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The West Coast:

An Overview of the California Art Scene

By Sarah Nardi

Most states have a varied cultural texture, a subtle social gradation that works its way east to west, north to south. But the vast landscape of California often feels less like a contiguous culture than a distinct collection of self-contained worlds. Each of the state’s three major cities is animated by its own political, social and aesthetic philosophies and defined by a particular historical identity. Art, and the corresponding gallery culture, reflect this reality, making each city home to its own unique scene.

San Diego, at the southernmost tip of the state, has a reputation for being the country’s most temperate city. Surrounded by lush natural beauty, the larger metropolitan area stretches north along the Pacific, encompassing the city and a string of affluent, coastal communities. Like the weather, the social climate tends to be genial — marked by a steadiness that borders on staid. Taste in San Diego is largely conservative, a fact which galleries, the most successful of which have been active for more than twenty years, must constantly contend. The city’s two main gallery districts are located in Little Italy, a self-styled neighborhood district west of downtown and La Jolla, a wealthy resort community to the north.

Little Italy’s reputation as an up-and-coming art district has been cemented in recent years by a string of young, progressive gallerists who have set up shop amid the area’s coffee shops and cafes. Many of the galleries, like Subtext — a small space with an adjoining bookstore on Kettner Boulevard — place an emphasis on urban contemporary art and design; courting an audience that may have otherwise migrated north to L.A. Around the corner on India Street, the three-year old Luis de Jesus Seminal Projects has gained a reputation for its experimental exhibition program that juxtaposes local work with emerging multi-media artists from around the world. Though popular with the young and hip, the area has struggled to initiate a dialogue with San Diego’s small, somewhat timid community of collectors, the majority of which is concentrated in the north. “San Diego is a highly segregated place,” one gallerist explains. “We don’t have the kind of assimilation, the cultural collision, that happens in other cities and you feel that as a gallery. Collectors play it very safe.” The one space in the area that seems to have struck a successful balance between mid-career contemporary and blue-chip is Scott White Contemporary Art, tucked away on West Kalima Street.

A ten-mile drive on the I-5 North leads to La Jolla where most of San Diego’s best known galleries are located. The downtown area is small and posh, with galleries interspersed between luxury storefronts and high-end boutiques. Tasende Gallery, located on a scenic stretch of Prospect Street, has been in La Jolla since 1979 when it moved operations from Acapulco, Mexico. With a heavy emphasis on sculpture, the gallery has mounted exhibitions of recognizable work by artists like Giacomo Manzu, Isamu Noguci and Mark di Suvero. A few blocks away on Girard, Joseph Bellows Gallery maintains three exhibitions rooms of contemporary photography and vintage prints from iconic names like Ansel Adams and Irving Penn. And through a hard-to-find back alley entrance, Quint Gallery occupies a quiet, subterranean space on Drury Lane. Of the city’s established gallerists, Mark Quint is perhaps the most adventurous and seems particularly adept at navigating the space between emerging artists and well-known work.

Two hours away in Los Angeles, intrepid gallery owners are in no short supply. L.A. has long been considered the Western analogue of New York City. But it’s only within the past several years that the L.A. gallery scene has really come into its own, developing both the vibrancy and gravitas to act as a true cultural counterbalance to the East. For the past two decades, a cadre of enterprising gallerists has steadily staked its claim in areas throughout the city and carved the Los Angeles sprawl into a series of distinct, navigable districts.

