Roberts Projects is leaving Culver City, as gallery scene shifts to Central L.A.
From the day she moved into the former home of Andy Warhol until she and her partner put it on the market, Elizabeth Diller had never thought she’d be in this position: working at the world’s most famous art gallery in her father’s old space. But when she and her partner signed on to manage the Elizabeth Diller Gallery of Art and Design in Culver City, they never imagined they’d live in one of Andy Warhol’s own houses.
Today, that’s exactly what they’re doing for the former home of L.A. Times art critic Roberta Smith, a converted single-story former residence in a Culver City neighborhood that’s now called Gable Court. But it’s more than that: It’s a place of refuge, a place with no other museum anywhere in the world, and a place where every work of art is a chance to make and be more, a place to learn and to experiment. It’s a place where people can do beautiful things in a beautiful place. And it’s a place where they might find a home.
Elizabeth Diller and her partner, Lisa Williams, are moving in for a year. The gallery will be hosting pop-up exhibitions in the historic home, which was designed by architect Edward Durell Stone. Some of the works inside will hang only once, but in the permanent collection, and will be moved frequently and regularly.
To find out how it all came to be, I went to the gallery last week to see how it’s all fitting together, literally and figuratively.
Inside the new Elizabeth Diller Gallery of Art and Design, there’s a moment when no one is really in the gallery, the kind you’d find on a tour bus. There’s more than a little tension in the space, particularly toward