“I’ve been asking myself, ‘What’s the point of art?’” said Esther Kim Varet in a video interview, the day after the United States presidential election.
The day before, not long after she had returned from canvassing for the Kamala Harris campaign in Michigan, Kim Varet, a busy gallery owner, had admitted she was nervous about how close the race looked. After the election had been called for Donald J. Trump, she let slip that even she wasn’t necessarily thinking about art — or its function in society.
Kim Varet’s politics are particularly evident at Various Small Fires, the contemporary art gallery she founded and operates. Based in Hollywood, south of the Los Angeles hills, Various Small Fires focuses on championing artistic voices that Kim Varet feels have been traditionally overlooked by galleries — such as those of Asian, Indigenous, Black and Latino descent.
She opened the gallery in 2012, in an industry historically dominated by white male gatekeepers (such as those running the galleries atop Art Land’s tracker of top contemporary galleries). Now, as she enters her 40s, Kim Varet is preparing to return to Art Basel Miami Beach, a testament to her gallery’s growing reputation.
“I just want to push conversations forward,” she said, of the gallery’s mission.
Kim Varet’s sense of drive has deep roots. “I’m a first-generation Korean American,” she explained, recounting how her grandparents escaped North Korea, and her parents, raised in South Korea, immigrated to Texas, where they became involved with the Southern Baptist Church.
“I was taught to stick with my own” and to be suspicious of others, Kim Varet said of her upbringing in the conservative church. She reflected that growing up under such strict conditions “can give you this thing where you want to break every barrier, power structure, and fight like hell for what’s morally right.”
It’s a personal history that underscores Kim Varet’s stance on art and galleries in a nation that is increasingly polarized and shifting toward conservatism.
Right now, “with so much outspoken intolerance for others, this work of bridging disparate world views is needed more than ever,” Kim Varet said, adding, “That’s the point, isn’t it?”
Underdog mentality
Various Small Fires has become a destination in Los Angeles for these types of dialogues because of the panels it hosts — on topics that include sustainable agriculture and stopping hate against Asians — and the artists Kim Varet shows. “I’m drawn to people who have historically been the underdog,” she said. “I want to elevate vulnerable voices.”
This curatorial approach has led to the discovery and career revivals of artists like Jessie Homer French, a self-taught artist in her 80s known for her folksy paintings addressing ecology and the environment; Diedrick Brackens, whose woven tapestries examine being Black and queer; Dyani White Hawk, a Minneapolis-based Lakota artist who blends abstract painting with her tribe’s traditions of abstraction, and Newton Harrison, a founder of the eco-art movement, who died in 2022.
Challenging barriers
Various Small Fires started as a series of artist conversations at Kim Varet’s Venice Beach home in 2012. The success of her homespun endeavor eventually led to the opening of the approximately 5,000-square-foot Hollywood gallery in 2015. The space features an outdoor sculpture garden.
In the last five years, Kim Varet has opened outposts in Seoul and Dallas. The expansion is fitting for a gallery called Various Small Fires, a name that comes from Edward Ruscha’s photo book, printed in 1970, titled “Various Small Fires and Milk,” which features images of small flames emitted by matches, stoves and the like. According to Kim Varet, her galleries are analogous to prescribed burns — the little fires necessary to maintain a healthy environment.
“In a way I’m tracing my own biography and I’m going back and I’m helping present ideas that directly challenge the barriers I felt there,” Kim Varet said, of founding the outposts in Seoul and Dallas. For instance, she said, a 2023 exhibition of Madeline Donahue’s work about motherhood and women’s bodies “felt different” when shown in Texas, a state that enacted a near-total ban on abortion.
While being fertile for cross-cultural dialogue, the locations are also strategic. Dallas is one of the nation’s hottest collector markets, while the move to Korea predated Frieze’s inaugural fair there. Moving into Asia, Kim Varet said, was an easy choice. “American artists are very curious about exhibiting in Asia, but are not always sure how to access it,” she said, adding that, at the same time, there is “high interest in Western artists in Korea specifically.”
Joel Lubin, managing director and head of the motion picture group CAA, is an avid art collector and indicative of a strand of Kim Varet’s collector base. He first encountered the gallerist at a fair a decade ago where he said that he quickly sensed her vision. “She wasn’t all about the West Coast prism, or the L.A. scene; she was looking beyond it,” Mr. Lubin recalled in a phone interview.
Making waves
At this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, running Friday through Sunday, the gallery will present a booth focused on the theme of abstraction, highlighting different approaches, and challenging its cited origins as a 20th-century construct. Kim Varet noted that the presentation will feature six artists, two of whom are making their Art Basel Miami Beach debuts.
One of the first-timers is A’Driane Nieves, 42, who said that she has been painting for 15 years after a therapist recommended she pick up a brush as a form of therapy. Nieves, who is forthcoming about having autism and A.D.H.D., contributed “A New Code” (2024), a painting that depicts solid blue and yellow boxes interrupted by hundreds of frenzied colorful brush strokes.
“The squares represent binary thinking, you know, the boxes we put ourselves and others in, the norms we are conditioned to accept,” Nieves said in a phone interview. The frenzied lines interrupt the clear lines and colors, showing, she theorized, how marginalized people “have found ways to thrive outside of the bonds and constraints of normative society, despite the retribution that comes with doing so.”
Sarah Rosalena, an artist and scholar in her 40s, is also making her Miami debut. One of her works in the show is “Gradient Wave” (2024), a basket sculpture created using a 3-D printer that mimics an ancient coiling technique. She explained in her artist statement that the work is an exploration of the displacement and devaluation of craft and female labor in our contemporary technology-fueled economy.
“My work is done by hand and by machine; in a way I’m straddling the ancient and the futuristic,” Rosalena, a member of the Indigenous Wixárika people, said in a phone interview.
For Kim Varet, both artists confront conflicting tensions. On abstraction alone, she said “they offer a feminine retelling which is obviously so different to what you get taught in a lot of art schools.”
These are the type of conversations that excite Kim Varet. After all, it is what draws her to her job, to her artists and to the locations she has chosen for Various Small Fires.
“I cannot function without tension,” she said, at the end of the post-election conversation. “What a time to say that.”
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