With so many high-profile denizens of the New York art world — former Whitney curator Shamim Momin and former art dealer Jeffrey Deitch prominent among them — having decamped in recent years to Los Angeles, it was perhaps only a matter of time before the L.A. spirit infiltrated New York. And so it may be a sign of the times that a loftlike space in SoHo is playing host this month to a sprawling temporary exhibition of recent art from Los Angeles.

"Greater L.A." — the title a gently provocative play on "Greater New York," PS1’s quinquennial survey of Big Apple art — showcases more than 40 L.A. talents, including Edgar Arceneaux, Skip Arnold, Justin Beal, Andrea Bowers, Aaron Curry, Karl Haendel, Matt Johnson, Jason Meadows, Amanda Ross-Ho, Pae White, and Sterling Ruby. The organizers are collector and art adviser Eleanor Cayre, New Museum curator Benjamin Godsill, and gallerist Joel Mesler, New Yorkers all. Of these, Mesler has the strongest connection to Los Angeles. He was born and raised there and ran a gallery and a printmaking workshop in the city’s Chinatown. Today, however, he is the co-owner of the Lower East Side Untitled Gallery. That Untitled artists Brendan Fowler, Ry Rocklen, and Henry Taylor are appearing in what is supposed to be a noncommercial exhibition may raise some eyebrows, but Godsill insists it shouldn’t. "Joel was adamant about not including artists he represents, but it felt more unethical not to include names who are so much a part of the community in L.A."

View Slideshow: L.A. on the Hudson

One of the names on the organizers’ must-have list is former gallerist and sculptor Aaron Wrinkle, who was the proprietor of a Chinatown space he closed last month, Dan Graham. For "Greater L.A.," Wrinkle is making a large wavelike piece that will function as a platform for performances, and serve, as Godsill puts it, as "a personification of Los Angeles." Additionally the curators are giving him space roughly the size of his gallery to hang a Minimalist wall-mounted object, made by artist Ignacio Perez Meruane, that will hold documentation from Wrinkle’s gallery’s archive.

"Greater L.A." bears some similarity to "The Station," a group exhibition Cayre produced in Miami with Momin during the 2008 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. Using her real estate connections, Cayre was able to find a vast, freshly developed multifloor space in Miami’s Wynwood District that, in the depths of the recession, was sitting unoccupied. "Greater L.A." will be mounted in 15,000 square feet of industrial space, a former fabric-trimming factory, on the second floor of a building on Broadway near Broome that the financial collapse has also left tenantless. "The owner is someone I know," says Cayre. "It’s nice to be able to take these opportunities." Aside from newly installed walls, the interior will be left fairly raw for the show. It’s about "reclaiming spaces that are left over in a capitalist system and finding aesthetic purposes for them," says Godsill.

With this exhibition the curators seek to introduce artists who they believe typify the L.A. vernacular. "It’s not that they’re brand-new or unheard of," says Godsill. "It was about who is most important in setting the terms for what’s going on both in L.A. and elsewhere." Not all are Angelenos born and bred; many — like Carter Mull, from Atlanta, and Mindy Shapero, from Kentucky — were attracted to the city’s art schools and stayed. One of the L.A. natives, Anthony Pearson, says the show should be interesting because of the "generalities that crop up" with respect to the differences between New York and Los Angeles, such as the fact that the West Coast coterie has "more immersion in studio practice."

"New York is a cacophonous echo chamber of art," says Pearson, who is producing a large installation for the exhibition. "I have the feeling most artists in New York know what other artists are doing. Culture is not as big an engine in L.A. So there’s an aspect of being less informed. And then there is the Western ideal of the seeker — just keep going west." Not that the Angelenos are all idealistic loners. They engage in a dialogue with one another, he adds, "whether it’s intuitive or verbal."

L.A. "doesn’t give you anything," says Mull. "You have to seek it out. Practices become large in Los Angeles. Look at Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy — there’s a conceptual complexity fostered by immersion in the city."

Because some 70 percent of the participants are producing new pieces for the show, it’s hard to tell precisely what image of current Angeleno practices "Greater L.A." will present. "We’re still wrapping our heads around that. It’s something we hope to figure out while we are installing," Godsill admits, adding that one unifying theme is the tendency of all the selected artists to "take bits of the world and remake them, whether through a film that uses appropriated images or the use, in an installation, of objects that exist in the world." Alex Israel, a recent graduate from the University of Southern California who has never shown in New York, uses items from Hollywood prop houses for his installations — and then returns them when he’s finished. For "Greater L.A.," he is presenting high-end film and TV props on pedestals as a sculptural installation.

"There are a lot of exciting things being made in L.A. now," says Israel. "That L.A. is not New York is its blessing and its curse. As artists we aren’t as under the microscope as artists in New York are in terms of how we approach our practice. A lot of us went to the same schools, had the same teachers. There are some unspoken connections you will see from the context." Those connections, the three curators believe, will be illuminating. "That’s the point of doing a show like this," says Mesler. "Putting together the players who you think are doing interesting work and seeing what the language is."

"L.A. on the Hudson" originally appeared in the May 2011 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' May 2011 Table of Contents.