Sidney B. Felsen and Stanley J. Grinstein, co-founders of Gemini G.E.L., in Gemini workshop

"For some strange reason, artists from the East Coast love coming to Los Angeles in February."
Sidney B. Felsen



"There’s a sense of optimism in Los Angeles and of a future, maybe because of the frontier society mentality; there is a belief that there will be new discoveries and that things will work out…  There's also a lack of history and no precedent that's so crucial that you must fit in a certain way.  People make their own history I think. There aren't any rules."
Stanley J. Grinstein

"I love Los Angeles.  I once said publicly that one of the reasons I like Los Angeles is that it is a thousand miles wide and a quarter of an inch deep.  I find Los Angeles both innocent and stimulating.  It has that kind of Western feeling, a controversial rawness.  The city works with my renegade feelings about what art is, both of what it's not supposed to be and what it could be."
Robert Rauschenberg

Ken Price at Gemini

"I never go anywhere to work that I think of as a vacation. I feel too much anxiety about my work. But I enjoyed it very much, working at Gemini. It was there, I guess, that I developed a pattern of working in series, because I would go out there for a certain length of time. Here in New York I was used to going to a print workshop just a day. At Gemini, I usually thought of a group of related works that I could concentrate on during several weeks."
Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns in front of the Color Numerals Series, 1968

Proofs of Weather Series at Gemini, 1973

"The reason I made the Weather Series is that Los Angeles doesn't have any weather."
David Hockney

"Each shop has a particular character I think my inital interest was in going out
to the West Coast in the
middle of a New York winter,
to live at the Marmont, to
have a rented car, that sort of thing... You lived in a bright, sunny way, and your phone wasn't ringing. That was great. I liked that experience a lot."
Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtensten drawing on a limestone, 1978

Claes Oldenburg with Irving Blum looking at Notes, 1968

"Los Angeles was sort of a paradise of technology; you had the feeling that all you had to do was look something up in the yellow pages, drive for three hours, and there would be some guy who would make whatever you wanted.  Gemini was a focal spot too, for people coming through Los Angeles,which at the time was a fairly unknown place for New York artists.  Los Angeles had been even more unknown when I first went in 1963.  There was a well-established school of Los Angeles artists, who looked with disapproval on outsiders; they were the important ones on the scene, and you immediately had to deal with that and prove yourself.  I always felt a little overshadowed by them because they could do things like surf and ride motorcycles and they all seemed to smoke cigars."
Claes Oldenburg