Inside Los Angeles’ ghost theater, brought back to life for one last season

In the heart of Downtown Los Angeles, at 940 South Figueroa Street, a six-story Venetian-style building bears the marks of more than a century of cultural transformation. Built in 1924, the Variety Arts Theater has been many things over time: a civic clubhouse, a vaudeville theater, a movie house, an event venue—and eventually, nothing at all. For a few weeks, however, its halls will light up again with What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem, the exhibition curated by Udo Kittelmann that, from Feb. 6 to March 20, 2026, presents a selection of video works from the Julia Stoschek Foundation Collection in the United States for the first time, with screenings every night until midnight.

From early cinema pioneers such as Georges Méliès and Alice Guy-Blaché to contemporary artists including Marina Abramović, Arthur Jafa, and Lu Yang, the exhibition brings cinema and video art into dialogue, allowing the two traditions to coexist within the same space.

In this dialogue, the building itself and its history play an essential role. The Variety Arts Theater is one of the buildings that best reflects the many transformations of Los Angeles’ cultural life. The complex originally served as the headquarters of the Friday Morning Club, one of the city’s most influential women’s associations, founded in 1891 by suffragist Caroline Severance. Lectures, cultural gatherings, and civic debates were held here, helping advance the movement for women’s suffrage in California.

In the same year it opened, the large auditorium was leased and later transformed into the Figueroa Playhouse, a vaudeville theater that quickly became part of the city’s entertainment circuit. Performers such as Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and Clark Gable appeared on its stage.

Since then, the building has undergone a long series of transformations: first a movie theater, then a museum dedicated to vaudeville, and later a venue for events, weddings, and concerts. Each phase has left visible traces in the interior architecture, which still bears the marks of its many lives.

Over the past two decades, the Variety Arts Theater has gradually fallen into disuse, left suspended between different eras. Today the building is on the market for around $12.5 million.

For this reason, its temporary reactivation takes on particular significance. What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem restores, for a few weeks, the cultural role that this space took on in different forms throughout the twentieth century. Opening during Art Week 2026, launched by Frieze Los Angeles, the exhibition appears almost as a unique moment—an epiphany within the cultural scene of a city that constantly demolishes and rebuilds parts of itself.

Here moving images finally find the viewing conditions they deserve. They are not simply content on a screen: they engage the viewer’s memory, perception, and body, shaping movement through space and the relationship to the surrounding environment.

As you exit the theater, a detail becomes visible that is easy to miss on the way in. Next to the entrance, small screens set into the masonry—once used for playbills and program listings—now project Dara Birnbaum’s work called Wonder Woman (1978–79). The image of the superheroine, endlessly transforming in a looping spin, flashes across the façade like one last bright signal cast into the city’s night.

Whoever buys the Variety Arts Theater will not only acquire a historic property in Downtown Los Angeles, but also a place that has hosted more than a century of performance, cinema, and cultural life.