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.
