The Little Gallery That Could

October 3, 2011, Cover Stories, Features

Mon, Oct 03, 2011

This month Billy Shire celebrates the 25th Anniversary of La Luz de Jesus with a monumental group show that features more than 260 artists, and companion catalogue which includes the following essay by Billy himself.

Who could imagine that I'd be running La Luz de Jesus for 25 years (which included a five-year detour to Culver City with a second gallery, Billy Shire Fine Arts), but here I am, 25 years later and none the wiser. As I remember the beginning, opening an art gallery was almost an accident, and it wasn’t necessarily planned as an ongoing endeavor. The first show was an outgrowth of the Soap Plant/Wacko store and the fascination with the Day of the Dead artesania we had been selling since the mid-70s. This ended up being the focus of the inaugural show, under the name Soap Plant in October 1986, and was our annual show for ten years.

A lot of people ask why I named the gallery La Luz de Jesus. At that time, I was traveling a lot in Mexico, buying Day of the Dead pieces and other folk art, as well as religious antiques, curiosities and kitsch, and that seemed to be the direction the gallery was going in. I was wracking my brain for a name, and late one night as I was falling asleep, it came to me: La Luz de Jesus, The Light of Jesus. It just rolls right off of the tongue, and in all my years of traveling through Mexico, I had never seen it used. So I had to grab it.

When the gallery started, we really didn’t have a discernible agenda or direction, except to have fun with it; we certainly did not do it to make money. The first gallery director, Robert Lopez, was very important in shaping the creative direction of the gallery, and the first few shows were mostly what I called Neo-Folk: self-taught artists working in tin, ceramic, and found objects. By July of '87, we started doing shows with local underground artist and illustrator friends, and this soon became the principal direction of La Luz de Jesus. At the time, there were no permanent gallery spaces showing this kind of art, although we had our antecedents: Steve’s House of Fine Arts, The Art Boys, and Zero One's seminal show, "Western Exterminators." In the late 80s, we suddenly found ourselves at the center of a popular art scene, which turned into a runaway locomotive. From our little gallery in Los Angeles with a handful of artists, it all bloomed: there are now hundreds of galleries all over the world and literally thousands of artists working under the Lowbrow and Pop Surrealism banner.

I am very proud to have been there early and to have helped give a burgeoning art movement a boost along the way. As for all the wonderful art and writing in this book? I’ll let that speak for itself.