Sometimes the apple might fall a considerable distance from the tree, but, in due time, it inches its way closer to its roots. Such is the case with Ronen Glimer, founder of Artists & Fleas craft and vintage market. “My father is an art dealer,” Glimer said. “I was talking to him about how, as you start to get older, you realize, ‘I’m starting to become like my parents.’ My dad deals with artists, and I’m dealing with them, but in a different way.”
In the Glimer family, collaborating with creative types in a competitive commercial environment has a deeply entrenched history. Glimer’s father, Josef, is a longtime gallery owner in Chicago who represents and sells the work of Israeli artists and modern 20th-century masters such as Marc Chagall and Joan Miro. Josef grew up in Tel Aviv; his father, Mordechai, had emigrated to Palestine from Poland as a teenager during the early 1920s. Eventually, Mordechai and a cousin from France partnered in opening an antique store on Tel Aviv’s Allenby Street, where the team merged Old and New World sensibilities by selling imported European valuables alongside sabra fine art. Josef lived for a while in Paris before returning to Israel just before the Six-Day War; he subsequently moved to New York City and then settled in Chicago.
Ronen grew up in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, where he attended a Modern Orthodox high school by personal choice rather than parental mandate, then went on to graduate from Columbia University. He remained in New York and married Amy Abrams, whom he had dated as a teenager when they attended Camp Ramah in Wisconsin together. The couple now live in Brooklyn with their two daughters, ages 6 and 8, and together they founded and run Artists & Fleas, based in Williamsburg, the neighborhood that has become the de facto poster child of urban gentrification and hipster culture.
When Abrams and Glimer decided to start a market in 2003, Glimer was working at a telecommunication startup, a job he continued to hold through 2008. “I loved it, and it was really interesting. But it wasn’t what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” he said. So when the couple looked around and realized how immersed they were in creative circles populated with crafty friends and acquaintances, their entrepreneurial side — boosted by Glimer’s family’s mercantile background — began to manifest strongly and take shape. “We had a friend who did this, a friend who did that, so [we] thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to do something on the side?’ ”
Operating Artists & Fleas is now a full-time occupation for both Abrams and Glimer, and since last May, they’ve been bringing their outfit to Los Angeles for a series of monthly pop-up markets. In Williamsburg, Artists & Fleas occupies a permanent 5,000-square-foot warehouse and is open on the weekends. The space gives the 60 vendors a home where they can maintain their retail presences and workshops. In essence, Artists & Fleas has become a small-business incubator for modern-day craftspeople working in all styles and mediums, as well as for dealers of vintage goods. Shoppers reap the benefit of having access to a curated, tangible retail environment equivalent to the eclectic online marketplaces such as Etsy that have exploded in popularity.
“I look for people who are able to articulate a strong point of view aesthetically and who have the desire to promote, grow, share and story-tell,” Glimer explained. “We like to be a place for experimentation. It’s a great way to reach your market and to find out what works.” The collective aspect also appeals to vendors who find support and collaborative opportunities among fellow like-minded small-scale entrepreneurs. In Brooklyn, a percentage of the spaces are intended to rotate to keep the material fresh, and there’s also an Artists & Fleas outpost in Manhattan at the heavily trafficked Chelsea Market complex.
The Los Angeles market, which features Southern California vendors, is held the third weekend of every month in a covered lot near Sixth and Mateo streets in the burgeoning downtown Arts District. “A market is a living, breathing thing. We try not to have an agenda and say this is what it’s going to be,” Glimer noted. “There’s a certain responsiveness to the market and market forces” that requires his team to be nimble. In L.A., the audience has been receptive thus far. “The people here are amazing,” Glimer said. “They’re very different from New York. The aesthetic is very California. I don’t know what that means exactly, but I know it when I see it.”
Artists & Fleas also isn’t just about connecting local buyers and merchants. Recent L.A. Artists & Fleas events have featured a DIY butterfly preservation workshop taught by taxidermist Divya Anatharaman, a beer garden held in partnership with grass-roots arts organization Art Share L.A., a live DJ and food trucks, along with the usual broad mix of 40-plus sellers and makers Abrams and Glimer diligently select.
“I almost feel like I’ve become a punch line in a joke, of being, like, the guy living in Brooklyn running a flea market,” Glimer said. Those elements do indeed sound risible and cliché, and yet they also describe a fitting evolution of a unique family legacy.
The L.A. market is held the third Saturday and Sunday of the month, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., at 647 Mateo St., downtown Arts District. artistsandfleas.com. @artistsandfleas.
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