January 6, 2026, Los Angeles, CA – Today Vezna Andrews, artist, author and curator, announced the formation of the Ellie Mayer Gallery, a one-time, five-month pop-up art gallery located in the heart of Los Angeles, along the Hollywood Walk of Fame and just blocks from LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions).
Vezna named the gallery in honor of her grandmother, artist and art director Ellie Mayer, and inherent in the name is an ethos: to bring together brilliant artists from California and all over the world, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, NYC, Chicago and Germany, to share their innovative artwork and perspectives with the community of Los Angeles. These artists, listed below, were selected for their creativity and kindness, each enjoying being parents, musicians, authors, skateboarders, dog-rescuers, surfers and filmmakers equally to their art-making practice. Like Ellie, art is in everything they do. They are:
VEZNA ANDREWS, January 31, 2026
JOHNNY LANE, March 7, 2026
BEN HORTON, April 25, 2026
SASKIA JELL, May 30, 2026
FEDERICO MARTINI CROTTI, May 30, 2026
TONY GOLD, May 30, 2026
The inaugural show, Vezna Andrews’ All We Cannot See, will open on January 31, 2026 and run through February 28, 2026. Vezna’s work has previously been exhibited at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Sales Gallery, The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (SLOMA) The Bolinas Museum, George Billis Gallery LA, Terrance Rogers Fine Art, Lauren Clark Fine Art and others. Her art is also commissioned and collected globally.
This is her first solo show since becoming a mother and will showcase work spanning the last five years.
It will include forty works on paper from the Minutes Art Collab — the visual component to an interdisciplinary art project she began in 2024 with two brilliant composers; Cornelius Dufallo and Guy Barash. The first twenty-four paintings were done in response to each innovative one-minute composition with violin and electronics by the composers, and viewers will be able to listen to the music on their phones. The second series of sixteen paintings, in 2025, were done simultaneously as the music was created, all three artists working in their disciplines — composers and musicians and painter, sharing their works in progress with each other.
The exhibit also sees Andrews return to abstracts, which the artist, also an author, began exploring while working on her second novel. While researching near death experiences she was inspired by first person accounts which consistently described the presence of a person to help them on their journey, offering unconditional love and compassion. At this time, Vezna started painting angels, eight of which will be displayed, each on four-foot-high by three-foot-wide canvases. The NDE accounts also told of people seeing colors they’d never seen before, and this led Vezna to explore what these colors might look like. She started to pastel-ize fluorescents. During this same period, Vezna’s grandfather had passed and she inherited his art supplies, including Dr. Ph. Martin’s watercolors, which she began using and mixing with acrylics.
The show will also exhibit thirteen large wall sized paintings, as well as some smaller works and studies.
Vezna has always believed to really experience art it must be seen in person and so she jumped at the chance to repurpose empty storefronts to create a safe place for her artist peers to exhibit their work, while also hoping to revitalize art and culture in Los Angeles.
"It all started when the opportunity to use the space to show my work came about,” said Andrews. “I thought, well, if I'm going to have a show, then I would like some artist friends that I greatly admire to have a show too.”
“I’ll never forget seeing the Mark Rothko retrospective in 1998,” Andrews continued. "At the time, I was working as a commercial film director and had stepped away from painting. I sat on a bench at the Whitney and cried. I had a breakdown and a spiritual experience at the same time. In that moment, I knew I had to start over, to find myself, and go back to painting,” Vezna recalled. "It's why I think it is so important to create opportunities for artists to show their work, and equally important to support those artists by going to see the work in person.”
The creation of the Ellie Mayer Gallery has been a community effort, with family, friends and the creative community coming together to help transform the raw space into an art gallery.
Entering through a series of rooms, it eventually opens to an enormous space with eighteen-foot ceilings, on the scale of a museum, recalling one of the Hauser and Wirth’s galleries, that formally occupied two stores on Hollywood Blvd.
“The space itself has a secret speakeasy feel to it,” Vezna described. “The parking lot is graffiti-filled, in which you enter through an unmarked door to a hallway, up some stairs and into an office door. You wonder, “Where am I going? What is this secret place?”
The Ellie Mayer Gallery will officially open on Saturday, January 31, 2026, with private previews available during the week of January 26th.
For more information or to book a preview:
Phone: 310 564-2491
Instagram: @elliemayergallery
About Vezna Andrews:
Vezna Andrews (nee Gottwald, born in 1971) grew up in New York City where she studied life drawing and painting at The School of Visual Arts and with Aaron Kurzen, who taught her the methods of Henri Matisse passed down through his teachers at the Art Students’ League in New York in the 40’s; Cameron Booth, Vaclav Vytlacil and Hans Hoffman. Vezna went to RISD on scholarship, with a major in film and minor in painting, graduating in 1992. Her senior film won the Student Academy Award for Best Experimental Film on the East Coast, launching a career directing music videos and award-winning promos and commercials for Nick at Nite’s TV Land, Miller Lite, Sprite and the like. In the late-nineties she returned to her roots in painting, venturing into non-figurative work for the first time while studying Sogetsu Ikebana with Judith Setsuko Hata. A move to Los Angeles in 2002 led to representation with George Billis Gallery LA. Vezna’s paintings have also exhibited at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Sales Gallery, The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (SLOMA) The Bolinas Museum, Terrance Rogers Fine Art, Lauren Clark Fine Art and others. Her work is commissioned and collected globally. Vezna is also a writer, her debut novel One with the Waves was published by Santa Monica Press in May of 2023 and she is currently working on her second. She lives (and surfs) with her family in Manhattan Beach, California.
About the Gallery, and Ellie Mayer:
We are a one-time, five-month-long pop-up gallery in LA featuring exhibitions of artists honoring Ellie Mayer's legacy. Located in the heart of Los Angeles along the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a block from LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). The gallery is accessible by public transportation and is accessed from the back entrance via a large parking lot. Please note that apart from the show openings, the gallery is open by appointment only.
Artist Eleanor Mayer was born in 1917 in Easton, Pennsylvania to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. After graduating from Pratt Institute in the 1930s, she went on to become one of the first women art directors in the country. The Bauhaus movement profoundly influenced Ellie and her work as an art director; from concepts to graphic design, illustration and her hand-drawn typography. During her formative years, artists she admired, including Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Ben Nicholson, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse, were making works that were significant breakthroughs in modern art. In 1939, the impact of experiencing Picasso’s Guernica had on Ellie as an emerging artist working in New York, was huge. Those artists formed her, and their perspectives on contemporary life and its relevancy was integral to her. Art and ethics conjoined, Ellie believed in the importance of freedom of expression, education and humans being kind to others, no matter their differences in culture, ethnicity or income. Ellie didn’t define success by accolades or material assets but by sharing, connection, community and support.
As an art director at Abbott Kimble in New York City, Ellie hired fellow Pratt graduate Bob Pliskin (who later became her husband). Four art grads working in the back room did all the art and mechanicals. They called themselves “The Art Mice.” Ellie quit her job as an art director to be a full-time mother. Following her belief that her most important work was to be a present parent, she, however, never stopped using her professional skills and served as a "ghost creative director" throughout the 1940s, 50s and 60s for her award-winning creative director husband at Benton & Bowles. She went back to work as an art director in the late 1960s.
