Blum & Poe was founded by Tim Blum and Jeff Poe in Santa Monica, California, in September 1994. The inaugural exhibition in Santa Monica featured Stroke, an installation by British artist Anya Gallaccio, consisting of chocolate smeared onto the gallery walls. In 2003, Blum & Poe relocated to a 5,000-square-foot warehouse on the edge of Culver City, an area of industrial warehouses. Several other galleries subsequently opened on the same stretch of La Cienega Boulevard, resulting in the formation of the Culver City Art District. On its 15th anniversary in 2009, the gallery purchased a 22,000-square-foot building across the street on La Cienega Boulevard and renovated it into a series of exhibition spaces on two floors.
Japanese artists
Prior to returning to Los Angeles in 1994, Blum had spent several years living and working in the Tokyo art world. During that time he met Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami. Blum and Poe visited Murakami's studio in Toyama to see his then newly created Oval Buddha. The massive sculpture was funded through the efforts of the gallerists. Following its opening in Santa Monica, Blum & Poe gave Yoshitomo Nara his first solo exhibition in the United States in 1995. Takashi Murakami’s first solo exhibition with the gallery was in 1997. In January 2010, Blum & Poe held a solo exhibition of Lee Ufan, the influential artist/theorist of Mono-ha, a loose group of Tokyo-based artists who established themselves in the late 1960s. In February 2012, the gallery held “Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha,” the first survey of Mono-ha in the United States, which included major installations by Kōji Enokura, Noriyuki Haraguchi, Susumu Koshimizu, Lee Ufan, Nobuo Sekine, Kishio Suga, Jiro Takamatsu, and Katsurō Yoshida.
Following the 2010 solo exhibition of Lee Ufan and the subsequent survey of Mono-ha in 2012, Blum & Poe expanded its exploration of the artistic contexts in which Lee Ufan worked. In parallel to his involvement with Mono-ha, Lee had been an influential figure to his peers in Korea, whose works were collectively referred to as Dansaekhwa. In September 2014, the gallery held "From All Sides: Tansaekhwa on Abstraction," curated by Joan Kee, Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Michigan, at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles. Featuring Lee and six other core artists from the movement — Chung Sang-Hwa, Ha Chonghyun, Kwon Young-woo, Park Seobo and Yun Hyong-keun — "From All Sides" was the first major survey of Dansaekhwa to be held in the United States. Blum & Poe in New York subsequently held Ha Chonghyun's first US solo show in November 2014, and Yun Hyong-keun's first posthumous US solo show in November 2015.
On its 20th anniversary in 2014, Blum & Poe established two new branches. In May, the gallery opened a gallery in a townhouse on the Upper East Side in New York. In September, Blum & Poe opened a space opposite the Meiji Shrine gardens in central Tokyo.
