Artists Have to Keep Pushing Forward: Eve Fowler on Artist Curated Projects

By Jake Yuzna

Walker Publishing Filed to Visual Arts · Part of Location, qhov chaw, goobta, ubicación

Otis Houston Jr., <em>Change is possible</em>, 2018. Courtesy of Gordon Robichaux.

Born in Philadelphia, Eve Fowler is an artist based in Los Angeles. Identifying as queer and feminist, Fowler often brings attention to queer and feminist histories and people through a variety of mediums and endeavors. Some of their most notable work includes a series of texts appropriating Gertrude Stein’s poetry, portraits of male hustlers in New York and Los Angeles in the ’90s, and the ongoing Artist Curator Projects (ACP), which presents exhibitions of local artists.

In an interview with Jake Yuzna, Fowler discusses what about Los Angeles influences their work and led to the creation of Artist Curator Projects.

Jake Yuzna

How long have you lived in Los Angeles and what brought you there?

Eve Fowler

I’ve lived in LA since 2002. In the 1980s, I had lived in California before I relocated to New York City for nine years. The thing that drew me back to California and to LA was the natural world. I really missed nature when I lived in New York. At that time a lot of people were going back and forth between NYC and LA. I had a lot of friends here in LA, and it seemed a little bit easier to live and work as an artist here.

LA is definitely more conducive to art-making because the artists who live here tend to be more collaborative and more helpful. Over the years it has become more difficult and expensive to live in LA, but still people help each other a lot here. They have the time and space to feel like they can help other artists, whereas New York used to feel like it was more like every person for themselves. I don’t know if it’s still like that, but it was.

JY

Do you consider LA your home?

EF

I do.

JY

How long did it take for you to feel that way?

EF

Even though I’m an East Coast person at heart, it took maybe five years.

JY

How would you describe today’s art community in LA?

EF

Right now, there is a new group of younger artists who are doing a lot and having their work seen. There is a lot of new theater and performance, as well as a lot of small artist-run spaces. Those spaces are interesting and provide a space for people who are looking for someplace to show their work. LA is the kind of city where, if you want to show your work, you can. That could mean starting in a gallery located in somebody’s backyard or in their house; but people go to those spaces and pay attention to them. People in LA respect those spaces because there is an ethos that, if a person is willing to put the work in and make a project space, people are willing to come look and take it seriously.

JY

How did Artist Curated Projects (ACP) start?

EF

ACP started in 2008 as a collaboration with Lucas Michael, but he left after two years to go back to New York City. We would go on hikes every morning because I had a dog, Dexter, and we were both living near in Hollywood.

During our morning hikes we would have long talks about friends who were really good artists but didn’t have galleries. We were trying to understand why these people who we thought were so talented didn’t have galleries, and why we didn’t have any agency to help them. I would always say, “This is so crazy because you can't have art without artists, but we don’t have any power. The collectors and the curators have all the power.” Artists have a very different kind of understanding of art, what they like and what art to champion.

We really wanted to help the other artists we knew. As we were planning it, Lucas and I decided to have other artists curate shows as well. At first we were looking for a garage space, but we just couldn’t find something that allowed us to have shows. Finally, one day I said, “You know what? I’m just going to sell my couch and get rid of the furniture in my living room. We can paint the floor, and we’ll just do it here.”

That is how ACP started in my living room. The main room had a two-story-high ceiling with windows above, so it was very bright and conducive to looking at art. You could have a tall sculpture in there, you could have other things on the wall, and it was in Hollywood. There weren’t galleries in Hollywood then but, because of its central location, people would come from all over the city to see the work.

Since the shows were curated by other artists, ACP attracted a lot of people. Both emerging artists and those who had been in LA for a long time were involved.

JY

How has ACP evolved since then?

EF

Over time, ACP started selling people’s work. At first, we didn’t think that we could do that and didn’t know how to do that. At first, we started showing people who were friends, and as it happened, a lot of those people’s careers took off. That led to some people–collectors–seeing ACP as a space where artists who were very commercially viable were coming from. People started to speculate on them, and at a certain point they were just buying everything, which is crazy. That was happening for a while.

Slowly over some years, I kept showing artists who had been making work for a long time but hadn’t shown much, mixed with artists who were new, young, and coming out of school. That allowed it to be a space where people have their first show. Often, ACP will present an artist who might have a gallery somewhere else but not in LA, followed by a group show that mixes newer artists with those who are more established in order to bring attention to those younger or newer people.

I’ve also noticed that when curators are doing studio visits for bigger exhibitions, often they seem to look at the ACP website. For instance, recently pretty much every person that’s shown at ACP had a studio visit for a big group show coming up in LA. I don’t think any of them got into the exhibition, but at least they had a visit so they could know these curators.

