Culver City Art Galleries
Los Angeles does not do walkable. That is what made Culver City strange. For most of the 2000s and 2010s, the stretch where South La Cienega meets Washington Boulevard was the closest thing the city had to a gallery district you could do on foot — park once, hit six shows, argue about them over a beer. Then the money moved. Blum (the old Blum & Poe) shut its brick-and-mortar in 2025. Roberts Projects left for La Brea in 2022, Corey Helford decamped to a warehouse downtown, Luis de Jesus went to the Arts District, and the space once called LAXART is now The Brick in Melrose Hill. Read that as an obituary if you want. But a real spine of galleries stayed, and a few good ones opened in the churn. This is what’s still here, still open, and still worth the walk. For the neighborhood’s fuller backstory — the murals, the Helms complex, how any of this happened in a former MGM company town — see the Culver City art guide.
1. Baik Art
2600 S La Cienega Boulevard, Culver City
Start at the bottom of the La Cienega cluster, where the boulevard meets Venice. Baik Art has one of the more specific programs in the district — a focus on Korean and broader Asian and diaspora artists, run with the kind of curatorial patience that comes from actually knowing the work rather than chasing the fair circuit. Shows here tend toward the material and the meditative: ink, ceramic, fiber, painting that rewards standing still. It’s a useful corrective to the pop-surreal energy that dominated Culver City’s reputation for years, and a reminder that the district was never a single aesthetic. Open Tuesday through Saturday.
2. Honor Fraser
2622 S La Cienega Boulevard, Culver City
Honor Fraser is two doors up. It has been an anchor on this block since the district’s peak years and shows no sign of leaving. Fraser — a former model turned dealer — built a program with real range, from established names to emerging painters. She favors work that pushes on traditional mediums without abandoning them. Kenny Scharf showed his Pop Renaissance paintings here, cribbing Renaissance altarpiece compositions and filling them with his cartoon logic — a nice bit of continuity given his mural sits a few blocks north (stop four). The space is big enough to give a show room to breathe. It’s one of the reasons the La Cienega end of the district still feels like a district.
3. Walter Maciel Gallery
2642 S La Cienega Boulevard, Culver City
Walter Maciel opened here in 2005 and has stayed put through every rent hike and exodus since. In this neighborhood, that counts as a form of stubbornness worth respecting. The program leans political and figurative. It shows emerging and established artists across painting, sculpture, photography, and video, favoring work that has something to say about who gets seen and who doesn’t. Maciel has a long record of showing Latino and LGBTQ artists without making a marketing campaign out of it. Four thousand square feet, no pretension, consistently good shows. If you only trust one gallery on this block to still be here next year, trust this one.
4. Kenny Scharf Mural at Davis Bros. Tires
5931 W Washington Boulevard, Culver City
Walk north to where La Cienega hits Washington and look at the tire shop. In 2013, as part of a Branded Arts project, Kenny Scharf painted the wall of Davis Bros. Tires — a shop he’d actually been a customer of. He wrapped a younger artist’s existing piece inside his own dense field of cartoon blobs and grinning creatures. It’s still there, still bright, last seen in good shape in 2026, overlooking Ballona Creek on its far side. This is the pivot point of the whole route: the corner where the La Cienega galleries hand off to the Washington Boulevard ones, with a free Scharf marking the turn. The district always bled between the gallery interior and the street, and this is the clearest evidence of it. More of that story is in the LA street art guide.
5. Klowden Mann
6023 Washington Boulevard, Culver City
Head west on Washington. Klowden Mann is the gallery doing the least to flatter you — in the best way. The program is conceptually driven and formally restless. Expect installation, video, sculpture, and painting from a roster weighted hard toward Los Angeles artists the gallery has committed to over the long haul rather than flipping. It reopened under this name in Culver City in 2013 after a Santa Monica run as gallery km. Today, it’s one of the more reliable places in the district to see an idea worked out with care. Shows here can be demanding. That’s the point. Tuesday through Saturday, and by appointment.
6. Sixty29 Contemporary
6029 Washington Boulevard, Culver City
Right next door is the district’s quiet oddity — Sixty29, the studio and exhibition space of artist Carlo Marcucci, running since 2011. It’s not a walk-in gallery in the usual sense: half working production space, half exhibition room, open by appointment rather than posted hours. Call ahead or catch it on an opening night. It rewards the effort precisely because it operates on an artist’s logic rather than a dealer’s. In a strip that has watched a lot of commercial tenants cycle through, an artist-run space that has simply kept making and showing work for well over a decade is its own kind of anchor.
7. Maxwell Alexander Gallery
6144 W Washington Boulevard, Culver City
A little further west, Maxwell Alexander occupies a lane almost nobody else in contemporary LA is willing to work: contemporary realism and the tradition that used to get filed under Western art. That means representational painting done seriously — landscape, figure, still life — by artists who can actually draw and aren’t embarrassed about it. It’s an unfashionable position in a district built on pop surrealism and concept, which is exactly why it’s interesting. The gallery has been a fixture on this end of Washington for years. Its Small Works shows are a genuinely good way to buy a real painting without a five-figure check. Open Wednesday through Saturday.
8. Arcana: Books on the Arts
8675 Washington Boulevard, Culver City
No gallery district earns the name without a serious art bookshop, and Arcana is one of the best in the country. Operating out of the Helms Bakery complex since 2012, it deals in new, rare, and out-of-print titles on photography, art, design, architecture, film, and fashion. These are the monographs and exhibition catalogs you cannot find at a general bookstore, and increasingly cannot find anywhere. Bring time. The stock rewards browsing, the staff knows the material cold, and the Helms complex gives you somewhere to eat when the walking catches up with you. Open Wednesday through Sunday.
9. Thinkspace Projects
4217 W Jefferson Boulevard, Los Angeles
Thinkspace was the engine of Culver City’s New Contemporary scene for years. The gallery, run by Andrew Hosner, gave the movement a curatorial home before the mainstream noticed. It has since moved a mile south to Jefferson Boulevard in West Adams, taking two adjacent buildings and expanding rather than folding — a happier version of the district’s story. The program is the same one that built its reputation: surreal, narrative, technically dense figurative work from an international roster. A print operation lets you start collecting without remortgaging anything. The move out of Culver City proper is worth naming honestly, but the gallery is very much alive. It’s bigger, in fact, than it was on Washington.
10. Lowell Ryan Projects
4619 W Washington Boulevard, Los Angeles
The last stop is technically over the line into West Adams, a few minutes’ drive from the core, and it represents the direction the whole scene has drifted. Lowell Ryan opened in 2019 — after the district’s supposed peak, which tells you the energy didn’t die so much as spread. The program favors idea-driven, materially adventurous work by artists building genuinely new bodies of work rather than repeating a signature. It’s a good final argument that the Culver City gallery story is a moving target rather than a closed chapter: the map keeps redrawing itself a few blocks at a time. Open Wednesday through Saturday and by appointment.
The honest read on Culver City in 2026 is that it’s thinner than it was and richer than the obituaries suggest. The heavyweights that made it famous mostly left for La Brea and downtown. If you want that scene, the best galleries in Los Angeles hub and the West Hollywood galleries guide will point you there. But La Cienega between Venice and Washington is still the rare LA block you can do on foot. The Scharf mural is still on the tire shop, and Walter Maciel still opens on Saturdays like nothing happened. Go before the next round of leases turns over.