Chinatown, a 24-square block area to the north of downtown, was the scene of a major cultural renaissance in the nineties. The area had been in economic free fall for about a decade when galleries, drawn to the neighborhood by low rents and compact, urban charm, began to settle in. The recently shuttered Black Dragon Society was among the first exhibition spaces to open on Chinatown’s Chung King Road in 1998. Run by an artist collective and operated only sporadically, Black Dragon had devoted many of its shows to student work and was instrumental in establishing the unrefined “art school” vibe that still permeates parts of the area. Traditional contemporary galleries soon followed and within two years, Chinatown became a thriving gallery district that balanced a unique mix of the commercial and the conceptual. China Art Objects, another Chung King Road pioneer, was an early supporter of emerging L.A. artists Pae White and Ruby Neri and for the past decade has focused heavily on cultivating local talent. Other contemporary spaces dotting the easily traversed length of Chung King include The Happy Lion, The Box, Kathryn Brennan Gallery (formerly Sister) and Sabina Lee. Steps away on Cottage Home Street, Steve Hanson (of China Art Objects), Kathryn Brennan and Thomas Solomon (son of the late New York dealer Holly Solomon) have opened the collaborative Cottage Home, a 4,000 square-foot exhibition space in a former Chinese theater.

Though Chinatown remains a viable art district, its rapid growth began to slow within a few years and by 2003, the L.A. scene was ready for the next phase of its evolution. At the time, Tim Blum and Jeff Poe (of the eponymous Blum & Poe) were looking to relocate the well-known gallery from its Santa Monica location to a larger space. They eventually settled on a sparse, industrialized strip in Culver City, an area located east of Venice on the Santa Monica freeway. When it opened among the warehouses and tire yards on a run-down stretch of La Cienega Boulevard, Blum & Poe was the only established gallery for miles. But typifying the will and enterprising spirit of the city’s gallerists, Kim Light (of Lightbox) followed Blum & Poe into the cultural wilderness, immediately trailed by LAXART, Susanne Vielmetter and Lizbeth Oliveria (now closed). The settlement quickly expanded into an empire and today, over thirty galleries are operating in Culver City. Serious collectors frequent the district, mingling with scenesters and casual spectators, to view work that ranges from the famous — Takashi Murakami and Sam Durant — to the infamous — Bruce LaBruce and Dash Snow. The Culver City Art District, as it’s now known, has quickly gained an international reputation for high-caliber work and is home to some of L.A.’s best known galleries including: Roberts and Tilton, Peres Projects, LA Contemporary, Cherry and Martin and Sandroni.Rey. David Kordansky has just relocated to the area from Chinatown while Susanne Vielmetter recently expanded into a larger space on Washington Boulevard. And in October, Blum & Poe moved across the street from their original 5,000 square-foot space to a 21,000 square-foot complex that includes three galleries and a private residence for visiting artists.

A short drive west from Culver City leads to the town of Santa Monica. The longtime home of David Hockey, the area is awash in the intense hues of cerulean and sand made famous by his paintings. As an arts district, the area is best known for Bergamot Station, an industrial complex housing two dozen galleries and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Bergamot was a trolley station until 1954 when it became a warehouse district and the site of a celery packing plant. It was later purchased by the City of Santa Monica which enlisted Wayne Blank, co-owner of Shoshana Wayne gallery, to develop the space for artistic use. The resulting complex, which opened in 1994, is a pedestrian-friendly grouping of galleries and shops that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. Those visiting Bergamot Station can expect a healthy mix of emerging and mid-career work from notable galleries like Rosamund Felsen, where the focus is exposing young, regional artists, and Robert Berman, an early exhibiter of Keith Haring and Raymond Pettibon.

Venice, which borders Santa Monica to the south, is home to the popular LA Louver gallery. Located on a sunny stretch of Venice Boulevard, La Louver is best known for “Rouge Wave,” an annual exhibition showcasing emerging L.A. artists, as well as for its roster of recognizable mid-career artists including Richard Deacon, Deborah Butterfield and Dale Chihuly. The New York-based L&M Arts is constructing a two-building complex down the street with a planned opening of September 2010 and will kick off their exhibition program with a show by Paul McCarthy. Though L&M considered opening a branch in Berlin, the gallery eventually settled on Los Angeles, citing a creative energy in the city similar to that of New York in the fifties.

