When oil heiress Louise Aline Barnsdall tapped Frank Lloyd Wright to design what’s now one of the most important modernist homes in L.A., she envisioned it as the anchor for a vast arts complex. That 36-acre vision was never quite completed, but the striking Hollyhock House was—and used briefly as Barnsdall’s home before acting as the California Art Club’s headquarters and, for the past half-century, as a house museum.
Now, a century since its completion, a bit of that original arts-focused ambition has returned to the Hollyhock House thanks to this first-ever artist intervention. Local couple Louise Bonnet and Adam Silverman were intimately familiar with the Mayan Revival house and eyed it for a collaborative exhibition—though they were unaware that the UNESCO World Heritage site had yet to host such a gallery show. That unintended boldness clearly worked in their favor, though, as new curator Abbey Chamberlain Brach accepted their proposal.
The result: A handful of paintings, drawings and sculptures that have been situated across the publicly accessible areas of the house. Silverman’s ceramics, like conical pieces by the fireplace made with ash from nearby olive trees, and Bonnet’s paintings, which draw your eye down the house’s various hallways, respond to each other’s work as well as the original bones of Wright’s design.
