When I show up to meet Rick Garzon for the second time at Residency Art Gallery in downtown Inglewood, he calls to tell me to come to the back door. This entails walking through an alley, around the back of the building on Queen Street and through a gravelly, unglamorous parking lot to a row of security screen doors. Inside the single-room but spacious gallery, Garzon settles comfortably on a stool near the door in the area that functions as his office and staging ground.
At a house party, this space would be the kitchen. But it took more than a few inquiries to identify him, a tall man in nondescript sweats, sneakers and baseball cap, an imposing figure, maybe, were it not for his air of modesty and instantly disarming, perpetual smile.
Moving through the crowd that evening, greeting everyone he knows—and he knows everyone— Garzon was also genuinely excited, as glad to be at the party and in the company of artists as everyone else. This might be obvious to say, but the core of Residency is art. He talks about who makes the art, who comes to see it and, hopefully, buy it—in that order. The community improvement is a given. For him, activism is built in. The neighborhood just happens to be Inglewood. Garzon views his gallery as entirely normal, part of a progression of Inglewood that was inevitable.
Garzon actually is my neighbor, in a sense. We both live in Inglewood and have deep roots here. Garzon opened Residency in , after a career in advertising and marketing that took him from LA to New York, where he lived in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.
It was there that Garzon, who is not himself an artist, began to indulge his love of art by collecting. As in, to acquire pieces you had to travel in certain circles, be in the know. This made little sense to Garzon. This direct-to-consumer philosophy would become part of the vision for his own gallery. During his years in New York, Garzon became friendly with various artists and steadily gathered knowledge about the business.
