LA's The Box Gallery To Close After 19 Years

A gallery built around overlooked Los Angeles artists is ending its run. The Box, founded by Mara McCarthy in 2007, will close after 19 years in downtown Los Angeles, where it became a key venue for experimental work and artist-centered programming.

Located at 805 Traction Avenue, The Box opened with a multichannel video installation by Spandau Parks and quickly distinguished itself through exhibitions that revisited figures such as Barbara T. Smith, Simone Forti, Judith Bernstein, John Altoon, Naotaka Hiro Stan Vanderbeek, Leigh Ledare, and Wally Hedrick. McCarthy described the gallery as an“artist-formed space” created in collaboration with her father, Paul McCarthy, and shaped in part by his late-career market success. The aim, she wrote, was to support peers whose work had not yet received comparable recognition.

That mission gave The Box a distinctive place in the city's art ecology. Its program often resembled the ambitions of a nonprofit, yet it remained a for-profit gallery, sustained in large part by McCarthy Studios and by the family's commitment to building a broader arts community. In her statement, McCarthy said the decision to close was driven by changing economics around support for Paul McCarthy's work, as well as the losses her family suffered in the Eaton fire, which destroyed their homes in Altadena and other parts of the San Gabriel Valley in January 2025.

The gallery's final exhibition was a two-venue collaboration with Parker Gallery for Wally Hedrick, which ran through April 4. A closing fashion show for Johanna Went, with Asher Hartman, is scheduled for June 6.

The closure places The Box within a broader contraction in Los Angeles's commercial gallery sector. Marian Goodman Gallery recently announced it would close its Los Angeles space, while Tanya Bonakdar, LA Louver, and Tim Blum have also stepped back from the city in recent months. For many in the local art community, The Box's departure marks the loss of a space that helped define a generation of experimental Los Angeles art.

McCarthy said she will continue to advocate for artists, even as the gallery closes.“Supporting artists takes many forms,” she wrote,“and exhibitions are only one of them.”

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