San Diego’s State of the Arts: Visual arts

Related: State of the Arts: Classical music/opera

At Lux Art Institute, you don’t just see art exhibits. What makes the Encinitas museum so unusual is that visitors have the opportunity to watch an artist at work.

So there was Victoria Adams, the latest resident artist, painting a four-by-four-foot linen canvas on a sunny weekday morning.

“Art can be deeply mysterious to people,” said the native of Columbus, Ohio, who lives on Vashon Island, near Seattle. “Seeing how a piece of art is made increases the appreciation for the art as well as the artist.”

Known for her luminous landscapes, Adams drew some inspiration for her new work, “By the Sea,” from nearby San Elijo Lagoon and the quality of light in the area (”it’s so different from what I’m used to in the Pacific Northwest”). She mixed the oil paints directly on the canvas, swirling together dabs of pigment with confident brush strokes. She almost seemed to be massaging the canvas while creating a sky whose pearly iridescence recalled such landscape masters as Albert Bierstadt and George Inness.

Adams — who completed her residency in April and will have paintings on display through May 20 — is the eighth artist to have lived and worked at the site since Lux opened in 2007. (Next comes Scottish-born Derrick Guild, who’s in residence from May 28 to June 20, with works on exhibit from May 28 to August 1).

“It’s always new — it really is,” Adams said of the invigorating experience of facing a fresh canvas. “I feel like if I show up and start painting, I get to see what happens.”

A sense of adventure also infuses San Diego’s visual art scene, which continues to reinvent itself despite, and sometimes because of, the ongoing economic challenges. If it were an art work, the local art scene would be a bold and varied collage.

Some of the shapes would symbolize such institutions as the San Diego Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum of Photographic Arts, Timken Museum of Art, Mingei International Museum, Sushi Performance & Visual Art, Oceanside Museum of Art and Athenaeum Music & Arts Library.

Others would represent the many galleries, college and university art departments, and individual artists who are based here.

“There’s definitely a vibrant art scene in San Diego,” says Neil Kendricks, a San Diego-based artist, photographer, filmmaker, writer, and SDNN contributor. “It may not be as visible as those in Los Angeles or San Francisco. It’s more of a hidden treasure.”

Yet something this valuable can’t stay hidden forever. Not with so much creative activity.

“The visual arts are healthier than they’ve ever been,” says Hugh Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. “San Diego is already a strong theater town and we’re approaching a moment when there will be more balance in terms of attention and acknowledgement for the visual arts.”

He cites the presence of strong art departments at such schools as UC San Diego and San Diego State University. He also commends the astute programming and collegial atmosphere of local institutions that favor cooperation over competition, promoting feelings of solidarity in troubled financial times.

San Diego benefits from expert and experienced leadership at local museums. Hugh Davies, for instance, has headed the Museum of Contemporary Art since 1983. In addition to enhancing its reputation with major exhibitions, he has guided the expansion of what is Southern California’s longest continuously operating museum of contemporary art, founded in 1941.

Rather than have a single home, like most art museums, MCASD has two co-equal locations, one in La Jolla; the other, downtown. The La Jolla facility, originally designed by architect Irving Gill and built in 1915-16 as philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps’ residence, was most recently expanded in 1996 with the help of architect Robert Venturi.

Visit it once and you may never forget it. Perched on a bluff overlooking the ocean, the museum has what is undoubtedly one of the nation’s most scenic museum settings.

The downtown location capitalizes on its unabashedly urban location, proving that the museum’s domain extends miles from La Jolla. Beginning with the galleries at 1001 Kettner, which opened in 1993, the facility expanded in 2007 to include the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Building (formerly the Santa Fe Depot baggage building) and the David C. Copley Building, which includes education space, offices and a lecture hall.

“We needed to embrace the whole city as our constituency,” Davies explains. “I felt that such a move was necessary in order to diversify our audiences and expand our offerings. Now we have the best of both worlds.”

Financial pressures have forced the museum to trim its budget, staff and programming, one casualty being downtown’s Thursday Night Thing (TNT), a wildly eclectic multi-media event popular with the much-coveted under-35 crowd. Instead of being held monthly, TNT will be presented sporadically, with the next installment slated for November 5 to coincide with an exhibit by Tara Donovan, whose sculptures have incorporated everything from Styrofoam cups to drinking straws.

Other shows include Jane Hammond’s anti-war installation titled “Fallen” (through July 5 at downtown’s Jacobs Building), which consists of more than 4,000 paper leaves, each bearing the name of a U.S. soldier who died in Iraq, and “MIX: Nine San Diego Architects and Designers” (May 22 through September 6 in La Jolla), which enables the participants to create gallery space that’s representative of their work. On view in La Jolla from Sept. 26 to Jan. 31, 2010 will be “Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art,” showcasing works by artists around the globe.

