The work of L.A.-based conceptual artist David Horvitz has never been easy to categorize. For the last two decades he’s worked across media, from video to sculpture to found materials. His latest project, 7th Ave Garden, also defies easy categorization. On a vacant lot in Arlington Heights, he’s created a small but verdant oasis that hosts exhibitions, poetry readings and performances.
On a formerly fallow lot off Washington Boulevard where a house had burned down, Horvitz has worked with landscape architecture firm Terremoto to build a secret garden that also acts as a living ecological lab and art project. Horvitz has a handshake deal with the property owner, who gave him permission to build a garden with the knowledge that the lot could be developed or sold in the future.
Undeterred by its potential ephemerality, Horvitz began planning the garden. When friends questioned the wisdom of planting a garden that may be destroyed to make way for real estate development, Horvitz brushed concerns aside. “If I have [the garden] in five years, this tree will be five years older and it’ll be 25 feet tall, right? But if I hesitate, then nothing will happen. It’s a very hopeful act,” Horvitz says.
Terremoto senior project manager Kasey Toomey, who worked on the garden, considers the site’s temporariness part of its appeal. “It forces you to be actively present in the moment. You have to enjoy it while it’s there,” he explains.
Work on the garden started at the same time as demolition of Los Angeles County Museum of Art buildings for its new Peter Zumthor-designed campus, creating an opportunity to use the rubble of the museum to create a new artwork. Tipped off by art world connections, Horvitz collected concrete detritus to serve as garden hardscape.
Other found materials include pieces of flat concrete pulled from Ballona Creek to make a walkway, rubble from the site of the former South Central Farm, and sand from the historically Black-owned oceanfront site of Bruce’s Beach in the South Bay.
Some of the shells peppered throughout the garden come from Horvitz’s beachcombing excursions, others are from oyster tasting parties held in the garden, but most were collected from local restaurants such as Michelin-starred Mexican seafood restaurant Holbox in South L.A.’s Mercado de Paloma. The shells serve a dual purpose — one that is functional, as they decompose to improve the soil quality, and another formal, reflecting moonlight in the evening.
Horvitz is acutely aware the garden has a dual existence. “There are two gardens here,” he explains. “There’s the garden that has plants and there’s the garden that’s my artwork. It has a different way to articulate and discuss it.”
Working with Terremoto’s team, Horvitz planted about 100 native plants, including elderberry, sage, brittlebrush and manzanitas. The heavy rains of the last few winters helped nurture scattered wildflower seeds, creating a dazzling burst of flowers in the spring that attracts butterflies and bees to the vivid petals. Horvitz also left some of the original inhabitants of the garden intact, including a rose bush, juniper and four o’clocks. Plumeria cuttings from his grandmother’s house in the neighborhood were also added to the plot.
The design of the garden isn’t the result of a formal process and plan. Rather, it was built intuitively on site. “It emerged rather than was pre-designed,” explains Terremoto principal David Godshall. After purchasing the native plants, Horvitz and the team at Terremoto hosted a plant layout day guided mostly by instinct. “Our design intent was to not make a plan,” Godshall says.
A wooden platform and benches in the center of the garden serve as a focal point for performances and events. Horvitz invites other friends, artists and curators to produce exhibits, events and readings and collaborate with him, taking a relaxed approach to programming: He intentionally keeps the garden’s programming relatively casual and free form. There is no official website or newsletter or Instagram handle for the garden.
“What I don’t want to have happen is this to become a full-time job and become professionalized,” Horvitz insists. Instead, Horvitz relies primarily on word of mouth for events, and will sometimes post to his personal Instagram a day or two before an event. He recently hosted a March 30 book launch party for “The World’s Largest Cherry Pie,” a collection of poetry by his friend Sophie Appel, that featured a harpist and tea tasting. And on Saturday at 4 p.m., there will be a reading of Cecilia Vicũna’s poetry at the garden.
While the garden is rooted in local culture, built bit by bit from the flotsam and jetsam of Los Angeles locations and plants native to the ecology, the programming is more global in approach. Interdisciplinary artists Martine Syms and Sophia Cleary partnered on a poetry reading in the garden. L.A.-based public arts nonprofit Active Cultures hosted a traditional Chinese tea service and cooked mushrooms in a ground oven for a community barbecue with artists Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez and Shanhuan Manton. Dance company Volta Collective has choreographed and performed in the garden.
During this year’s Frieze Los Angeles art fair in February, Horvitz partnered with French contemporary art museum Frac Lorraine. The Frac Lorraine prominently features a garden as a living artwork at its location in Metz, France. Horvitz and Fanny Gonella, director of the Frac, collaborated on an exhibition that included work from the Frac Lorraine collection including Rosemary Mayer, Lotty Rosenfeld and Mario García Torres. The artwork is primarily conceptual and performance, avoiding some of the stickier issues of transport, storage and insurance most museum loans entail.
While the Frac inhabited the 7th Ave Garden temporarily, Horvitz has contributed a more permanent artifact to the Frac’s collection through his work “Fleur de Corbeau.” The piece, a frangipani branch from his grandmother’s former garden in the neighborhood, will be planted in the museum’s garden, crossing temporal and spatial boundaries between the institution and the artist.
The exhibit, titled “Conversations With Ghosts,” included a mural reproducing a detail from a piece by Corita Kent currently in the Frac Lorraine collection. The bold black and yellow painted Kent aphorism on an adjacent wall, “Hope Arouses as Nothing Else Can Arouse a Passion for the Possible,” still overlooks the garden, serving as a trenchant visual reminder of the garden’s purpose.