If Los Angeles is approaching the apotheosis of its creative evolution, San Francisco is just beginning the ascent. After spending decades entangled in associations with the counterculture, the city is stepping beyond the hazy shadow of history and raising its profile in the world of contemporary art. The area has arguably never been aligned with emerging artists in the way that other major cities have. But as symbiosis between a new generation of gallerists and artists develops, the city seems to be poised on the brink of major cultural change.

Union Square, bordered by four main streets, Stockton, Geary, Post and Powell, is situated in the heart of downtown and is home to the majority of the city’s most well-established galleries. Many are located at 49 Geary Street, where galleries occupy several floors of space. Fraenkel Gallery, on the fourth floor, has been operating since 1979 and has a diverse history of photographic exhibitions that includes Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon and Sol LeWitt. One flight up, Robert Koch Gallery, also since 1979, maintains an extensive collection of historical and contemporary photography with special emphasis on modernist and experimental work of 1920’s and 30’s. Jack Fischer Gallery eschews easy categorization, offering an eclectic mix of intuitive, folk and outsider art. And Haines Gallery, occupying a multi-room space on the fifth floor, has a reputation for a progressive exhibition program which includes the first major West Coast showings of Andy Goldsworthy and the YBA’s. Rena Bransten, a longtime San Francisco gallerist, is located just up the street at 77 Geary.

Gallery Paule Anglim, at 14 Geary, has a long history of supporting experimental movements and artists in California such as Paul Kos, of the Bay Area Conceptualists and Manuel Neri, of the Bay Area Figurative movement. John Berggruen Gallery, among the most prominent in the city, has an established reputation for exhibiting seminal California artists like Richard Diebenkorn, Richard Serra and Ed Ruscha. Berggruen is located one block west of Union Square on Grant Avenue.

But it’s to the south of Union Square, in the Mission District, where a handful of relatively young gallerists are working closely with local artists, hoping to usher in a new era of San Francisco culture. Despite having one of the highest artist per capita rates in the world, San Francisco has been largely unable to provide the kind of international exposure emerging artists need to build an established reputation. Mission galleries like Ratio-3, Triple Base, Fecal Face, Jack Hanley and, in the Tendernob district, Silverman Gallery, are hoping to change this with progressive curatorial programs designed to garner international attention for both emerging local artists and the San Francisco arts scene. Chris Perez of Ratio-3, who has made a name for himself with high profile exhibitions like the West Coast debut of Ryan McGinley, regularly exhibits young locals like Mitzi Pederson and Jonathan Runico. Jessica Silverman, the 26-year old founder of Silverman Gallery, cultivates relationships with galleries abroad, bringing in the work of emerging international artists while sending her artists to show overseas. And Fecal Face Dot Gallery, the physical manifestation of the popular e-zine Fecalface.com, has largely been credited with legitimizing the New Mission School, a movement with roots in street culture and comic art.

Across the Bay Bridge in Oakland, gallery culture is informed by the city’s gritty, grassroots history. Oakland has long been a hotbed of activism and attendant feelings of solidarity and optimism pervade the burgeoning arts district in the city’s uptown neighborhood. Centered around a stretch of Telegraph Avenue, the district was the scene of an “art renaissance” in 2006 when a spate of new galleries opened within months of one another. Looking for way to maximize the area’s exposure, gallerists began to work cooperatively, conceiving a cross-promoted first Friday event christened the “Oakland Art Murmur”. Immediately popular with locals, the event managed to garner considerable national attention by its third year. And though the landscape has shifted considerably since 2006, several galleries in the district have become well-established. Johannson Projects, on the corner of Telegraph and 23rd, works with a recognizable roster of mid-career artists including Devorah Sperber and Jim Campbell; Hatch Gallery, on 23rd, maintains a diverse mix of outsider/folk, experimental and pop; while Rock Paper Scissors Collective and The Compound, both on Telegraph, are run by artists and volunteers. A few blocks away in the Ironworks district, Swarm gallery focuses on contemporary and experimental work and runs The Nest, a neighborhood artist residency program. The cooperative spirit that seems to define the district extends beyond the galleries to the small, devoted community of collectors that has formed around them. “We affectionately call them ‘emerging collectors’,” says one gallerist. “They may not spend the same kind of money as collectors in other areas, but they’re highly supportive of Oakland artists and tend to follow them throughout their careers. There’s just a tremendous amount of good will here right now.” M

Ed. Note:

Sarah Nardi is an arts and culture writer based in California, and a regular contributor to the M magazine. 

