STEVE TURNER & VICTORIA DAILEY
Steve Turner and Victoria Dailey have been following their bliss as co-collectors for 20 years. Their art collection is a huge project on three levels, encompassing collecting, dealing and nonprofit. For example, when they discovered 1920s African-American artist William H. Johnson, they traveled to Denmark on numerous discovery trips, collected his work, wrote a book, (William H. Johnson: Truth Be Told), organized a traveling museum show and created a nonprofit, which awards an annual cash prize to an emerging African-American artist.Dailey started as a 19th-century book and print dealer, until she became interested in California art. Most recently, she has spun her passion for the cultural archeology of Southern California into LA's Early Moderns, a "secret history" of the Depression-era LA avant-garde including Richard Neutra, Anaïs Nin, John Cage, Paul Landacre, Knud Merrild, Henrietta Shore and Edward Weston.
Steve Turner Contemporary is right across Wilshire Boulevard from the Broad Contemporary at LACMA — only Turner got there first. When he founded his gallery in 1988, the focus was on 19th- and 20th-century objects; it has evolved over time to feature a shortlist of emerging contemporary artists, including My Barbarian.
Turner and Dailey were in their home in LA when I reached them by phone on October 1, in the midst of financial hurricanes. It was heartening to hear their two voices merge in one story.
Artillery: What's the latest addition to your collection?
Victoria Dailey: We just got a photograph by a 19th-century Los Angeles photographer named Blanchard. It's called Live Oak, Kenilworth. Kenilworth is near Pasadena, only it's not there anymore. Here's a huge old oak tree, in a place that no longer exists.
Steve Turner: Southern California is a forensic study: You study the evidence of it. Victoria wrote about Henrietta Shore in her book; our show in November will be the first to link this artist of the past to contemporary artists. It's really a continuum. At the gallery, we'll increasingly do shows that have a dialogue between the past and present.
How do you catalogue your thousands of photographs and paper works?
Turner: Everything we get, we have photographed and entered into a database. For us, it's not merely the acquisition, like some sort of trophy grab; it's the study of the object, and with the gallery, the recontextualization of it. We have the database at the gallery: Sometimes people end up in front of my computer for a while.
Dailey: Artists love to see what we're doing in our collection because they've never been exposed to this before. They know Miró, but they don't know J.B. Ball, the 19th-century African American photographer: That work just hasn't made it into the canon.
Turner: We have collections that are deep on the history of African American presence in the West. Beyond that, we have a great African American collection. We have a collection of Chinese in California and the west. Our historic collection is focused on objects of the past, in the way that in the last 20 years, there have been race- and identity- based artists. We focus on source material from the past.
Dailey: We like things that haven't been well documented elsewhere. We like pioneering in these areas. And we like the underdog.
Who do you like in contemporary art?
Turner: We love Mark Bradford. We just bought a work by an artist Tavares Strachan, who shows in New York at Pierogi.
Dailey: And we love Brenna Youngblood ...
Turner: We own several works by her. Rodney McMillian: We bought works by him recently.
Dailey: We tend to like artists who have a dialogue with history. The Chapman brothers piece we have is a reworked Goya.
Where do you go to hunt for art?
Dailey: All over the country ...
Turner: In New York, and we're going to Houston soon. We go to San Francisco a lot, and here in LA, we do an average of two studio visits a week, all up and down the food chain. We go to the best galleries to see what's going on, read a lot, go to nonprofit spaces and are always going to one charity event after another, auctions and so forth. We look forward — in that we look at contemporary artists, and we look backward, at early photographs and ephemera and books. So we have different categories of interest, which sometimes relate to contemporary art, sometimes not, but it's an interesting dialogue.
What are your favorite museums in the world?
Dailey: The Museum of Jurassic Technology. Love the Hammer. Those are our local favorites. I love the Tate Modern.
Turner: I love the New Museum. I love the energy, the reinvention. We went to the International Surfing Museum in Huntington Beach on our summer holiday. We were driving the other day in Chinatown and there was this Chinese Historical Society — dying to go there! It's right in Chinatown, in an old pagoda-style building from the '20s.
Sounds to me like you might be building a museum.
Turner: We're building a life. ■
Steve Turner Contemporary, 6026 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036 (across from BCAM at LACMA); (323) 931-3721; www.steveturnercomtemporary.com; The William H. Johnson Foundation for the Arts; www.whjohnsongrant.org
Robyn Perry at robynpc@gmail.com