Previous entries in Mesler’s column are here. In February 2017 my family and I relocated from New York to Sag Harbor where we are happy and building a new life. I have stopped drinking and know I can…
Our memoirist returns after a year-and-a-half break. You can read his previous entries here. I spent a good 25 years using drugs and alcohol to get by. It's the same old story: A neurotic born into a…
In the summer of 2009, in the middle of a global recession, I opened a show at Rental, my gallery on New York's Lower East Side, called "Don't Panic I'm Selling My Collection." As it turned out, the…
For two years after I opened Rental Gallery in L.A.'s Chinatown, I never left my two-block kingdom in the neighborhood because I didn't have to. Back then, in the mid-aughts, everyone wanted to be in…
I'd been an art dealer in Los Angeles for three years when I decided I'd had enough and got a job working the bar at Hop Louie, a neighborhood establishment in Chinatown. After Sinky, the 72-year-old…
The first real crossover art celebrity to come out of Los Angeles's Chinatown was Eric Wesley, who showed at China Art Objects. The gallery's owner, Giovanni Intra, was selling Wesley's bronze casts…
This is the second part in a recurring column. You can read part one here. Giovanni Intra started China Art Objects in 1998 with Steve Hanson, who still runs the gallery, now in Culver City. The Los…
Not long after I graduated with an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, Ella King Torrey, the school's president during my time there, hanged herself in her house without leaving a note, and…