Anything but Minimal

Kiyo Higashi is an art dealer who thinks like a curator--a curator with a specific area of expertise, to be precise. Minimalism is her thing, and her belief in it as a style impervious to trend is unshakable.

“For me, it’s a timeless school,” says Higashi, an impeccably elegant woman whose personal style echoes her taste in art. “There’s always art being made that could be described as reductive relative to whatever’s going on at the time, and an endless procession of young artists working in the Minimalist tradition come to the gallery hoping to be shown.”

The Kiyo Higashi Gallery, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, began presenting exhibitions of Minimalism a good decade after the avant-garde lost interest in it. Minimalism, a contemplative style that began to coalesce in the 1950s in reaction to the excesses of Abstract Expressionism, peaked in popularity in the late ‘60s with the grandly austere work of such sculptors as Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Tony Smith. Emotionally muted, usually characterized by a low degree of visual differentiation and often monochromatic, Minimalism synthesizes aspects of geometric abstraction, earthworks, serial imagery and Conceptualism.

“My attraction to the style may have something to do with my Japanese background, because I responded to it immediately,” Higashi says. “In Japan there’s very little space in the homes and public buildings, so you learn to think minimally and develop ways of creating a sense of spaciousness in small quarters--and into your mind as well. How else could several people live in a small house with paper walls? It takes a lot of discipline.”

Higashi, the fourth of six children of first-generation Japanese immigrants, was born in Portland, Ore., in 1934.

“We lived in a nice house with a grocery store and were doing fine until I was 7 years old,” she recalls, “when a man with a bayonet came to our door and ordered us into a military truck that drove us to the first of several internment camps.”

The camps, built in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, were fenced with barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards but were nonetheless euphemistically referred to by the government as “assembly centers.” All but three of the 15 erected were in California, where 80% of America’s ethnic Japanese population lived, and they housed 116,000 U.S. citizens for about three years.

“Suddenly everything changed: We lost our house, our store and our identity,” Higashi says. “We were allowed to take one suitcase each and were taken to this huge area where cubicles had been created out of blankets and 2-by-4s. Each family was assigned a cubicle, and that’s where my family lived until they finished building barracks at the Tule Lake camp in California. We lived at Tule for a year, then they turned it into a compound for isolating so-called troublemakers, and we were sent by train to a camp in Jerome, Ark.”

When the camps officially closed in December 1944, the government did nothing to restore the possessions that had been taken from the Japanese Americans--that didn’t happen until 1988, when Congress passed the redress law. So Higashi’s family started again from scratch.

In the camps, she says, she and her family had met many people from California, so they moved to the Los Angeles area, eventually settling in a hotel downtown. Her father got a job as a cook and saved enough money to buy the liquor store across the street.

Needless to say, culture wasn’t high on the list of concerns in Higashi’s family. Still, she recalls, “I loved to draw from the time I was very young. That wasn’t considered a proper thing for a girl to do. My parents were very Japanese, and they felt it was better for a woman not to work or go to college. I nonetheless went to UCLA and got a degree in education in 1956, and as soon as I graduated I married a man I’d met in college and got a job as an elementary school teacher. Three years later, I started having my three children--they were born in ‘60, ’62 and ‘64--and I stopped working to raise them.

“I never stopped looking at art, though, and in 1965 I began getting to know people in the local art community when my husband, who’s a CPA, introduced me to Frank Gehry, who was one of his clients. Frank introduced me to Larry Bell; his was the first Minimalist work I saw, and I immediately loved it for its meditative qualities. It’s art you must participate in to appreciate, and you have to slow down to absorb it. Being involved with Minimalism changed my perception of myself and of everything else.”

In 1984, Higashi and her husband, Robert, bought two buildings on Melrose Avenue.

“Larry asked if he could design the space,” she says. “I told him that would be wonderful, so I hired an architect to execute Larry’s plans. Having transformed the upstairs into an office for my husband, Larry shifted his attention to the downstairs space, which at the time housed the Les Enfant Boutique. Larry suggested I make it a gallery and begin representing him, but as I’d never even thought of opening a gallery, my initial response was: ‘Are you serious?’

“Then I thought about it and I realized my children were grown and that I had more freedom than I’d ever had. Maybe it was an offer I shouldn’t refuse. So I opened with an exhibition of Larry’s work, with no long-term game plan other than knowing that I’d never show work I didn’t believe in.

“I soon discovered I enjoy working with artists--it’s exciting to see them grow and change--and of course, I love the work and feel it’s a privilege to show it.”

Higashi, who will celebrate her 10th anniversary in November with a show of new work by Bell, has a stable of 13 artists that also includes Max Cole, Carol Kaufman and Penelope Krebs. “I’d never done sales in my life prior to opening the gallery,” Higashi says, “but when I’m enthusiastic about something, I find it easy to approach people and talk about it.”

Like everything in the art world, the market for Minimalism goes up and down. It did well in the ‘80s and is doing less well in the ‘90s; however, there’s a small circle of collectors--including several in Southern California--who consistently support it and patronize Higashi’s gallery. Moreover, Minimalism does extremely well in Europe; among its staunchest supporters is Italian art patron Count Panza, who annually makes two trips to L.A. and regularly acquires work from Higashi.

“The wonderful thing about Count Panza is that when he buys a body of work, he either donates or sells it to a museum. He refuses to sell to private collectors, because his mission is to get this work before a wider public and educate people--and I suppose that’s part of what drives me as well,” Higashi says. “People often tell me they have a unique experience here, and although they don’t quite understand it, they keep coming back.

“When I first opened the gallery, an electrician working here looked at the art on the walls and said, ‘Ugh.’ He asked how much one of the pieces cost, and when I told him, he was outraged. And I, of course, said I was pleased that this art created such intense internal conflict in him. Because he was working here, he kept coming into contact with the piece, and to make a long story short, he eventually bought it.

“The day he took it home, I told him, ‘This is going to change your life. Not in a dramatic way, but in making this commitment to look at a kind of art that didn’t immediately reveal itself to you, you’ll begin looking at everything in life differently.’ ”

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KIYO HIGASHI GALLERY, 8332 Melrose Ave. Exhibitions: Work by German artist Frank Badur is on view through Saturday. Fall season opens Sept. 13 with an exhibition of new work by Ted Kurahara. Hours: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Phone: (213) 655-2482.