Max Hooper Schneider’s Garden Party

By the time Virginia Robinson had the place to herself, the 2,500 square foot house started to feel a little lonely. She and her husband Harry Robinson, whose family made its fortune from the J. W. Robinson’s department stores, had brought the six rolling acres of their Beverly Hills home to life with the help of the on-staff botanist and landscape architect Charles Gibbs Adams. There were rare, imported plant species and antique furniture, an endless swimming pool reflecting dazzling, cloudless blue skies and a manicured backyard that later doubled as a helipad.

When Harry died in 1932, Virginia wanted her home to still feel as if it were alive with the endless stream of guests they had always entertained. So she invited some real party animals to move in – a troop of monkeys. The primates roamed the tropical Australian King Palm Forest and mingled with visitors; nowhere on the Robinson estate was off-limits. 

The monkeys eventually handed over the keys in 1977, when the Robinson family donated the estate to Los Angeles County. There haven’t been many unruly interventions since. Until October 2024, when the Virginia Robinson Gardens opened up for Los Angeles-based artist Max Hooper Schneider to present his exhibition ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’.

Recognized for works that involve both organic and technological collaborators, Hooper Schneider has created a series of sculptures using the gardens’ late-season debris of fallen fruits, branches and flowers. He has covered them using electroplating – a chemical bath that coats objects with metal. The copper drips from the organic matter in what he describes as a ‘coraline, dendritic fashion’. The arrangements are like preserved specimens: dormant for now, but suggestive of having the potential to break out of their shells and return to a more primitive ecological order. 

Even though these objects look like antiquities, they’re still in transit.

– Max Hooper Schneider

‘You have to think of these assemblages as reliquaries,’ explains Hooper Schneider, ‘because you have to believe what’s really inside them stays in a constant state of change.’ We are speaking on the terrace of the Pool House, a miniature mansion overlooking the listless blue waters that the visitors on this arid October morning seem barely able to resist. ‘They will denature and oxidize the surface [of the plants],’ he continues. ‘They’re evolving; they aren’t static objects.’ The copper-plated arrangements of tree bark and bananas, whose series of chemical baths took half a year to complete, have been placed in the dining room, amid the Continental crystal and china, and in the house’s studies, as well as in the ponds and pools outside. ‘Even though these objects look like antiquities,’ he explains, ‘they’re still in transit.’

A back room, blocked off with blackout curtains, contains a raised bed with Hooper Schneider’s collection of black plants. It resembles his aquarium works, but with the lid pulled off. The artist, who trained as a landscape designer, has contrived the lush, velvety, silent container garden to thrive under the rays of a single pink light bulb – an austere and harsh habitat when compared to the proliferating ecosystem just beyond the covered windows.

‘Max and I have been discussing this garden for years,’ explains project curator Jay Ezra Nayssan of Del Vaz Projects, a nonprofit exhibition space and publishing platform based in Nayssan’s Santa Monica home. ‘In many ways, it’s like turning the room itself into a vitrine.’ 

These incredible gardens are one of LA’s hidden gems, so I ask guests what else they would nominate as a lesser-known masterpiece from the city. Artists Lucile Littot and Markos Mazarakis-Ainian, who are in town from Athens to perform at nonprofit LAND’s annual Halloween benefit, hosted at Del Vaz Projects a few nights later, focus on its natural wonders. For Littot, it is the landscape just beyond the city, ‘The sound of the desert, because there is something surreal in the “no-sound”, the silence. It’s between two worlds – ours and the spirits’.’ For Mazarakis-Ainian, it is the ocean.

The night before, large parts of the city had come to a standstill, when a combination of huge public events, including a Dodgers baseball game, caused a ‘trafficalpyse’ or ‘carmageddon’ that paralyzed the city’s streets for hours. For Belen Piñeiro from François Ghebaly gallery, the city’s masterpiece is its intricately looping freeway system – one that is easy to take for granted, but which connects every corner of the loosely defined ‘city’ of Greater Los Angeles. 

As we wander through the gardens, around the fountains and up and down stairs to get back to the pool house, Hooper Schneider muses on the Robinsons’ ecological ambitions for their home: ‘At what point does an exotic plant become a native one?’ he asks. The flowers and trees have been blossoming here for nearly a century. A visitor spots a starfish embedded in one of the artist’s sculptures. ‘Where did you get this?’ he asks. ‘Oh, that’s definitely from here,’ jokes Hooper Schneider to the laughing crowd. ‘I got that one from the swimming pool.’

Max Hooper Schneider is presented by François Ghebaly (C15) at Frieze Los Angeles 2025.

Further Information

Frieze Los Angeles, 20 – 23 February 2025, Santa Monica Airport. Early-bird tickets now available.

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^{Main Image: Max Hooper Schneider, ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’, installation view, Virginia Robinson Gardens, Los Angeles, 2024. Photo: Emily Pinto}