Art with an edge

See that naked woman in the top left corner of Raul Guerrero's painting pictured to the left? (You might have to click the image to make it bigger.)

In person, Guerrero's piece is about 6-feet-by-17-feet, so the nude is easier to spot. But, still, it's definitely not the central focus of the piece. You have to sort of search it out to find it.

Back in 2008, Guerrero's painting was removed from L Street Fine Art Gallery because someone complained. A church group holding a conference at the nearby Omni Hotel saw the nude and said it looked like the girl was masturbating. They called it pornographic and threatened to move their conference if the hotel didn't take the piece down.

L Street Fine Art Gallery is a unique space that serves as both the foyer to the Omni Hotel and a gallery open to the public. Housed in a building that's also home to a parking garage built by the Centre City Development Corporation (CCDC) as a redevelopment project, the gallery was born out of a compromise.

CCDC requires the street-level rooms of the building to be active retail space, but Omni wanted more room for conferences. The hotel came up with the solution to activate the space by putting a gallery between the conference rooms and the street. CCDC agreed, and L Street Fine Art Gallery opened its doors.

After the removal of Guerrero's piece, Berchtold, one of the founders of the San Diego Art Prize, knew that the gallery wouldn't be a good fit for the next San Diego Art Prize exhibition.

"If they thought Raul’s piece was racy," Berchtold said, "they were not going to handle Eleanor Antin's piece, which is very provocative but a very beautiful piece. [In the work], women are partially clothed with nooses hanging from a tree, and it was the size of a billboard so, at that point, I made the decision to relocate the show and we moved it to R3 Gallery."

The split was amicable on both sides, according to Berchtold and Patsy Bock, director of sales and marketing for the Omni Hotel. R3 has since closed its doors, and the 2010 San Diego Art Prize exhibition has moved yet again, this time to the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla. An exhibition featuring Mexican artists Julio Orozco and Einar and Jamex de la Torre, all Art Prize winners, opens from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Friday, April 1.

But with a happy new home for the Art Prize, the question still remains—what kind of art does L Street Fine Art Gallery want to show and what is the effect of censoring art? Thanks largely to the San Diego Art Prize, which has showcased internationally known artists like Marcos Ramirez Erre, Andy Howell and Tania Candiani, the gallery had become known as one of the more progressive, interesting art hubs in the region.

It may quickly lose that reputation, though, and, in fact, do wider damage to the San Diego visual-art world. Guerrero said that after having his piece removed, he sometimes catches himself "self-editing," or tailoring his work to make sure it won't offend anyone.

He says other artists with similar experiences are probably out there doing the same thing, setting the overall tone of San Diego art to a certain type of "safe" art that doesn't attempt to push the envelope in any way for fear of repercussions from local, privately owned galleries like L Street.

A few weeks ago, after seeing this story about an exhibition of nude paintings that had been canceled, artist Michael Carini emailed me to let me know that he, too, felt his work was being compromised. An exhibition of his abstract paintings is currently on view at L Street Fine Art Gallery. Kay Colvin, the gallery's current director, told Carini he couldn't hang labels for a few of his pieces.

"[She] was nice about it but she said because it was a family hotel and that it was too controversial," wrote Carini in an email. "I still put up the work, but I couldn't label what it was, which was very significant to me. That white piece I did about addiction was made of acrylic, vodka, and Xanax on panel. The gold piece I did had narcotics and burnt currency mixed with it, and I couldn't label that either. I just finished a piece, a very classy and beautiful piece that has ejaculate mixed with it because it was critical to the theme. I have another piece I'm working on about suicide and it is going to have a suicide note in the painting. I know both of these paintings are not going to be well received in San Diego, no matter how strong they are. It's sad, but the artist has to keep making the work they need to make."

Bock said she wasn't aware that Carini was told he couldn't show his labels. She said the Omni doesn't have a policy in terms of what is and isn't allowed to be shown in L Street other than "art that matches the rest of the hotel."

When asked to define what that meant, she simply restated that it needed to be up to par with the fine-art collection of watercolors, oils and photography on view throughout the Omni. She insisted it was the only prerequisite when it came to allowing art to hang on the gallery's walls.

"Well, they do show art and they have supported the art community; they have committed to showing local art as far as I know, so, you know, that’s a plus," said Berchtold, who has since moved on to running the Art San Diego Contemporary Art Fair, where she says they never censor works from participating galleries. "But San Diego needs to be a little less prudish when it comes to art. For our art show, I would expect the parents to do a diligent job and decide if they want to bring their kids to our art fair. I, as the director, am not going to censor it for kids or the people who might complain."