The Gaylord Apartments

Of the 200 occupied units that comprise the historic Gaylord Apartments in Koreatown, one apartment will let you walk in and make yourself at home. But be sure to make an appointment: residents Joseph Geagan and John Tuite will need to move the dining table out of their living room-turned-art gallery.

Open to the public since 2021, the gallery, also named Gaylord Apartments, has had over seven seasons of shows and installations, with programming scheduled through the summer. Situated in the same rent-controlled unit that Tuite lived in for six years, it has been home to shows by local and international artists with reach as far as Australia. 

Ruby McCollister

Gaylord Apartments began as a space among friends to jolt each other out of the COVID-19-induced languor. Geagan and Tuite’s confidants and fellow artists Veronica Gelbaum and Ramsey Alderson wanted to coax their respective social circles out of their homes as the pandemic’s restrictions loosened. The four friends figured that showing some art in Geagan and Tuite’s residence had the right easygoing social element. ‘People were having a different experience by coming to someone’s apartment to see some art after having been locked down for so long,’ says Geagan.  When I first arrived at The Gaylord last November, Tuite was in their dining room with artist Sam Anderson, putting the finishing touches on the sculptural works for her opening show. Anderson had been staying with Tuite and Geagan in their spare room prior to her exhibition. Meanwhile, the living room is sparsely furnished; random objects and tools are strewn across a makeshift table in the center of the room, all in preparation for Anderson’s show.

As two artists themselves, Tuite and Geagan had never thought they would be running a gallery, but they love the intimate joy of figuring it out together as they go. ‘It’s really fun,’ says Geagan. ‘I’m also lucky to have been an artist and grown up knowing artists here in L.A. and New York, so now I can do this with people I've known for years. We work on things together, we help install and finish, we do whatever we need to do to make shows happen.’

Willa Nasatir

For what it’s worth, apartment galleries are not novel concepts for art crowds in Los Angeles. Most recently, music executive and Los Angeles native Harley Wertheimer opened his CASTLE gallery –– focused on contemporary art –– inside a historic Victorian apartment building near Hancock Park. Near Griffith Park in Los Feliz, the Finley Gallery uses the apartment building’s stairwell to display a rotation of contemporary works through a panel of windows that are visible to public passersby and even more visible to the residents inside as they amble from their units to the laundry room or the parking garage. And in 2018, after almost a decade in operation, Park View moved out of its modest 350 square feet functioning apartment space in Westlake when gallery founder Paul Soto moved its location to Arlington Heights.

For two artists who were never sure of the forthcoming scope of their gallery, Geagan and Tuite get to learn a new venture from their roomy, light-filled comfort zone. ‘I never had any intention to run a gallery,’ says Geagan. ‘I had only been showing art as a painter since 2012 or 2013. I had never imagined doing this myself, but it just kind of evolved.' Amid the renewed interest in apartment galleries, currently, only Geagan and Tuite can claim to run one inside Los Angeles’ iconic rent-controlled residential building. The early Renaissance-inspired thirteen-story Gaylord Apartments building opened in 1924 and was marketed towards well-to-do couples and families who moved west to cash in on a burgeoning automobile and cinema culture. Designed to be one of L.A.’s first co-ops for the wealthy, the sumptuous final project boasted marble floors, custom tapestry furnishings, views of the mountains and the sea, and one of the most memorable lobbies in the city. Today, it has been dramatically repurposed into a nearly all-occupied apartment building with long-term working-class residents and the buzzing next-door H.M.S. Bounty dive bar for late-night explorers. Almost 100 years later, The Gaylord Apartments has evolved into a place for the people. 

Ramsey Anderson

As omnipresent and familiar as its glowing green neon sign at night, Geagan and Tuite intended for The Gaylord to sound like the spot where everyone knows to go. ‘We didn’t want it to seem like a serious gallery, so it kind of just happened that we called it the Gaylord,’ says Geagan. ‘We wanted it to have the feeling of it being a local place. And it rolls off the tongue.’ The Gaylord founders try their best to invite residents to every opening. Management has also gone to view works on display –– a sign that their quietly bubbling art space has its blessing. ‘It doesn’t seem to be an issue as far as I can tell. The most we do is have a number of people come in on a Sunday afternoon, and it doesn’t seem like the culture of the building would be against something like this.’

To date, showing at the Gaylord has been like a deep breath for working artists who are more familiar with the airs of rigidity that surround more serious galleries. Geagan and Tuite recently wrapped their exhibition of contemporary artist Willa Nasatir’s vivid paintings, a few of which still hang throughout the apartment, including their spare room. Displaying at the Gaylord brings a different perspective to her work –– hung on alabaster white walls that unabashedly show lived-in cracks –– than at somewhere like the Whitney or at Chapter NY, both of which have shown the artist for her works of everyday scenes that melt into each other to reveal dual meanings. Whereas in established institutions, there is a pristineness by which to abide, at the Gaylord, a visitor can appreciate paintings and installations as being a part of a home.

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The Gaylord finished 2022 with an exhibition by Anderson, which featured a group of assemblage works that resemble balcony-type forms in a variety of scales. Completed over 18 weeks while nursing a severe back injury, the artist gives surreal insight into her personal emotions and psyche as seen through familiar or mass-produced objects. Anderson’s exhibition and onwards –– including hosting a Frieze Week L.A. afterparty for Georgia Gardner Gray’s exhibition –– marks a blessed streak in which the duo has been able to secure programming through the richness of their social circles. ‘I just want it all to feel fateful,’ says Geagan about the future of The Gaylord. ‘In terms of future artists [...] I don’t really know how long this will keep going. This is an apartment, so who knows how long this project will continue as it is now.’

From the top floor, the Gaylord Apartments gallery overlooks swaths of apartment buildings, old and new, preserved in their brownstone blueprints or newly remodeled like shipping containers. Below, pedestrians cross streets and dodge listless cars cruising for parking, and savory smells from nearby restaurants on Alexandria Avenue waft through the air. The faint afternoon sirens and music rise to the top, but the building otherwise sits in stillness with the perennially blue sky. In a town that places so much value on views –– yet a town where people make do with the spaces they are given –– the Gaylord Apartments have pulled off the must-see gallery for any art lover.