By Jori Finkel

When Susanne Vielmetter founded her eponymous gallery in Los Angeles 25 years ago, the local art market was a baby or toddler at best. The art schools were established but still gaining broader recognition, contemporary art museums were relatively young, and sales were, many thought, best left to New York. But she persisted in developing an exciting and wide-ranging program, giving artists such as Mickalene Thomas, Wangechi Mutu, Charles Gaines, Nicole Eisenman, Amy Sillman, Rodney McMillian, and Hayv Kahraman important early shows. She has done it all with vision, integrity, and intellectual flair – the German accent helps. Here, she talks about the ever-evolving LA arts community that she has helped to create.

You moved to LA in 1990 from Cologne, where you grew up and studied. What brought you here?

My husband is a molecular biologist, and he was offered a scientific research project at Caltech. We had three young children at the time. I wasn’t really crazy about moving to Los Angeles; New York would have excited me. We joined him under the promise we would stay only for a year. [Laughs]

So what was LA like for you – was there a kind of culture shock?

It was the opposite in every way of what I thought culture was. Cologne has a long and active history in the contemporary art scene, and the Cologne fair was the ‘it’ art fair for a while, with all this new, wild painting; all these boy-man painters who didn’t behave. What I learned was that LA functioned at the time very differently than a European city. It was very decentralized. It was impossible to get a unified impression of it. It was so far-flung; everyone was puttering away in their garage, making things, producing things. You want to go with the zeitgeist? In LA there was no zeitgeist. But when it comes to supporting discourse and radical ideas, LA was and still is unmatched. I think it’s more political, bold, and diverse than any other city – a place for radical fermentation.

You started your career by working at Newspace in Hollywood. What did you learn from that gallery?

What I learned most was how not to do things. At the time, to be fair, the traditional model of a gallery was one of control: the gallery was supposed to handle the market part of the career and the artist was supposed to be strictly working in the studio and not meddle with ideas of how to price work. The gallery had exclusive representation and all other galleries had to work through this main gallery. It was all too patriarchal for me. Very early on I thought artists should participate more in shaping their careers. The relationship between artist and gallery should not be one of parent and child, but more about collaboration and conversation.

Can you describe how LA collectors today are different from the collectors you met back then, or when you started your own space?

I can’t tell you how much has changed. We have so many more collectors than in the 1990s and they’re so much more sophisticated; they do their homework and they are often more knowledgeable and with it than I am. They make a full-time job of going out to look at things.

Your gallery moved from Mid-Wilshire to Culver City to downtown, where you’ve been for the past 6 years. What makes downtown LA particularly interesting to you these days?

I’ve always loved downtown – this fabulous place that had inexplicably always been neglected. I remember wave after wave of New York galleries opening in LA, but when Hauser & Wirth opened here in 2016 on 3rd Street, I thought this is a more serious move and investment – this will actually change downtown, and it has. What’s great about my particular location is we have amazing parking right by the front entrance. New York galleries that come here underestimate three things: freeway access, parking, and walkability.

How has your work as a gallerist changed over the years?

For the longest time, especially right after the pandemic, the art market was so frenzied. In order to compete and prevent artists from being poached, there was enormous pressure to grow big. As all of this happened, my personal role became more and more removed from the things I loved about running a gallery: talking to artists and collectors. Ninety percent of my time became managing my team. Now, with the market shift, I’m trying to work with a smaller team. I’m going back to how the gallery used to be, where I was more accessible to my artists and interacting more directly with the curators and collectors.

Your program is so diverse in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity but also in terms of medium and practice: everything from ceramicist Bari Ziperstein to painters such as John Sonsini to a socially focused artist such as Andrea Bowers. Is there any type of art you won’t show?

In the past I’ve been very experimental with all genres, but I would say right now I am a little hesitant to make a full-on commitment to exhibitions that are expensive to produce. That would add a responsibility to the gallery that I don’t know if the artists I’m representing could carry.

Is your promotion of women artists something you’ve developed intentionally?

Because I had kids early on, I was thrown into life in a way that I discovered feminism very quickly for myself. It was always a huge concern. Did I always talk about that all the time or carry it around on my sleeve? No, it was not really a fashionable thing to do at the time I opened the gallery, but I had this secret wish to show a gender-balanced program. My hope is that someday it will be so normal nobody needs to mention it.

You live in Altadena, where the Eaton Fire did so much damage to a community rich with artists. Is your home still standing?

Between my husband, my daughter, and me, we own three homes. Two of them burned and the third we had to completely remediate. That has been cleaned up, and we moved back in. My daughter is permanently displaced.

Is there anything people can do to help artists in Altadena at this point?

Buy their work. What helps even more than a donation is a sale because it validates the artists’ work, which is crucial after such a traumatic experience.