Inside Superchief Gallery, murmurs of pleasure and eagerness crammed the air. Round 60 folks gathered within the downtown artwork house for a display printing workshop on a late summer time night in August.
Younger households, good friend teams and {couples} crammed neon pink pews, able to print designs on T-shirts. Salsa music blared over the audio system as a couple of stragglers took their seats and others admired art work on the partitions, together with a fine-line David Lynch drawing, a ceramic Garfield and an outline of a lowrider’s paint job.
Regardless of the full of life environment, this gathering is likely to be one of many final. Co-founder Invoice Dunleavy stated the gallery could also be compelled to shut this month if it might probably’t elevate sufficient cash to pay the payments.
“We thought we had till November to avoid wasting Superchief, however it got here early,” Dunleavy stated. “It’s not straightforward to construct the kind of group we’ve constructed. It will be an actual disgrace, and set the tradition again to some extent.”
For over a decade, Superchief has established itself as a spot the place punk rockers, graffiti writers, road photographers, homegrown high-quality artists and anybody with a piqued curiosity in counterculture collect to have fun artwork.
Audrey Caceres poses along with her display printed jersey at Superchief Gallery, through the workshop.
(Jonathan Alcorn/For The Instances)
The gallery’s attainable closure would add to the checklist of shuttered companies in downtown L.A. which have struggled to rebound following the COVID-19 pandemic. Though downtown continues to draw residents, many workplace buildings are scuffling with falling values and excessive vacancies.
This yr alone, the neighborhood has seen legacy kitchens just like the Authentic Pantry Cafe and Cole’s French Dip face everlasting closure. The Mayan, a historic nightclub, is about to close down later this month and Angel Metropolis Brewery introduced that its Arts District taproom is being put up on the market.
Nick Griffin, govt vice chairman of the DTLA Alliance, a coalition of property homeowners, stated the closures mirror the “ebb and move” of enterprise and altering tastes quite than circumstances in downtown.
“Superchief is likely to be closing, however Dataland, the digital AI Artwork Museum up on Bunker Hill, goes to be opening subsequent yr. The Lucas Museum, an enormous billion-dollar museum, is opening in Exposition Park. The Broad is doing a $100-million growth of its facility,” stated Griffin. “It’s the traditional churn of companies and tradition.”
He says that extra companies are opening within the space than are closing, however the ones which can be closing are usually “very excessive profile,” cater to area of interest audiences and sometimes have a cult following — like Superchief.
Artwork galleries have confronted their very own challenges.
The worldwide artwork market declined 12% in 2024, marking its second consecutive yr of falling gross sales, based on the Artwork Basel and UBS International Artwork Market Report. Going through shrinking income and rising overhead prices, a number of different artwork galleries throughout town, like Blum, Clearing and Tanya Bonakdar, have additionally lately introduced the closure of their L.A. areas.
Dunleavy first began to note a falloff in enterprise a couple of yr in the past. The gallery’s ordinary sponsors, who would connect their names and types to the varied exhibitions, began to tug out and income from digital artwork (NFT) gross sales declined.
“Individuals are simply being extra cautious with their cash,” Dunleavy stated. “They’re scaling again their promoting and promotional budgets. On the identical time, fewer individuals are shopping for artwork. These are the 2 issues that maintain an artwork gallery enterprise mannequin afloat: sponsors and gross sales.”
Final spring, he and his enterprise accomplice Ed Zipco launched a fundraising marketing campaign to assist save Superchief. They began a Patreon, a month-to-month subscription service tailor-made to particular person audiences the place members are invited to attend particular occasions and get numerous perks for a month-to-month price ranging $10 to $30.
Subscribers and common gallery-goers have since carved pinewood derby vehicles, participated in a determine drawing class the place fashions in lingerie had been certain by ropes and shopped at a month-to-month vendor market. The crowdfunding now has about 400 members.
Though the fundraising has helped, the gallery isn’t making sufficient to cowl month-to-month bills that vary from $10,000 to $15,000, most of it to pay for renting the ten,000-square-foot constructing on South Los Angeles Road.
The gallery employs two part-time staff and is now open solely on the weekends. Dunleavy disclosed that he hasn’t paid himself in over two years and has taken on extra loans to fulfill bills.
A flier with a Patreon QR code is pictured on the Superchief Gallery throughout their occasion.
(Jonathan Alcorn/For The Instances)
“We began to incur lots of debt in an effort to keep afloat, hoping issues had been going to get higher. However issues didn’t get higher, they only acquired worse,” he stated.
Superchief moved into its present location in 2022. The gallery, which opened in 2014, was beforehand housed in a warehouse in Skid Row the place it shared house with artists. It quickly constructed a relationship with L.A.’s underground artwork scene, promoting artworks and competing with bigger mainstream galleries.
In 2020, a couple of weeks earlier than the pandemic, a close-by explosion broken the constructing, and the gallery was compelled to relocate to its present location.
“The economic system is unreliable, and the artwork market is just not what it was pre-pandemic, so it’s forcing us to make some actual pivots and diversifications,” Dunleavy stated.
Although September could be the ultimate curtain name for the gallery, Dunleavy hasn’t given up. He plans to host ticketed events and different fundraising occasions with the gallery’s related artists.
“Patreon is about midway the place it must be in an effort to be sustainable,” Dunleavy stated. “I’ve realized how to deal with hectic conditions by throwing loopy events and unconventional occasions — in order that’s precisely what I plan to do.”
Surrounded by ink-flooded screens and piles of white T-shirts used for the August workshop, Audrey Caceres, a frequent Superchief goer, had simply completed printing her pink jersey with the gallery’s brand in vivid blue ink. The Boyle Heights resident says the gallery’s location, on the outskirts of downtown close to East twenty first Road, has introduced new life to the industrial space.
“I actually can’t think about LA [sub]cultures with out Superchief. It’s such a powerful basis for photographers, zine makers, and multimedia artists,” Caceres stated. “So, in the event that they weren’t right here, I don’t know the place folks would run to show their work.”
