March 14, 2017

Meet Jensen Karp of Gallery1988 in Hollywood

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jensen Karp.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
Coming out of college, I quickly joined, then left the music industry after finding myself with some success in it. It wasn’t for me. At the same time however, a friend from college, Katie Sutton, was working at an art gallery, and I’d visit her all the time. The owner was such a jerk, treating me like an idiot kid, not knowing I was actually looking for art for my place and could totally afford what he had on display. It got Katie and I thinking: what if we created a space of art, without judgement, treating each buyer the same? And since we knew we’d be catering to a younger audience, mostly purchasing art for the first time, we decided to encourage our artists to produce pieces based on their pop culture influences. We knew that would speak to our potential customer. And now, going on 14 years later, we’ve really created quite an industry around us. We’ve been able to work directly with properties like Star Wars, LOST, Breaking Bad and the Academy Awards, while also continuing to have a large presence on Melrose, the street it all started on.

Has it been a smooth road?
We’ve been lucky over the past decade, but before that – it just wasn’t very busy. We were the first gallery in the world to focus on pop culture. It’s since become a business model stolen frequently, but back then – it was just us. So there were many weeks where Katie and I just played online poker all day. It was before online sales even. So we just had to depend mostly on world of mouth, and lucky for us, the word got out. But a lot of slow, boring days up top, mostly just wondering how long we could keep the doors open.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
We’re a pop culture focused art gallery and marketing company. We’ve encouraged artistes to dig deep into their actual influences, since this generation is just as influenced by Nintendo and Tarantino as they were Rothko and Pollack. So people come to us for that type of art. And on our marketing side, we’ve created campaigns and visuals for Paramount Pictures, SONY, The Academy Awards, Cartoon Network, Mattel, Disney, Bad Robot, and Universal. It’s been incredible to have a small idea turn into something much larger, as what sets us apart is the media attention our collaborations get. We’re lucky to get that.

Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Totally. We’ve had locations & pop-ups in New York, San Francisco and Chicago and nothing compares to LA. We specialize in entertainment focused art, and this is the entertainment capital. We’re right in the epicenter and that has definitely helped us excel over later competition. I guess you have to really research the connection between your product and LA to understand if it’s the right place for you. Especially with rent being pretty expensive. But we knew it was where we needed to be, so we made it happen.

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