Sushi gone

Shame on me. Shame on you. Shame on anybody interested in keeping this city's cultural scene alive.

When The San Diego Union-Tribune reported last week that Sushi Contemporary Performance and Visual Arts is closing its doors, most people acted shocked and surprised, but as board chairman Indra Gardiner Bowers put it to me over the phone last Friday, "It's like, 'Really? How many times did you go to a Sushi performance? How much money did you donate?'"

For my part, I should have done a better job at covering Sushi's plight. The story started writing itself the moment the once homeless, cutting-edge arts organization moved into its new East Village digs just as the recession hit.

The story continued when, in early 2010, Sushi hired Patrick Stewart but had only enough money to cover the first few months of his required salary. It was basically left up to Stewart and the board to raise the money to keep him paid, but by the end of 2010, Stewart had to take on a new, full-time job at Words Alive, a San Diego literacy nonprofit.

"We had no staff," Gardiner Bowers said. "Everyone was a volunteer for a really long time."

And as if that weren't enough indication that Sushi was going through some pretty hard times, I had a few folks whispering in my ear that Sushi was on the brink of shutting down. I had even experienced first-hand moments of programming mishaps and communications frustrations. In fact, near the end, most of the communication coming from Sushi was more membership-driven and less program-touting. I should have surly known by then.

I wrote about the very last art show to grace Sushi's walls, but shame on me for not including anything about the current state of Sushi itself.

Maybe a story wouldn't have made one lick of a difference, but at least I could say I tried to raise awareness.

Rather than ranting and trying to find a few places to lay blame, I could ruminate on the great programming Sushi brought to San Diego, but KPBS's Angela Carone already did a good job of that on her Culture Lust blog. 

Instead, I'd rather focus on the fact that San Diego's arts-and-culture crowd should have known about Sushi's troubles and, if we didn't, we should start listening. Start volunteering. Maybe it's even time to start thinking about giving your favorite arts organization some money. At the very least, we should start paying closer attention.

"I just stopped hearing about Sushi out in the world," said Vernon Franck, a Sushi board member from 2003 to 2008 and board president for two of those years. "The on-the-street presence just kind of evaporated."

Franck says he didn't know Sushi was so close to shutting down, but he did see changes during the last few years that he thinks may have amplified the economic challenges.

"I'd say that it's a very powerful bit of evidence that yesterday's lead story in the U-T was, ironically, the surprising robust nature of the arts in this city," Franck said last week. "It shows there's been a lot of resiliency. So, yes, there were economic problems, but I don't think that was a good enough reason for Sushi to go down; I think it was cultural ineptitude."

While Franck blames Sushi's current board for the organization's demise, Lynn Schuette, who founded Sushi and ran it for 14 years as its director, pointed toward San Diego's seeming unwillingness to embrace art that is too far out on the edge.

"For a long time there’s been problems with San Diego supporting more liberal edges of culture, and that in itself is such a profoundly sad issue," Schuette said.

"Plus, it’s rough out here; everyone I talk to is struggling," she added later.

According to Gardiner Bowers, part of the redevelopment deal between the site's developers and the Centre City Development Corporation is that certain debts would be forgiven in exchange for a 25-year discounted lease that would go to a San Diego arts group. So, unless that lease is renegotiated, an arts organization must occupy the space.

"Our hope is to see that an arts organization will move into the space and work with the emerging landscape there," she said. "The library will eventually be right across the street."