Meet the Women of Frogtown, An Artist Community Like No Other
What are the chances that five women artists, with studios in the same Los Angeles complex, would all be rooting for one another? Just such an unlikely arrangement exists right now in Frogtown, a sleepy, mostly residential neighborhood on the Los Angeles River, minutes from downtown.
Ruby Neri, a sculptor of bright, bumptious, large-scale female clay nudes, had her eye on the magic warehouse for some time before she officially obtained it in 2020. “It was a little bit beyond my price range, but I signed the lease two months before COVID shut things down.” Lily Stockman, an abstract painter, heard about it from a friend, and got in touch with Neri. “It was truly right in my backyard,” she says. Neri then called Hilary Pecis, a realist painter of interiors and landscapes, and Megan Reed, a sculptor who had once been Neri’s student. Within the first year, the adjoining mirror-image warehouse, where camper vans were outfitted with all their trappings, became available; a gestural abstract painter named Austyn Weiner moved in.
This accidental community of women artists—ranging in age from 32 (Weiner) to 51 (Neri)—almost immediately became a family of friends. “I don’t think any of us expected that,” Weiner says. “We all, without trying, really do like each other.” They are at different stages in their careers, doing very different work, but if there’s one thing that connects them, it’s their belief in no-holds-barred, vibrant, all-out color (“I’m almost a hundred percent positive that each of our palettes will make their way into one another’s work at some point,” says Weiner) and a commitment to the idea that participating in the contemporary art world does not have to mean adopting a cutthroat attitude.
The vibe, in fact, couldn’t be further from the intensely competitive climate in Bushwick cubicles or Jersey City’s vast Mana Contemporary, or any number of L.A. warehouses where artists have taken root and fierce rivalries abound. There are no handles on the nine-foot-tall doors to their Frogtown studios because they’re rarely shut. “Deep conversations happen, where we’re pinging off of each other,” Reed says. “That’s the joy of being in a space like this. I feel that electric energy.”