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Jane Gennaro         

Rogue Space New York 

By Mary Hrbacek

Jane Gennaro’s art is imbued with a sense of connection to the natural “found objects” she has discovered in the environs of her country home in New York State. Animal bones, insect parts, goose eggs, tortoise skulls and snake skins form the original impetus for a diverse array of collages, assemblages, sculptures and drawings that combine natural items with personal articles such as clothing and bedding. In an intuitive creative process, Gennaro formulates visual ideas in response to the shapes and textures that attract her. This process stirs childhood memories, transforming them into individual yet universal visual narratives. The work delves into the sanctity of nature, the mystery of daily life, death, birth and regeneration.

The Bones and Egg series projects a dimension of holiness inherent in the spiritual feeling of the sanctity of life and the natural world. Using white gauze or string, with eggs affixed to canvas, Gennaro creates soft web-like nests usually associated with gestation. This format elicits a sense of promise with the expectation that culminates in birth and regeneration. The hint of gestation evokes a dimension of time in the works. In some pieces, the eggs seem to be trapped as in a spider’s web. The group of white wall reliefs, especially the cross format, exude a feeling of purity and holiness usually associated with the silent reverence one feels when approaching a shrine or entering a chapel. The whiteness symbolizes the new beginnings of a tabula rasa. The Brides of Bone sculpture, constructed of deer bones and fabric, has a phantom, nostalgic quality of ghostly apparitions glimpsed in moonlight.

The Model series of cutout fashion magazine figures comments on contemporary cultural values. In these works, Gennaro projects the anger she feels at the diminished bodies and sick souls that result from the requisite starvation weight that models must maintain in order to qualify for their jobs in the fashion industry. This expectation of thinness is a modern phenomenon. That these emaciated beings are role models for young girls is anathema to the increasingly liberated, self-actualizing contemporary woman. The artist also performs a monologue called “Feed the Models” during the course of the exhibition.

In the related Hair and Model series, Gennaro employs her own hair as lines in her intuitive drawing process that results in an amalgam of abstract flowing visceral organisms. Nervous tension ignites a condition called trichotillomania, in which one pulls one’s hair out, strand by strand. She cites “hair pulling” as a female affliction, but uses this impulse creatively in her drawing procedure.

The Kinderdraussen collages invoke the innocence of childhood by recreating the magic and wonder of early “bedtime” stories. In this nostalgic series, Gennaro simulates the aura of fairy tales by employing soft colors, flowers, bees, bones, insects, and eggs fixed on top of Eisenhower era handkerchiefs. To these she adds vintage coloring book graphics of young children busily reading, sleeping or at play. The works tap the power of fantasy to stir the childhood memories that persist within every adult child.

Gennaro’s highly imaginative, inventive art flows from a consciousness of the unity of all forms of life on the planet. She follows her muse, Joseph Cornell, in making narrative theatrical works imbued with a sense of mystery. M

Ed. Note:

High Line Open Studios' Rogue Space is located in Chelsea at 526 West. 26th St., Ste. 9E, New York, NY 10001

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Beyond Time: Andrea Chiesi

Nohra Haime Gallery

By Vivi Ying He

During his first one person show in New York, self-taught Italian artist Andrea Chiesi discusses his paintings, which are based on photographs that he takes of empty and abandoned spaces.

