LOS ANGELES — In 1933, German-Jewish artist, artwork collector, and artwork vendor Galka Scheyer commissioned architect Richard Neutra to construct her a home within the Hollywood Hills. Scheyer had moved to america in 1924 with the purpose of selling European fashionable artwork, particularly a bunch of artists often called the Blue 4: Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, and Paul Klee. The constructing wouldn’t solely function her residence, but in addition as a gallery and salon — an “airship,” as she known as it — the place artists, writers, and intellectuals may collect far above the glittering metropolis beneath. She had additionally supposed to create an artist residency, tapping architect Gregory Ain to design a second-story bed room, however she died in 1945 on the age of 56, earlier than it may materialize.
Eight many years later, her dream is taking form, with the Galka Scheyer home reborn because the Blue Heights Arts and Tradition residency the place Short-term Dwelling, a bunch present curated by artist Beatriz Cortez, provides glimpses of the location’s historical past and its future transformation.
The home was used as a personal residence after Scheyer’s loss of life, and remained so till final summer season, when it was put again available on the market. Benno Herz, program director on the Thomas Mann Home, noticed the itemizing and wrote an article in regards to the property for a German newspaper. His story caught the attention of Max Grimminger, a German artwork collector, who bought the house with the intention of preserving it and organising a nonprofit artist residency. When the devastating wildfires swept by the Pacific Palisades and Altadena in January, they realized the constructing may serve a direct want.
Jay Ezra Nayssan, founding father of Del Vaz Initiatives, advised they provide the house to artist Beatriz Cortez, who had misplaced her Altadena house within the Eaton Hearth. After bouncing between pals’ properties for a number of weeks, Cortez moved into the home in March, turning into its first unofficial artist-in-residence.
Whereas researching Scheyer, tracing threads that attain again throughout time and house, Cortez learn in regards to the social milieu she fostered in her residence, internet hosting cultural figures akin to John Cage, Bertolt Brecht, Maya Deren, Fritz Lang, and Greta Garbo, lots of them German or Austrian émigrés. She thought of her personal supportive artistic neighborhood in LA and its familial histories of migration, and commenced internet hosting dinners, cooking feasts of paella or bean soup. Impressed by these connections, Cortez curated Short-term Dwelling, partaking with the home’s historical past and echoes of displacement and solidarity whereas adapting Scheyer’s cultural refuge for up to date instances.
The exhibition is open by appointment the final two weekends in July, the ultimate days of Cortez’s keep earlier than the home closes for renovation.
Within the middle of the lounge sits “Ceiba” (2023), a metal sculpture of a ceiba tree — which represents a portal to the underworld in Mayan mythology — created collaboratively by Cortez, Phillip Byrne, and Tatiana Guerrero. Metallic parasites sprout from the welded floor of the volcano-like construction, whereas natural rubber and Mylar types bubble up from its inside, a illustration of multi-species hybridity. Close by is rafa esparza’s “Xolotl” (2018), an adobe canine that attracts on geometric Mesoamerican precedents, its head craning up on the viewer with an air of naturalism.
Esparza started making xolotl figures in 2018, impressed by his volunteer work a decade earlier with No Extra Deaths, a corporation devoted to stopping the loss of life of migrants throughout their treacherous border crossings within the Sonoran Desert. In Aztec mythology, the xolotl is a information to the afterlife, and esparza drew on these figures to honor those that had handed on. “I pressed as many canine as I may,” esparza advised Hyperallergic, “however I couldn’t counter the insurmountable life misplaced within the desert.”
Positioned on a ridge exterior the home, Sarah Espinoza’s “Regalos del Fuego” (2025) overlooks the town. Assembled from ceramics and objects discovered on the location of her residence, which was destroyed within the Eaton Hearth, it stands as a memento mori and a reminder of the precarious stability between magnificence and devastation that’s ever-present in LA.
Within the upstairs bed room, an intimate wall area of interest homes esparza’s adobe sculpture “Hyperspace: simultaneous τ (cease time)” (2025), which references the monumental Olmec head that was displayed exterior the Seagram Constructing after which on the Mexican Pavilion on the 1965 World’s Truthful in New York. Esparza’s model is “caught on the apex of a worm gap,” he mentioned, “time-travelling by house and time,” twisted and disfigured as it’s wrenched from its unique context. The work additionally ties into the home’s historical past: Scheyer had invited Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera to go to, however died earlier than they might make the journey. The sculpture is imagined as a present Rivera might need introduced from his huge assortment of Mesoamerican artwork in an alternate timeline.
On the bed room’s home windows, Maria Maea has famous the dates, places, and descriptions of a number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) abductions in her piece “Then They Got here” (2025). When ICE started descending on immigrant communities throughout LA in early June, Scheyer’s home on the hill felt particularly disconnected from the truth going down within the metropolis beneath.
Cortez frightened in regards to the predominantly Latine development staff and gardeners engaged on the stately residences she would cross on the windy roads as much as her short-term residence. “If there’s a raid right here, who’s going to return out and doc [it]?” she questioned.
Maea additionally struggled with the best way to handle the state-sanctioned violence and disappearances. “At instances like this, what’s the function of an artist? We make issues seen,” she advised Hyperallergic. Every abduction chronicled in her piece is marked by an extended blade of grass, pointing to the precise location of every incident as seen by the window. When the viewer stands in the correct spot, the window serves as a map of the town, bringing the stark actuality of the disaster beneath into sharp focus.
Group and celebration shine by a Marjorie Williams’s {photograph} recreating Angelica Archipenko’s 1934 picture of revelers mirrored in the home’s home windows, the town lights fanning out behind their silhouettes. Williams’s model options Cortez, Byrne, fellow artist Fidencio Fifield-Perez, and Cortez’s UC Davis graduate college students throughout a current communal meal.
“From what I perceive of Galka, that is work she can be happy with, smiling upon, that the home continues to be getting used for this degree of communication,” Maea mentioned.
