Paint, Sip & Poetry: Bendix Building Closes Out Its Gallery In Style For DTLA Art Night
DTLA Art Night exists to bring people back into Downtown Los Angeles — reconnecting Angelenos with the culture, art, and community that live in the neighborhood’s galleries, studios, and creative spaces. On August 6th, that mission played out at the Bendix Building, which partnered with DTLA Art Night to welcome a new wave of visitors dropped right off at its doors as part of the night’s citywide route. Once inside, guests found a special pop-up edition of Paint, Sip & LA Underground Poetry Night — timed to coincide with the closing of Bendix’s pop-up gallery in Suite 1030 which featured the works of Hagop Najarian, Olivier Ganthier, Francisco Palomares, and artist 9AM. As creative spaces and galleries across downtown LA threw open their doors for the night, Bendix building offered something a little different: a hybrid evening of visual art, live poetry, and interactive storytelling including a live DJ. Pairing the pop-up with the gallery’s closing gave the evening extra weight. Instead of a quiet farewell, Bendix Gallery went out the way it seems to have operated throughout its run: as a space for connection, expression, and community-built art. Folding that closing into the broader DTLA Art Night meant the send-off happened alongside dozens of other downtown venues doing the same thing on the same night — part of a citywide moment rather than an isolated one, and a chance for people who may never have set foot in the Bendix Building before to walk in as part of DTLA Art Night’s push to get Angelenos back out
Poetry was featured in various languages — from Walt Whitman to Pablo Neruda in Spanish.
@bendixbuilding
Featured Galleries & Artists
DTLA Art Night brought together spaces and artists from the Bendix including:
Track 16, Lobby 100
Francisco Palomares, Suite 200
Hagop Najarian, Suite 208
HK Zamani Studio, Suite 515
Summer Group Show, Suite 515
Disha Studio, Suite 522
Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Suite 523
Don Tinling, Suite 542
Wendy Bain, Suite 544
OFFUS Gallery, Suite 546
Persons Unknown, Suite 620
Durden & Ray, Suite 823
William Okun, Suite 903
Bendix Pop-Up Gallery, Suite 1030
Artist Wendy Bain painting in her studio.
Spotlight: Kelley Johnson’s Sculptural “3D Paintings”
One of the standout pieces on view during the night was a large-scale sculptural work by Kelley Johnson — a tangle of brightly striped steel beams arranged into an interlocking geometric structure that visitors could walk around and through.
The piece has a history that goes well beyond this one-night show. Johnson explained that the work originated as part of a much larger installation:
“I did it for Art Basel Miami for Untitled Art Fair. I made about 30 of these anbd they used it as a booth, for a podcast booth so everybody could set up their equipment and sit on it. These are made so they can be arranged and transformed a bunch of different ways. I have done several projects with these now. This particular piece is actually three distinct, separate pieces. I think of these particular works as three dimensional paintings, really. They are kind of like reverse moguls as you walk around and kind of interact and let them move you. I’ve made these for many public works. These are made out of steel with a matte-based paint.”
That idea of a “three dimensional painting” comes through in the piece itself: the steel members are striped in overlapping bands of red, blue, pink, and green, so the color relationships shift depending on the angle you are viewing it from — closer to a painting you walk around than a static object. Knowing that the modular units began as functional seating for a podcast booth at Untitled Art Fair adds another layer: the same components that once hosted conversations at Art Basel Miami were, on this night, reconfigured as a freestanding sculpture for Bendix visitors to take in and interact with.
For a closing night, this was a fitting way to mark the occasion — not with a somber godbye, but with paint, poetry, open mics, and galleries full of work from so many talented artists. As DTLA Art Night continues to bring DTLA[‘s creative spaces into conversation with one another, evenings like this one at Bendix are a good reminder of ehat those spaces can hold: not just finished work on the walls, but the process of making it togther, in real time.