Davies doesn’t mind if you’re not always enthusiastic about the featured exhibitions.

“When I take visitors to the museum, I often say ‘Pay attention to what you don’t like because that piece is the one that may be talking to you longer than the others,’” he recalls. “The ones you feel neutral about, you’re not going to think about. The ones you don’t like are the ones that provoke thought and intellectual growth.”

The most adventurous local gallery is Sushi Performance & Visual Art, the ever-stimulating multidisciplinary institution founded in 1980. Located in the East Village, and hoping to select a new executive director by the end of June, Sushi cultivates local and outside artists by presenting “fresh, edgy and engaging work,” as visual arts coordinator Jackie Hall puts it.

Also a performance presenter, Sushi serves an array of exhibitions each year. Up through June 9 is “o.o.t.s.,” which stands for “orphans of the storm” and involves a group of young artist friends from Los Angeles, Vancouver and Vienna. They work outside the traditional gallery system and believe in bartering. No kidding. Guests at the recent opening night reception were urged to bring a toss-away blanket, plant clipping, candle and foreign currency.

“It’s so important for San Diego to have a place like Sushi,” says Hall. “We need more alternative spaces for the arts.”

Despite the gentrification of East Village, which has made it harder for artists to afford to live and work there, the San Diego area has a robust gallery scene.

Little Italy is perhaps best known as the site of Mission Federal ArtWalk, which celebrated its 25^th anniversary in April. Solana Beach provides such enticements as the Ordover Gallery, which currently includes works by veteran National Geographic photographer Ira Block (through July 19). And La Jolla is home to a variety of galleries, the most prominent being Quint Contemporary Art, which has scheduled a major new show, “HOMING IN: An Exhibition of 50 San Diego Artists” from May 29 to July 11.

For established masterworks, the leading go-to place is the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park, which hosts major visiting exhibitions and has a collection of approximately 16,000 objects.

That’s a whole lot of art. Yet there has also been some anxiety.

“This is a challenging time for the art world as well as for the world in general,” notes Derrick Cartwright, executive director of San Diego’s biggest and oldest art museum.

Because of a drop in its endowment, the institution laid off more than 20 employees earlier this year.

“I would have done anything not to have had to do that. But it just wasn’t a possibility,” says Cartwright. “We still have the largest museum staff. And we’re very proud of what the San Diego Museum of Art is doing. It’s meant to be the central focus of the cultural institutions in Balboa Park.”

Adorned with a handsomely restored façade, and packed with everything from Asian, American and Indian art to Old Masters, the building welcomes visitors from around the globe. And there will be much for them to see this summer and beyond.

“Art Alive 2009″ (June 11-14) is the latest installment of the annual art and flower extravaganza. From July 25 through Jan. 3, 2010, the museum will be the only West Coast venue for “Calder Jewelry,” which showcases about 100 necklaces, bracelets and other objects by mobile genius Alexander Calder. (”They’re wear-able works of art. It’s really a terrific show,” says Cartwright.) And “American Artists from the Russian Empire” (Oct. 22 through Jan. 17, 2010) honors key figures in modern art, including Mark Rothko and Ben Shahn.

Only steps away from the San Diego Museum of Art is the Timken, whose new director, John Wilson, was appointed last year, the Mingei, where James Goodwin succeeded founding director Martha Longenecker in 2005, and the Museum of Photographic Arts (MoPA), where Deborah Klochko succeeded founding director Arthur Ollman in 2006.

These are all special places and San Diego is fortunate to have them.

MoPA, for instance, is one of only three independent photography museums in the country, according to Klochko. (The others are the George Eastman House, in Rochester, New York, and New York City’s International Center of Photography.)

“It’s the ideal moment to be in the visual arts, especially photography,” says the photo historian, educator and museum administrator. “Photography is the visual currency of our time. Nearly everyone has a cell phone camera. What we try and do at MoPA is understand the power of the visual image.”

Works by one of photography’s legendary superstars, Ansel Adams, will be on view from May 23 through Oct. 4 — great timing to attract summer tourists and vacationing students. Due to the decline in corporate sponsorship, the sure-to-be-popular “Rock ‘n Revolution,” featuring photographs of such iconic musicians as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell, has been pushed to next year. Also coming to MoPA in 2010 is the San Diego debut of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, the leading outlet for socially conscious cinema.

Having guided MoPA’s 25^th anniversary celebrations last year, Klockho is confident about the future.

“We’ll be here for the next 25 years,” she says. “We really feel that our role is to bring a national and international presence to San Diego.”

That kind of thinking is sure to stretch and enhance the canvas for San Diego’s visual arts.

Valerie Scher is the SDNN Arts & Entertainment editor.

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