Los Angeles According to: Olivia Barrett of Château Shatto
The Melrose Hill gallerist loves the people, the persimmons and the hummingbirds, but admits you need a ‘fortified sense of self’ to thrive in LA
The Melrose Hill gallerist loves the people, the persimmons and the hummingbirds, but admits you need a ‘fortified sense of self’ to thrive in LA
Olivia Barrett and co-founder Nelson Harmon opened their LA gallery in 2014, initially on South Maple Ave in Downtown, representing artists including Body by Body, Cayetano Ferrer, Parker Ito and Helen Johnson. Ten years later, in a significant expansion, the gallery relocated to Western Ave, joining the likes of David Zwirner, James Fuentes, Hoffman Donahue and Southern Guild. Barrett considers the changing face of the city she says she was ‘magnetized to’.
What’s your personal relationship with Los Angeles?
Like any kind of enduring love, my relationship with Los Angeles is characterized by curiosity, seduction, captivation, disappointment, fear, fascination, commitment and ambivalence. I moved to Los Angeles 14 years ago, having been magnetized to the city for many years before by its great productive output; the intense interplay between the veneer and the substance that has fed so many practitioners here. Or, in Sturtevant parlance, the ‘razzle dazzle of thinking’.
What are your favourite museums and galleries in Los Angeles?
The Brick. Hand Hamza Walker the keys to any exhibiting institution and it will ascend to the top of its class. Plus, he has the kind of support that only a visionary director can attract, so things really happen there.
What’s a memorable exhibition you’ve seen there recently?
The Brick’s portion of ‘Monuments’, with Unmanned Drone by Kara Walker as the centrepiece. There is an efficiency to the gesture and an infinity to its implications – sculptural, political, semiotic. Artworks that are precise where they need to be to render them inexhaustible elsewhere, this is what I’m often looking for.
Los Angeles doesn’t carry you along in a sweep of busy momentum; it demands you determine a pace.
Who are the artists you’re bringing to Frieze Los Angeles 2026?
For the first two days we’re exhibiting historical 20th-century works by Emily Kam Kngwarray and John Divola, and new works by Emma McIntyre, Charlie Engelman and Julia Yerger. On the weekend, we swap this more programmatic booth out for a presentation of Paul Becker’s paintings on the walls and Aria Dean’s recent sculptures that adorned the set of her Performa commission on the floor.
What are your LA eating and drinking recommendations?
Holbox, forever. I’ve been eating there since the week they opened, when Château Shatto was a five-minute drive away, and they’ve prepared food for nearly every party I’ve thrown since. A Martini and artichoke at the bar at Little Doms. A mid-shelf tequila and soda during each half at a Clippers home game in seats close enough that you can hear James Harden’s shoes screech on the court. All the street vendors selling sliced fruit throughout the city. As many persimmons as possible from Ken’s Top Notch at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market in the narrow window they’re in season.
What’s the best thing about LA?
The people. The tremorous presence of hummingbirds. The neurosis of acorn woodpeckers. The furry blur of coyotes at dusk. Griffith Park. The abandoned Oceanwide Plaza development in Downtown – what a superb social sculpture. The agony and the ecstasy of supporting the LA Clippers. The holograms of history that flicker on the city’s surfaces and in the mind’s eye. The demands the city makes of you and what it might give in return. Because of its physical and social orientations, Los Angeles requires an articulated sense of curiosity towards yourself and towards others. It asks you to make daily choices about where you want to be, both in the physical boundaries of the city and the thought exercises of your mind. Los Angeles doesn’t carry you along in a sweep of busy momentum; it demands you determine a pace. Bracketing questions of economics, which dictate how one can experience any major city in 2025, you do need a fortified sense of self to participate meaningfully in Los Angeles.
What’s the worst thing about LA?
Nearly everything that Mike Davis and Octavia E. Butler wrote covers this question.
Further Information
Frieze Los Angeles 2026, 26 February – 1 March 2026, Santa Monica Airport.
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Main image: Olivia Barrett, Los Angeles, 2025. Photograph: Zeinab Saleh
