Esther Kim Varet, Owner and Director of Various Small Fires Gallery

What exact duties does your role encompass?
"It encompasses everything from doing one-on-one studio visits with artists, conceiving and curating my shows, having lunch or coffee meetings with collectors, fielding questions and sending images to art advisors, curators, or art press about my represented artists and their shows, applying to and exhibiting at art fairs, corresponding with other dealers around the world who also exhibit my artists, making sure that the art work is getting produced in a timely manner for shows, writing essays and press releases for the show, and going out and making the rounds in the evenings at different art events to socialize with L.A. peers."

How did you score your job?
"After graduating from Yale in 2004, I went to work for established New York galleries such as Paula Cooper and Friedrich Petzel before heading to Columbia University to begin an Art History master’s program in Modern and Critical Theory. While a full-time student, I independently represented and showcased emerging artists at international art fairs. By the age of 24, I owned and operated my first ground-floor gallery with two partners on Vandam Street in New York City and simultaneously matriculated into the full-time PhD program at Columbia specializing in modern and contemporary art. Through a major fellowship from Columbia, I am currently completing dissertation research at LACMA and the Getty on late '60s California Conceptualism. I opened my gallery on Abbot Kinney in January dedicated to emerging artists and fresh curatorial ideas."

What's your most prized piece of art you own?
"I wouldn't say this is my most valuable piece of art, but it certainly is the most giving — I recently commissioned the rising art star and friend Alex Israel to do a 100-foot public art mural on the facade of my gallery building on Abbot Kinney. The mural has started to become a Venice icon and landmark in its own right, which has been an immensely rewarding project."

What artists would you give your right arm to hang in your living room?
"Being a PhD candidate in addition to a gallerist, I have to admit that I'm a total history dork. So, The Death of Murat by Jacques-Louis David which has been credited by some art historians as the first modernist painting. I don't particularly love the image, let's be honest — it's of a dead dude in a bath tub! But, I'm in love with the story — how the painting was theatrically marched down the streets of Paris during the French Revolution as an iconic proclamation that art now was to serve the people. Off with those other guys' heads!"

Hermés Watch, Julie Nolan Necklace, Chicco Ruiz Shoes, Self-Made Dress