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 objective of selling European trendy artwork, particularly a bunch of artists referred to as the Blue 4: Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, and Paul Klee. The constructing wouldn’t solely function her residence, but additionally 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 Residence, a bunch present curated by artist Beatriz Cortez, presents glimpses of the positioning’s historical past and its future transformation.
Beatriz Cortez on the Galka Scheyer Home (picture by Matt Stromberg / Hyperallergic)
Jay Ezra Nayssan, founding father of Del Vaz Tasks, urged they provide the house to artist Beatriz Cortez, who had misplaced her Altadena condominium within the Eaton Fireplace. After bouncing between buddies’ properties for a number of weeks, Cortez moved into the home in March, turning into its first unofficial artist-in-residence.
Set up view of Short-term Residence (picture by Izak Bunda, courtesy the artists and Blue Heights Arts and Tradition)
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, a lot of them German or Austrian émigrés. She considered her personal supportive inventive group 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 Residence, participating 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 heart 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 varieties 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.
rafa esparza, “Hyperspace: simultaneous τ (stop time)” (2025)
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 dying 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 dogs as I could,” esparza informed Hyperallergic, “but I could not counter the insurmountable life lost in the desert.”
Positioned on a ridge outdoors the home, Sarah Espinoza’s “Regalos del Fuego” (2025) overlooks town. Assembled from ceramics and objects discovered on the positioning of her residence, which was destroyed within the Eaton Fireplace, it stands as a memento mori and a reminder of the precarious steadiness between magnificence and devastation that’s ever-present in LA.
Maria Maea, “Then They Came” (2025)
Within the upstairs bed room, an intimate wall area of interest homes esparza’s adobe sculpture “Hyperspace: simultaneous τ (stop time)” (2025), which references the monumental Olmec head that was displayed outdoors the Seagram Constructing after which on the Mexican Pavilion on the 1965 World’s Truthful in New York. Esparza’s model is “caught at the apex of a worm hole,” he stated, “time-travelling through space 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 may 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.
Beatriz Cortez, “Crow Vision (Iridescence)” (2025)
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 Came” (2025). When ICE started descending on immigrant communities throughout LA in early June, Scheyer’s home on the hill felt particularly disconnected from the fact going down within the metropolis beneath.
Cortez frightened in regards to the predominantly Latine development employees and gardeners engaged on the stately residences she would cross on the windy roads as much as her non permanent residence. “If there’s a raid here, who’s going to come out and document [it]?” she questioned.
Maea additionally struggled with learn how to handle the state-sanctioned violence and disappearances. “At times like this, what is the role of an artist? We make things visible,” she informed 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 way of the window. When the viewer stands in the appropriate spot, the window serves as a map of town, bringing the stark actuality of the disaster beneath into sharp focus.
Marjorie Williams, “Beatriz Cortez, Fidencio Fifield-Perez, Phillip Byrne, and the 2026 UC Davis MFA Cohort at the Galka Scheyer House, 2025” (2025) (picture by Izak Bunda, courtesy the artists and Blue Heights Arts and Tradition)
Group and celebration shine by way of a Marjorie Williams’s {photograph} recreating Angelica Archipenko’s 1934 picture of revelers mirrored in the home’s home windows, 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 latest communal meal.
“From what I understand of Galka, this is work she would be proud of, smiling upon, that the house is still being used for this level of communication,” Maea stated.
