-works play off one another, creating astonishing abstract landscapes. Fierce and absorbing, the visceral textures, nooks, and crannies of Marvel’s cast bronze are rich and passionate. They seem to erupt, as if from the earth’s core, while Smith-Hudson’s work is more of a look within layers of land and space and time, a vision otherwise unseen. Using rich, deep encaustic layers, printmaking, and collage, her paintings are dense, yet filled with light. Like so many exhibitions here, this was museum quality work, displayed in a community gallery space.

The Zasks have always been deeply dedicated to the arts. The couple met in 1989, when Ben was running a Redondo Beach framing shop and gallery – BZ Framing – and Peggy a Torrance art space, Minus Zero Gallery, which was a first for contemporary art in the South Bay. With a newly combined family of young children, the pair of working artists put their galleries aside for a while and spent 20 years teaching: Ben teaching science in South LA, and Peggy art in Manhattan Beach. In 2006, the pair began to exhibit in new gallery spaces, with a vision to develop “relevant contemporary art with local community interaction and international participation with artistic and curatorial experimentation.”

Now a non-profit, Peggy states “we are focused on serving the South LA community and excited that there is so much support and enthusiasm for building the arts and culture in this area. I work as executive director, and Ben as preparator for SoLA.” She adds, “we hope to build our constituency as we continue to serve in our new neighborhood.”

Artist friends of the couple are also involved in the gallery, serving on the board as advisory, staff members, or through philanthropy.

At the same time, the pair continue to work as artists. “Ben is exclusively an assemblage artist, and I work mainly in sculpture and painting,” Peggy relates. Her delicate, ethereal mixed media sculptures of horses are the stuff of dreams, while her husband’s work has an earthy, intense, and often witty bite.

Despite the challenge of creating her own art while running SoLA, Zask says “the work of a non-profit is something that allows me to give to others, and it gives me a sense of accomplishment. My art is inspired by and intermixed with the projects that I continue to develop and become involved with. Both the gallery and my personal art practice keep my life exclusively devoted to art.”

She adds that “since we moved, we have developed a new board and advisory committees. These groups are connected to a broad new diverse community of artists, who we are getting to know. Each new artist brings with them their supporters, and we are introduced to more artists. It is a networking web as broad you can imagine,” she enthuses. “We also have juried shows that anyone can enter. Through those, we meet even more incredible artists.” In fact, the Zasks are looking for proposals from area curators and artists, and ask only that the concept for an exhibition demonstrate a connection to contemporary culture and issues.

Thus far, SoLA has worked with an exciting and diverse group of curators including April Bey, Nicholette Kominos, Peter Frank and Fatemeh Burnes, Lore Eckelberry, David Lovejoy, and Monica Wyatt; and upcoming, Mark Steven Greenfield.

SoLA’s location has been dynamic and galvanizing. “We have become much more aware of what is going on in the African American arts community. It seems like development is across all art disciplines: TV, film, music, visual art – the message is one of collaboration and support. In LA, African American artists are stepping out into the spotlight,” Zask asserts. “Women and minorities are being given opportunities like never before. African American artists… have an experience that is unique, and many artists such as Kara Walker, Mark Bradford, and Kehinde Wiley among others use that history in their art,” Zask says, also citing a vibrant color palette in many works.

“There is even a movement going on in the Crenshaw district to highlight the history and culture of South LA by working exclusively with black artists. The plan is to build parks, public sculpture, and murals in the Crenshaw corridor. The idea is to recognize and establish the identity of the area for its historically rich culture,” Zask explains.

SoLA is a hub, a space, and a movement that encourages South LA artists to connect with their rapidly transforming community.

— Written by Genie Davis
— Photography by Farida Amar
— First published in [ Issue 2 ]