Currency Exchange is a neighborhood-first arts and community center rooted on Washington Blvd in Mid-City Los Angeles that creates space for community to practice & integrate the exchange of alternative cultural currency.

Born from the evolution of DMST Atelier, Currency Exchange expands the role of the traditional gallery into something broader: a neighborhood resource.

All currency is welcome.

3% Cover the Fee

David Vega & Andy Montiel Phillips ▲ Cast Shadows ▲ Opens Saturday 9/12, 5-8 PM ▲ Karaoke Saturday 10/10, 7-10 PM ▲ Closing Reception & Community Feed ▲ Saturday 11/14, 4-7 PM ▲

David Vega & Andy Montiel Phillips ▲ Cast Shadows ▲ Opens Saturday 9/12, 5-8 PM ▲ Karaoke Saturday 10/10, 7-10 PM ▲ Closing Reception & Community Feed ▲ Saturday 11/14, 4-7 PM ▲

Group of people gathered outdoors on a city sidewalk, with buildings and parked cars in the background.

CXLA offers an art gallery, artist residency and supportive programming as a bridge between artists, neighbors and the residents of the affordable housing community above the gallery. 

While art remains the central tool, our identity extends beyond exhibitions and cultural programming and is defined by an enduring commitment to advocate for the current needs of the neighborhood.

Through decentralized resource & idea sharing, partnerships, outreach and engagement CXLA facilitates a space of care and connection.

“The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference”
— Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic

▲ Art Exhibitions

Rotating exhibitions featuring emerging and established artists whose work cultivates curiosity, dialogue, and reciprocal exchange between the contemporary arts community and the local community.
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▲ Programming

Workshops, talks, shared meals, and public events designed to facilitate access to art, education & mutual care.
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▲ AGAPE Artist Residency

A year-long residency, which includes a free studio, financial support and a culminating presentation for established artists interested in developing new work alongside community-based projects.
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▲ Community Center

A welcoming space for neighbors to gather, share experiences, build relationships, and support one another.
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David Vega & Andy Montiel Phillips ▲ Cast Shadows ▲ Opens Saturday 9/12, 5-8 PM ▲ Karaoke Saturday 10/10, 7-10 PM ▲ Closing Reception & Community Feed ▲ Saturday 11/14, 4-7 PM ▲

David Vega & Andy Montiel Phillips ▲ Cast Shadows ▲ Opens Saturday 9/12, 5-8 PM ▲ Karaoke Saturday 10/10, 7-10 PM ▲ Closing Reception & Community Feed ▲ Saturday 11/14, 4-7 PM ▲

Board of Directors

Woman in a pink shirt and white pants sitting on the floor in front of a blue tiled wall
Woman in a pink shirt and white pants sitting on the floor in front of a blue tiled wall

Frannie Hemmelgarn

Frannie Hemmelgarn is an artist, cultural organizer, and community development professional whose work explores the intersection of art, the built environment, and community.

President / Executive Director

  • With a background in economics and accounting from Claremont McKenna College, Frannie has spent more than a decade working in affordable housing and community development, most recently at Brisa Development Partners. Her work has spanned public funding, development strategy, financing and the delivery of affordable housing, transportation, and community infrastructure across California.

    Her artistic practice is visual and social. Her multidisciplinary multimaterial visual studio practice uses processes of deconstruction, reconstruction, layering, weaving, and repair to explore access, fragility, balance, experimentation, and care. Her social practice and community development work have increasingly converged around a shared set of interests: activating underused spaces, working within and around existing infrastructure, and experimenting with ways art programming can cultivate connection and belonging in housing and surrounding neighborhoods. . 

    In 2021, Frannie co-founded DMST Atelier with artist Marantz Moon out of a desire to build artist community and create greater access to the arts. In 2024, after losing their original Downtown Los Angeles location, the gallery relocated to the ground floor of a newly completed affordable housing development in Mid-City Los Angeles, and the current location of Currency Exchange, where Frannie serves as co-founder and Executive Director.

Blonde woman in a red sweater standing beside a shiny copper foil installation and sculptural display
Blonde woman in a red sweater standing beside a shiny copper foil installation and sculptural display

Liz Stringer

Liz Stringer is an artist, arts administrator and educator based in Long Beach. In her practice, Stringer uses science fiction as a framework to fracture and rearticulate narrative...
Board Secretary

  • boundaries between the physical and metaphysical. Collapsing scientific research to create a hybrid language that transforms into multimedia installations of smell, ceramic, and drawing. She received her dual Bachelor’s degree from UC San Diego (BFA & BS 2016), and her MFA at UC Irvine. Stringer has led programs for youth, teens, and adults as a gallery educator through the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and at La Jolla Country Day School for grades 5 -12 for the past seven years. She is was involved in the 5th and 6th versions of INSITE.

