This year LA Louver celebrated 50 years in business—making it the longest-running gallery in Los Angeles—with a major anniversary show featuring longtime artists such as David Hockney, Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Rebecca Campbell, Gajin Fujita and Alison Saar. Now, the Venice space is closing to the public, as the gallery transitions into a new phase that includes private dealing and pop-up exhibitions, mainly from its Jefferson Boulevard warehouse in the city’s West Adams neighbourhood.
“We are heading into a stage where instead of ten shows per year, we may make two shows a year, or another year it could be six,” says founder Peter Goulds, explaining that the Venice space will be listed for sale but remain open by appointment in the interim while they sell inventory. “As our imagination grows and we’re liberated from our programming responsibility, the gallery will be a more free-wheeling enterprise.”
Goulds, who turns 77 next month, plans to stay at the helm going forward. “I have no intention to retire, ever, but we need a new business model.”
As it shifts models, the gallery is donating its extensive archive to the Huntington in San Marino. Home to the papers of such writers as Octavia Butler and Christopher Isherwood, the Huntington Library has strengths in English-language literature and California history.
From left to right: Peter Goulds, Sandra Brooke Gordon and Elizabeth Goulds sign the promised gift agreement for the donation of the LA Louver Archive & Library to the Huntington on 9 September 2025 Photo by Matt Emonson. Courtesy of LA Louver, Venice, California
“The LA Louver Archive & Library offers an unparalleled record of Southern California’s artistic and cultural life, interwoven with vital Anglo-American connections,” says Sandra Brooke Gordon, the Huntington Library’s director. “[T]his gift will enrich our holdings not only in art but also in literature, business and cultural history, providing scholars with new insights into Los Angeles as a city of tremendous creativity.”
“It’s not that we are the best thing since sliced cheese or the greatest gallery that has ever been,” adds Goulds, a British transplant who kept his knack for self-deprecation. “It’s that we’ve spanned this important time period—the largest period of cultural growth in Los Angeles history spans 1970s to now.”
He said he was drawn to the Huntington, despite early conversations with the Smithsonian and Getty, because of its broad reach and “phenomenal resources”, mentioning the library renovation in progress, over eight miles of underground storage and 85 employees—17 of whom are curators—at the library alone. (That is more curators than are on staff at the Huntington’s art museum.)
While the news of LA Louver going private is likely to be lumped together with the sudden closing of Blum gallery, which surprised its artists and staff in July, Goulds says he began making his plans well before the current art-market contraction.
Installation view of Alison Saar’s solo exhibition Topsy Turvy at LA Louver, 28 March-25 May 2018. © Alison Saar. Courtesy of LA Louver, Venice, California. Photo by Jeff McLane.
Along with the gallery’s directors Kimberly Davis and Elizabeth East and managing director Lisa Jann, Goulds has been approaching the question of how to preserve LA Louver’s legacy—and goodwill in the community—for nearly a decade. They bought the Jefferson Boulevard facility in 2012 to mainly use as storage but later renovated the space to host private viewings, hold the archives and host scholarly activities. They hired professional librarians and archivists to help organise the archives. And they will continue to support artists by mounting focused shows from time to time, developing commissions or helping to handle museum projects.
Goulds also plans to use the Jefferson Boulevard space to work on two pet projects: his trove of Aboriginal desert paintings, to be donated to an institution; and his collection of works by the 19th-century French painter Adolphe Monticelli, whom Goulds considers a bridge between Delacroix and Cézanne and “which might not be gifted”, he says, noting “that research might exceed my lifetime”.
Rich archive ripe for research
The donation to the Huntington, to be handed over by 2029, includes documentation of the 665 exhibitions staged by the gallery, from career-defining shows of Wallace Berman, Fred Hammersley, Leon Kossoff, Ken Price and Alice Neel to the series of emerging artists group shows, Rogue Wave. The gift also contains volumes of mail and email correspondence between gallery staff, artists, curators and more.
The archive dates back to 1975, when Goulds—who had originally gone to art school in London and worked in graphic design, among other gigs—made plans with his wife Liz to open the gallery in Venice, near a cluster of artists’ studios. They struggled to find a gallery name. But Goulds had made an homage to Marcel Duchamp’s blackened window, Fresh Widow (1920), by creating a miniature louvered window with mirrors lining the slats. His flashy, California counterpart was called La Louver, which could be read as “LA Louver”. Liz suggested it would work for the gallery too.
Peter Goulds, L.A. Louver: Eros It Is the Mirror, 1976, at the LA Louver Archive & Library, Los Angeles Photo by Matt Emonson. Courtesy of LA Louver, Venice, California
The Hockney files are especially extensive, given that the artist has a way with words and has had 23 solo shows with the gallery. The files include many of Hockney’s earliest iPhone and iPad drawings and paintings as he began to embrace the technology as a medium for art.
Documentation of the gallery’s sales history, which helps to chart the growth of the Los Angeles art market, is also included. For better and worse, LA Louver resisted much of the international art-fair circuit, doing only Art Chicago in the 1980s and, later on, Art Basel on a regular basis.
Goulds says that ten years of participating in Art Basel spurred a major reckoning in 2012 about the gallery’s priorities—as “we were seeing the beginning of what would be the deterioration of the art-fair model”.
Gajin Fujita, Invincible Kings of This Mad Mad World, 2017 © Gajin Fujita. Courtesy of LA Louver, Venice, California. Photo by Jeff McLane.
“We looked at what it would cost us to do Basel Switzerland, Hong Kong, Art Unlimited and the sculpture programme as well. The total cost to do all that was $600,000,” he recalls. “How else could we spend the money?” The next day they learned about the Jefferson Boulevard property, which they bought for $1.65m, ultimately investing another $2.2m in building it out. They immediately stopped doing international fairs.
“People have built their financial futures on doing these big fairs, but if 60% of your business comes from that one source, that’s fragile beyond belief. You could go out on a dime with that,” he says, noting the importance of developing your home base. He adds: “Most of the galleries that have opened here in the last few years will not be here five years from now.”