I don’t do ACP full time or all the time. It can be an off-and-on space. It’s just a way of creating opportunities for people.

JY

Do you have any processes or criteria you use to select ACP exhibitions?

EF

Usually, they are artists I know who might be struggling to have their work seen. Artists can’t do everything, but they are expected to do everything. ACP feels like something I can do to help fellow artists in Los Angeles. Sometimes people need that extra component of introducing the work to the world.

JY

How do you think artists view or approach artwork differently than those other perspectives?

EF

Artists have this instinct about the other artists. If you are an artist, you can tell when you are going to like another artist’s work right away when you meet them. That gut instinct is important.

There are things that other people who aren’t artists, like curators and scholars, can’t really understand, see, or get.

JY

Do you consider ACP a gallery?

EF

No, I don’t think of it as a gallery; it is a project space, or an artist space. If somebody referred to me as a curator, I would get upset because I’m not trained as a curator. Although this is called Artist Curated Projects, I’m not a curator. I’m just bringing friends together and showing people their work.

JY

Do you think ACP would’ve happened in another city other than LA?

EF

I don’t think so. People also took ACP seriously as it happened. There were a lot of interesting artists involved. With there being so many excellent art schools in this city, there were a lot of people looking for opportunities to show their work. You could live here as an artist because it wasn’t expensive. Sadly, that has changed, and it has become very expensive here, but young artists keep coming to LA. I don’t know how they’re doing it.

JY

Did Los Angeles uniquely influence ACP?

EF

When I moved to LA it was a place where you could have time and space to read and write. It is also a city where you can make projects happen as you think of them. Lucas and I did a lot of different projects before we started ACP. We organized screenings on somebody’s lawn, called Baba Bring a Blanket and Booze, where we screened our friends’ videos. We did several different things like that, where we created opportunities to present artists’ work that people would come to.

Now, there is a lot of stuff going on in LA. It has become a richer city culturally, but it’s also the kind of city where you can stay home and not feel bad about it. It’s not like New York City, where if you stay in for the night, you feel like you are missing the best thing you’re ever going to see.

JY

Do you see a connection between ACP and your other work? Are they a continuum, or two separate things?

EF

I see them as being the same thing, because what I do with most of my work is to draw or bring attention to others.

For instance, with the Colby poster series, I was trying to draw attention to Gertrude Stein.  When I first read her book Tender Buttons, I wanted to talk about it with people because it was so queer and incredible. Not to mention it had been written 100 years before I read it.

I was surprised when I discovered that no one had read Tender Buttons, but they all said, “Oh, I want to read that.” Everybody meant to read it, but no one had read it. I thought: Well, I’ll just take parts of this writing and put it on these posters and then people can read it this way. That led to a lot of people who saw the work buying the book and reading it.

This is true of a lot of my other work, as well as with ACP. I often think about recognizing people or remembering them both when they’re alive or if they died. That is where the impulse to do ACP comes from. These artists are alive. They’re making work. They need to be recognized. They need to be seen. They need to be visible because they could die. My mother died when I was young, so the reality of our limited time on Earth affects how I see these things.

As an artist it is always a struggle. You’re always struggling. You always have to try to keep pushing forward, pushing the ideas and making the work good. Being an artist is not like another profession, where you can become comfortable. Artists have to keep pushing forward and trying to figure out what the best way is to survive. It’s not easy.

JY

How does living and working at LA influence your work?

EF

The biggest influence is probably the other artists I’m around. I pick up influences I’m not really even aware of from those artists.

For instance, I was recently in Paris for four months as part of a residency. During that time, it hit me that, Wow, the larger artwork world is really different than the LA art world.

A part of the LA art world is very focused on flat works that are hung on the wall, whereas in the larger art world, there is less of a focus on paintings or works made to hang on the wall. Instead, there seems to be more of an interest in ephemeral works, like performance.

JY

Is there anything you’ve learned, or continue to learn, from ACP?

AF

Don’t limit yourself—and the weirder the better. I’ve seen exhibition spaces that are on someone’s dresser or a closet. Artists like Maurizio Cattelan had 2.5 square space in NYC; or John Burtle, who is also based in LA, created a gallery that is a tattoo on his arm. John displays other artists’ artwork on his arm. You can be standing next to him in a supermarket line, and there will be artwork attached to this gallery on his arm.

Artist projects can be anything, and they can help others discover compelling work that is already taking place in the city they live in. I think that is what ACP has always been about.▪︎

Learn more about Eve Fowler and their work here. Interested in ACP? Discover more here.