The Lodge is a contemporary art gallery based in East Hollywood, Los Angeles. Since opening in early 2015, the gallery has brought a singular, vibrant perspective to the city’s rapidly growing cultural landscape. The gallery possesses an inclusive roster that spans modalities and viewpoints. More jewel than big box, The Lodge encourages intimacy, interaction and a sense of wonder that is in the tradition of iconic Angeleno galleries like Walter Hopps’ Ferus’. Here, the gallery is a physical experience designed to celebrate play, theatre and improvisation.

As a curator, Lodge’s unerring eye and endless curiosity calls to mind writer Eve Babitz’s maxim that “it takes a certain kind of innocence to like LA.” The city itself—with its creative outliers, nihilists and dreamers—is the golden thread that connects each show and infuses the gallery with its aura of lost bohemia. It’s a mix that seems could only happen in Los Angeles, a place of existential improbability. “Here, fantasy is made real,” Lodge has said. “When LA was built in the early 1800s, nobody thought it could sustain itself. It was a dust bowl with no water, but the sheer force of the human imagination created what it is today.”