PASADENA. In February 2017, La Luz de Jesus Gallery director Matt Kennedy launched a new gallery, Gallery 30 South, in Pasadena’s Green Street Village Landmark District. He was soon joined by a group of international artists and prominent guest curators from the Norton Simon, LACMA, and Bergamot Station.
Located at 30 S. Wilson Ave., just south of Colorado Blvd., Gallery 30 South represents a broad selection of contemporary artists from emerging names to established international figures and showcasing metallurgy, painting, sculpture, installation and new media.
The exhibition program has featured solo presentations by young Los Angeles-based performer and painter Lindsey Way, who rose to fame at the creative core of internationally acclaimed art-rockers Mindless Self Indulgence, José Rodolfo Loaiza Ontiveros’ controversial remixed Disney paintings, a multi-media retrospective on Asian and American culture jammers Panik Collective, and the first Los Angeles gallery showings of Japanese neo-modernist, Shigeru Idei and Danish motion philosopher, Torben Ulrich. The gallery has also showcased groundbreaking installations by Dosshaus and Indecline, and made international headlines for presenting Frances Bean Cobain’s first adult art exhibition, which sold out in a single day. March 2018 brought the first-ever exhibition of paintings by Hip-Hop legend Chuck D. of Public Enemy and Prophets of Rage.
In December of 2018, Gallery 30 South showcased the work of Disney Imagineer and Jeff Koons consultant, Ken Salter, in collaboration with dream pop pioneers, Mazzy Star in a fully immersive and interactive exhibition that utilized video feedback and music to create a meditative state of mindfulness. The summer of 2019 hosted the work of Ryuhow and Koko Shimizu in a showcase of traditional and abstract paintings and sculpture that included proprietary hologram technology.
But in addition to fostering well-established artists and high-profile projects, Kennedy dedicates much of his time to mentoring emerging artists and developing talent via his world famous (and high concept) Coaster Show, which displays a thousand unique pieces from artists new and old in a single exhibition of four-inch artworks–all rendered on actual beer coasters.
The space is also a showcase for the atelier jewelry of AdnohiA, whose Hammershøi inspired bracelet is currently on exhibition at the Statens Museum for Kunst–the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen.
Matt Kennedy comments: ‘The opening of Gallery 30 South in the district that once housed Albert Einstein’s office, right down the street from Cal Tech, and between the campuses of Art Center and PCC fulfills my decades-long ambition to work with an outstanding group of contemporary artists who bring together the disciplines of design and science to expand the definition of fine art in Los Angeles. I greatly look forward to playing a further part in a vibrant and increasingly international gallery community in Pasadena with this atelier, gallery, and media space.”
Gallery 30 South closed its Pasadena location in May, 2022 –choosing to continue promoting online exhibitions and guest curations via a series of partnerships with likeminded galleries, museums, and municipal projects.
Matt Kennedy
Matt Kennedy is a curator with twenty-five years of experience within the art world. Kennedy is also the director of La Luz de Jesus Gallery, where he started a five-year stint in 1991, returning in 2009 and serving in the longest, uninterrupted directorship of the gallery’s history. The interim included fifteen years of entertainment business experience ranging from performing and producing to funding independent and experimental film. He organized major exhibitions such as retrospectives of Neon Park and Chick Strand (LAMAG 2010), Wayne Martin Belger (Art Space Shreveport 2011), Myron Dyal (Indy MOCA 2012), and ¡Orale! The History of Pop Surrealism at The Harwood Museum of Taos (2013-2014). He has also contributed to Guillermo Del Toro: At Home with Monsters (LACMA 2016) and Pacific Standard Time (The Getty 2017), and Kennedy’s Panik Collective headlined the inauguration of the Houston Museum of Drawing, which was extended by more than six months for popular demand. As founder and president of Panik House Entertainment from 2003 to 2007 Kennedy oversaw restoration of many classic films now included in Mexico’s National Museum of Film, and broadened appreciation for Japanese feminist films of the 1970s. He is widely recognized as an expert on Animation & Sequential Art, Asian Film, and Street Art, and has appeared on many television and film programs for his knowledge on those subjects. He launched the Pop Sequentialism brand in 2011 as a traveling exhibition of important, contemporary comic book art, which subsequently grew to include a podcast, auctions, and a commercial website.