Michael Oxley Wants to Show You Something

Michael Oxley clicks the counter with every new person who walks into Hauser & Wirth’s Arts District gallery. During Lorna Simpson’s 2022 exhibition, he was fidgeting with his counter when he accidentally dropped it. As he knelt to pick it up, Oxley noticed that the color scheme of several paintings change from blue to red. He shared his findings with visitors, inviting them to join him in shifting their perspective. “Stand over here at this angle and see what you see,” he’d say. “Get on a knee and see what you see.”

For five years, Oxley has done far more than his security job requires: He’s become a renowned figure of the gallery, making a point to greet people and show them around. Before the gallery opens, Oxley begins his shift by studying the artworks. And his insights haven’t gone unnoticed. “I’ve known Michael for quite a few years,” said Robert Rosenblum, a local artist who visited the gallery on a recent Sunday afternoon. “He finds angles to view the art that nobody else can see. He shows me all these little secrets.” When Oxley showed Simpson how the color of her paintings shifted, she remarked that she hadn’t seen them in that way before.

Raised in a working-class neighborhood outside of St. Louis, MO, Oxley moved to L.A. at 26, pursuing a career in law enforcement. He retired as a lieutenant after 34 years, around the same time his wife, Selena. Struck with boredom, Oxley took a weekend job with a private security firm. He was assigned to Hauser & Wirth by happenstance, stationed first in David Hammons’ landmark 2019 exhibition. “I had never seen anything of that nature,” Oxley recalls, wanting to learn more. So he did what he now does with nearly every artist, pulling Hammons aside during installation to ask. “He sold snowballs on the streets of New York…so I asked him, ‘How is that?’ And he goes, ‘Because in New York they’ll buy anything!’ I was amazed.”

Though Oxley says he “knew nothing about art” prior to his work at Hauser & Wirth, it’s perhaps more accurate to say that the position has expanded his engagement with it. He’s long filled his home with prints by iconic artists like Cornell Barnes, Jacob Lawrence, and Ernie Barnes. Now, he counts Simpson, Hammons, Gary Simmons, and Nicolas Party among the artists who inspire him. He was so awestruck by Winfred Rembert’s recent exhibition that he approached the late artist’s son. “I need a better word than kidnapped, but I kidnapped him for hours,” he said. “I wanted to know everything.” Oxley learned minute details that he would not have known had he not asked, like that some of the figures in Rembert Sr.’s capture his children posing.

While commercial galleries often exude a cold, profiteering austerity, Oxley invites another way to see and engage with art—one that goes well beyond his job description. He uses each conversation, each subtle shift in perspective, to close the distance between the visitors, the artists, and the art. As Oxley fosters his own curiosity about art—its meaning and how to continuously look at it anew—he remakes the gallery into a place for human connection, where all opinions and ideas are valid and where the meaning of a work is co-created by those who encounter it together.

This photo essay was originally published in Carla issue 38.