6th Street | A Group Exhibition
Featuring: Javier Carrillo, Dan McCleary, John Nava, and Victor Reyes
January 24 – March 14, 2026
Opening Reception: January 24, 4–6pm
Artist Talk: February 28, 11am
Thirty-three years ago, LA artist Dan McCleary moved into a studio on 6th Street just around the corner from MacArthur Park. The small storefront space has windows only on the north facing wall which allow for a single source of raking light that always illuminates his painted subjects from the left side. The cloistered stillness recalls the atmosphere of Vermeer’s paintings whose light source was almost always from windows to the left of his subjects. In this quiet environment, McCleary makes paintings of cut flowers in vases, an ephemeral subject with subtle but profound allusions to the tradition of memento mori. He regards his still-lifes of pink bakery boxes, white paper cups and sculptural nail polish bottles as “buildings,” fundamental blocks and forms that are arranged in simple groups echoing the compositional structure of Morandi and the brushwork in a Thiebaud cake. McCleary’s larger works are humble scenes of a barista behind the counter, a woman painting her toenails, or a man in pajamas weighing himself, all with the timeless and classical balance of a Piero della Francesca.
This solitary studio ambience changed dramatically shortly after McCleary founded a non-profit art school for underserved young adults in 2010 called, Art Division. The storefronts on both sides of his studio became the school’s library, paint studio, gallery and printmaking workshop. McCleary had created a thriving art community of students, instructors, visiting artists, chefs, musicians and a dedicated group of supporters from the artworld. The growing library was essentially founded on major book donations from Ed Ruscha and Chris Burden.
MacArthur Park has been a troubled neighborhood in recent years, but the Art Division community on 6th Street has created a safe sanctuary as well as an invested group of people who care about their neighbors. The exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, titled 6th Street includes the work of four members of that organization, Dan McCleary, John Nava (a visiting artist in Art Division Programs and the creator of the extraordinary series of tapestries at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels) and two Art Division printmaking instructors that were former students, Javier Carrillo and Victor Reyes.
McCleary’s work in this exhibition centers on three new large figure paintings made from life and constructed sets in his studio. Like his earlier figurative work, they represent quotidian moments, this time focusing on workers in public places of his neighborhood.
John Nava’s contribution includes a 90” painting that depicts a block-long line of boarded up storefronts adjacent to Art Division. As Nava states, this wall had been “a stage for a lively and constantly changing collage of graphic ‘speech.’” In 2020 the walls were covered with “exhortations to vote,” and later included “protests of the Trump administration’s abusive ICE raids.” The wall has subsequently been painted out, but Nava’s work is a testament to these moments ‘when the walls were not silent.”
Javier Carrillo and Victor Reyes identify with Mexican and Chicano ancestry, honoring and incorporating symbols and mythologies of these cultures. Carrillo’s recent work has centered on the working-class individuals of his neighborhood, particularly street vendors. Carrillo says, “Many of the people I portray are family members, depicted at their everyday jobs. I want to give voice and visibility to those who form the backbone of our communities and honor their resilience during challenging times marked by political unrest, ICE raids and the impact of anti-immigrant policies.”
Victor Reyes fuses Indigenous cosmology, Chicano culture, and the urban landscape of LA in phantasmagorical narratives where the past is not erased but transformed. For Reyes, “lowriders function as sacred vessels, chariots, time machines and ceremonial carriers, like ritual masks or secret objects.” Like the legendary Chicano artists before him, Carlos Almaraz and Gilbert Luján, Reyes invents his own mythic figures like jaguar women, warrior cholos and other wildly hybrid figures that “function as protectors and witnesses of everyday people trying to embody resilience and strength.”