M: Many of your paintings feature abandoned places. Why did you choose these places to paint?

AC: I started to paint abandoned places like factories and heavy industry because I’m interested in painting the history and memory of the last century. My first medium was shooting photos, but then I wanted to realize a traditional technique, oil on canvas because I love the history of Italian painting. I tried to do a new view of painting with the emotion of our time. Painting oil on canvas, oil on linen. I change the colors, the photos, to be just black and white. And I transform the real places into more metaphysical places; about the mind, the soul, nowhere.

M: I could feel that because I’ve seen similar work in Chinese art, with abandoned pictures; but they were just pure photographs. Yours are paintings; there is the emotion, the sadness of something that it is gone.

AC: There is emotion. I try to give light, I try to stop the time. Suspend the moment. It is interesting for me to give hope to these kinds of pictures about shadow; the shadow of the light. It’s a spiritual search, about control, about concentrating the technique of painting. I mean it’s hard to get the light; it’s similar to life, there is hope, in going to the light.

M: About hope, what do you mean?

AC: It’s a simple view. First, I’m a painter. I use language with imagery, I think one of the powers paintings have it that they give something to your soul. It’s a religious way of thinking of life. These painted places are out of time, out of the world, so I try to give hope to myself and to those who view the pictures.

M: Each person who sees your paintings will have a different feeling; the experience is different. One may see the sadness, others the hope, all have different interpretations. Are these all of the same place? Yes, it’s an abandoned place, a factory. It was a steel factory, abandoned and collapsed. It lives again in the pictures, like a cathedral of our time.

AC: Many of your paintings study architecture. I didn’t study architecture, but I’m interested in places where people have passed through. These places are waiting for people to come again; my interest is in painting, not architecture.

M: I understand that you are self-taught, for all of the paintings. Did you also do the photography that the paintings are based on?

AC: Yes, for me it’s necessary to go to places. I never use photos shot by someone else, or downloaded from the internet. I have to go and feel the place. A lot of times I have problems with the police; they’re closed places and so I don’t have authorization. I like exploring the landscape, seeing the transformation of the town. That’s the first part. The final part, the panting is more spiritual.

M: First you take pictures, then you make the paintings. That’s how you do it?

AC: Yes, first there is the real, physical place. Then I paint, and another process starts. I change the light and architecture; the technique is traditional. Hand drawn, slow painting. These sizes take at least two weeks to a month depending on my concentration. It’s very detailed, a lot of technique. The detail is what I mean about life being difficult, to go into the light.

M: How did you teach yourself painting?

AC: I started drawing in the 1980’s when I was young. But not in a contemporary style, I started drawing in punk rock gothic, I drew alterative kinds things; I arrived at oil on canvas later. It’s been a slow process. But it’s always growing.

M: How did you start to work with this gallery, with Nohra?

AC: She saw my gallery show in Milan, at my gallery there last year. It was simple, she liked it. Then there were some months for organizing the transport, new pictures, new work.

M: I feel in the contemporary art world, I haven’t seen work similar to yours, most people do portraits. The feeling of your painting is unique, it’s not only technique but the way you present it.

AC: You’re very kind; you’re right, maybe that’s so. I did not study art, I became a painter through drawing.

M: Did you do an apprenticeship?

AC: No, it was something that I had inside me, I had to get it out, to express it.

M: What about your family?

AC: My sister is a painter but she never exhibited. It’s my own motivation and choice of life. To be a painter now, doing this kind of painting, it was at first a life choice. Then sometime after, it became my job — what I doing for a living. In Italy, there are many people doing architecture or art who did not study. The Italians seem to know, on the street, about painting. It’s a good, cultured environment. Many people absorb the centuries of art; but the problem now in Italy is that the government doesn’t invest much in culture, so artists have had to do a lot on their own. There is not political culture for contemporary art, so everyone is alone. The atmosphere is good for starting and growing up, and then trying to do other things outside. M