Dani Tull comes from a family of artists. “Not art dealers,” he specifies.
His great uncle Herman Cherry opened a small gallery above Stanley Rose Bookstore in the 1930s where he eventually showed artists like Fletcher Martin, Reuben Kadish, and Phillip Guston (former, Goldstein) before their primes. In the 1950s, his grandparents owned a gallery and a bookstore in San Bernardino. Then in the 1990s, his mother opened a gallery with some friends on La Brea.
“The idea of an artist opening a gallery wasn’t foreign to me,” said Tull in retrospect. It is all part of a cycle of inspiration to him, calling on artist-run spaces before him and hoping to catalyze the next generation as well.
“So many people think you have to be at the center of everything, the center of culture or the center of a city, but really, historically, the interesting and unexpected things happen at the fringes,” said Tull. “You can almost discover the true essence of something not by looking at the middle because the middle tends to get homogenized.” The instinct to find the untold, rare stories well before their time is innate to him.
When he co-founded Odd Ark LA in 2018, it was more of the same.
At that time, Tull described a robust, “healthy ecosystem” of mutually supportive artist-run spaces all over L.A. Odd Ark LA became a “stepping stone” for many emerging artists before getting picked up by larger galleries, according to Tull.
“I was thrilled about that,” he said. The financial success of the gallery was a pleasant surprise to him, who was familiar with past generations of gallerists who had little financial support.
Since last September, Tull has collaborated with his business partner and independent curator Jessica Gallucci, whom he met at a party while she was starting a new role for the L.A. outpost of The Hole. Now his business partner, they launched their joint curatorial project, Gallucci Tull, this February with an old friend’s archived collection.
“[The art world] can be incredibly fraught and tough on the ego, tough on the nerves,” said Gallucci. “The things I admire most about Dani are his sensitivity and the way he’s able to remain even-keeled. He’s got a real wisdom in the way he moves through this world.”
According to the project’s inaugural artist, Nick Taggart, Tull thinks “more like the way artists think rather than like a gallerist…Everything he does involves community. He has a sense of people’s history with the place…Absolutely genius.”
Tull’s identity as an artist first has informed all of his other work and distinguishes him from art dealers or curators launching similar projects.
In total, Tull is an artist himself, the co-founder of Odd Ark LA, the co-owner of Gallucci Tull, a guitarist for The Spirit Girls and the upcoming co-curator at the Ed Ruscha exhibition at The Hole. With all of this multifaceted involvement, Tull has explored seemingly every artistic space, and that’s how he noticed what was missing.
“Even though Los Angeles has a thriving international art scene, for whatever reason, compared to other major cities, it doesn’t seem to have a healthy amount of artist residency programs,” said Tull. “One thing I wanted to explore and prove, is that opportunities like this for artists can be created with very little support.”
When Dani Tull first stepped foot on the property up in Topanga Canyon (which some friends offered him a weeks-long stay at), he saw an artist’s oasis, a true escape from the concrete and smog in L.A., complete with a geodesic dome built in the 1970s.
“When I arrived, I was completely enchanted… I realized that being in the setting of nature with that canopy of oak trees, next to a creek, in the mountains, was what my soul needed.”
Since then, he has hosted six different artists at the same property as part of a retreat which he calls the Encina Artist Residency. He convinced those same friends to let him run a program that currently has no substantial funding or cost for visiting artists while they eat, sleep, and work in the dome. The only requirement: a parting gift from the artist to add to the owner’s personal art collection.
This residency is heavily inspired by all of the greats who retreated out to those same hills. Tull draws on those like Wallace Berman, Chris Burden, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell, who retired in the “energetically rich and inspiring” canyon.
The residency property stands on a landscape over a creek and hills which house multiple cabins and an open horse stable, now turned artist studio. The cabins are separated by a flowing creek from the residency, which takes place in a white, geodesic dome equipped with a kitchen, bed, and heating for visiting artists to live while on retreat. Most residencies span a week, and the artists are encouraged to acquaint themselves with the landscape and only make art should they feel inspired.
Tull remarks that when he is on the property working on his own paintings, he no longer listens to music or podcasts, but rather opts for the natural hums. “It was so nice to be able to hear more voices of birds than of people.”
Now, he’s looking towards opening the formerly invite-only residency to an application process.
“Honestly, all I really want to do is paint and focus on my own work, and I love collaboration. I love learning from what other people do. All of these things, whether it’s playing music with other people in a band, or running the gallery, or doing this residency, it just feeds me. I really believe firmly in the value of the collective and the community.”