Smiling man in a red plaid shirt standing in front of a wall decorated with black abstract sculptures

Marantz Moon

Vice President / Director of Operations
Marantz Moon, Los Angeles, CA based is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores identity, memory, culture, and the symbolic power of form. He holds a B.A in Studio art & M.A in Art.

  • Working across sculpture, painting, resin, clay, and found materials, Moon creates works that invite viewers to reconsider their relationship to history, humanity, and contemporary society. Recurring motifs—including the silhouette of the Afro—which serve as visual anchors that connect personal experience with broader cultural narratives. With 12, plus years of Art handling, installation and art service practices he has a vast knowledge of space, form and installation design. 


    Alongside his studio practice, he is a lecturing professor of Art and social justice education at CSUF. As a Co founder of the space, Moon has also co developed community-based projects through Currency Exchange formerly DMST Atelier, expanding conversations around accessibility and the role of art beyond commercial systems. His work seeks not to provide definitive answers, but to create spaces for reflection, empathy, and dialogue, encouraging audiences to pause, question, and engage more deeply with themselves and the world around them.

Bald man in black clothing sitting on a wooden bench indoors

Joseph Sherman

Joseph Sherman is a Los Angeles-based artist, photographer, and creative director whose work moves between fine art, sports, and contemporary culture. His career spans collaborations with...
Board Member

  • the National Basketball Association, Los Angeles Lakers, SLAM Magazine, Complex, and other leading cultural organizations.

    Sherman holds an MFA in Fine Arts from Otis College of Art and Design. His work has been exhibited throughout Los Angeles, including at SoFi Stadium, Residency Art Gallery, Praz-Delavallade, Bolsky Gallery, and DMST Atelier. Drawing from photography, basketball, and the visual language of popular culture, Sherman brings together a career built inside culture with a fine art practice that looks critically at the images, objects, and ideas that shape it.

Woman in a pale green blouse and jeans sitting on a rolling stool in an art studio

Kim Garcia

Board Treasurer / Gallery Director
Kim Garcia is a Los Angeles–based multidisciplinary artist and educator whose work begins from her experience as the daughter of immigrants, tracing how personal memory expands into...

  • questions of belonging, power, and the making of American identity. Working across sculpture, installation, drawing, and painting, she uses material processes of folding, compression, and accumulation to engage what resists closure, approaching history as something active and embodied. Recent projects move from intimate family narratives outward to examine Filipino American identity and U.S. imperial histories, creating environments that invite viewers to reconsider America as shaped by layered arrivals and unfinished histories.

    Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Feia Gallery, Phase Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), and Torrance Art Museum. Kim holds a BA from UC San Diego and an MFA from UC Irvine. 

    As an educator, Kim leads sculpture at the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara and serves as Gallery Director of the CCS Art Gallery, where she shapes exhibition programming and student engagement with contemporary practice. At Santa Monica College, she teaches gallery exhibitions courses that give students hands-on experience organizing shows, grounded in a commitment to mentoring students with transparency about the art field.

Person wearing a denim jacket and white graphic T-shirt seated indoors, with colorful fabric decorations on the wall behind them.

Cara Rae Joven

Cara Rae Joven (b. 1988) is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles, CA. Joven received her MFA from University of California, Riverside in 2020, her BFA from Art Center College of Design in 2015
Board Member

  • and her BA in Art History from University of California, Los Angeles in 2011.

    Joven’s art practice engages materiality through sculpture and video. Using paint, fabric and various armatures, she creates conditions and arrangements that draw on the intrinsic qualities of her materials. Joven is motivated by a deep fascination with the historical baggage and cultural weight that materials bring. She embraces these complications through the invisible subtleties of light and color, gravity and tension. For Joven, the meaning is made in the gestures performed to create the work, as well as gestures of the work itself.

Group of people relaxing on outdoor steps and benches in a lush landscaped courtyard.
People lying on yoga mats inside a colorful contemporary art gallery with abstract paintings and a large translucent orange installation.
Abstract multicolored textured artwork with red, blue, green, yellow, and purple pigments on a rectangular panel.
Diverse group gathered around a table for a creative workshop in an art-filled room

David Vega & Andy Montiel Phillips ▲ Cast Shadows ▲ Opens Saturday 9/12, 5-8 PM ▲ Karaoke Saturday 10/10, 7-10 PM ▲ Closing Reception & Community Feed ▲ Saturday 11/14, 4-7 PM ▲

David Vega & Andy Montiel Phillips ▲ Cast Shadows ▲ Opens Saturday 9/12, 5-8 PM ▲ Karaoke Saturday 10/10, 7-10 PM ▲ Closing Reception & Community Feed ▲ Saturday 11/14, 4-7 PM ▲

Recent Exhibitions