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Zodiac Heads/Circle of Animals: Gold
Feb 22, 2012
This large-scale installation by artist and activist Ai Weiwei depicts the ancient Chinese zodiac with 12 gold-plated bronze animal heads. On view through July 29. The museum is open until 7 p.m. on third Thursdays.
51 other things to do on Wednesday, February 22
Perry Meyer's contributions to Pacific Standard Time
How the San Diego gallerist's dedication and detective work brought Clay Walker back into the spotlight
Kinsee Morlan
"I’m beginning to know him more and more, yes definitely—definitely," says Meyer, flipping through a big binder filled with Walker's writings.
Walker's wife, Muriel, contacted Meyer soon after her husband's death in 2008. She loaded Meyer up with thousands of pieces of art by Walker and rounded up every show flier, poster, personal letter, poem and piece of writing she could find. That's all Meyer has to work with—not much else has been written about the somewhat reclusive artist.
Meyer opens the thick, white binder filled with Walker's writings. "We’ve got to take all these 10 notebooks here and read everything that’s in them and extract whatever we can and try to come up with something," he says.
Slowly but surely, Meyer is piecing together the narrative, telling the story of Walker and his art, which ranges from large-scale abstract canvases and sculptures to small representational prints made with an interesting mishmash of traditional techniques.
You can almost always find Meyer at his Little Italy gallery, Meyer Fine Art Inc., seated behind a big, messy desk filled with books, papers and a billowing Rolodex. He says he'd be doing research on Walker even if his gallery wasn't part of Pacific Standard Time, the Getty's ambitious initiative that seeks to highlight West Coast artists working in and around Los Angeles between 1945 to 1980. As one of PST's participating galleries, Meyer showed Walker's work in two separate exhibitions—West Coast Walker: Catalyst to Modernism, a solo show that came down in early January; and a group show exhibiting Walker alongside Dan Dickey, Barney Reid, Allan Morrow and others, which is on view now through the end of February.
"I think that’s why the Getty did this," Meyer says. "It was to say, 'Hey this is what was going on here between '45 and '80—it’s more important than you ever thought.'"
Will the spotlight continue to shine on Walker and other Southern California artists even after PST wraps up? While Meyer sold several of Walker's pieces and probably got more eyes on the work than ever before, he's still not quite convinced that the history books will take note.
"This was important," he says, thumbing through the special catalog he wrote and printed to go with the West Coast Walker show, "but I’m not sure how long it will actually last."
So Meyer's detective work continues.
It would be a daunting task to piece together the life of a very productive artist who purposely stepped out of the limelight to live what he thought was a more honest, authentic life in a quiet suburb of San Diego, but Meyer enjoys the work. He's constantly surprised by what he finds while digging through Walker's things.
"I describe it as a color-woodcut-slash-relief," Meyer says, "because this portion might be cut and this section is all relief—so he combined it.... Clay Walker doesn't do anything in the traditional manner. He takes the technique and creates his own mystique within it. He’ll take a woodcut and instead of just cutting a wood block, he’ll add stencils to it as well—it might be 10 different processes to get to the one finished piece."
Meyer then walks to the back of the gallery where he has drawers filled with hundreds more of Walker's prints.
"He even made his own paper at one point," he says, opening a drawer and lifting out a crisp Walker print. "So, that's another side of him."
Meyer says he's found documentation that Walker once showed alongside artists like Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol in venues like the Museum of Modern Art and the Toledo Museum of Art. He says Walker's work was selling to collectors for big money and that his real heyday was in the Midwest in the '50s.
"But he just wasn’t interested in the commercial side of showing his art," Meyer says, looking both proud and disappointed.
A book on Walker could be in the future, says Meyer, but the next big project is putting together a proposal for a Walker solo show at the Oceanside Museum of Art.
"[Walker's] story is amazing," Meyer says. "He’s kind of the real-deal; he’s not a copycat. The more I find in the paperwork and letters that Muriel gave me—he did everything and he didn’t allow anyone else to help him. He did everything himself."
From art at Bottlecraft to the Barrel & the Beast
Our Red List roundup is better than Mona Lisa's smile
byDigable art
Watch the whale
Three things that make San Diego Opera's Moby-Dick something you might want to see
Kinsee Morlan
There's no hit single coming out of Jake Heggie's Moby-Dick—that's what a few of us agreed on last night after watching San Diego Opera's dress rehearsal of the new piece, which opens Saturday, Feb. 18.
The music, in other words, isn't something you'll be humming or whistling to yourself later. It's more like intense mood music that transitions from sounding like the swelling of the sea to the blowhole of a whale. It helps set the scene, transporting you onto The Pequod with Captain Ahab (Ben Hepner), Queequeg (Jonathan Lemalu), Starbuck (Morgan Smith), Pip (Talise Trevigne) and the rest of the crew.
So, what will opera-goers be talking about when they leave Moby-Dick? In the opinion of this admitted opera novice—who can count on a pinky-less, thumb-less hand how many times she's seen a big-time production—I'd say that they'll focus on what CityBeat writer Jim Ruland so wonderfully described in his preview piece this week: the epic stage design.
Michael Wheelden captures California
The San Diego artist's 'Painted Dessert' exhibition focuses on our unique landscape and architecture
Kevin Freitas
Michael Wheelden’s new body of work, Painted Desert, on view through Feb. 25 at the Earl & Birdie Taylor Branch Library (4275 Cass St. in Pacific Beach), is characterized by a certain vernacular or indigenous Southern California architecture seen through the eyes of the artist. The often banal and nondescript houses and pseudo-desert landscaping Wheelden paints are enhanced by the artist’s formal treatment of the subject matter (light, color, composition) and the intersecting planes of doors, windows and sloping roof lines this brand of modest architecture offers as a backdrop.
Wheelden’s dry, colorful scumbling of the paint is infused with light and pastel colors that turn ordinary homes and landscapes into an almost precise recording of another endless summer day. Roofs shimmer under the midday sun, the ground’s moisture is wicked away and the only refuge from the heat is within the cool blackened windows of an empty house.
Often, Wheelden’s paintings are shaped and sliced into planes of interlocking canvasses and odd rectilinear forms. The painting’s wood frame will cut through a work mimicking a house’s flattened and frontal appearance. It’s an effective tool the artist uses, perhaps a bit gimmicky at times, but when done well it’s as seamless and provocative as some of Robert Irwin’s scrims devised to transform a space or a field of Eucalyptus trees.
But Wheelden’s at his best when he focuses in on mundane sagebrush, sprawling cacti or a rock garden. It is then that you can see the artist’s brush and interest in his painting and subjects come alive. The wispy brushwork and colliding colors of cool greens and violets against burnt oranges and lemon yellows of a house’s framework, for example, is where his true joy in painting seems to lie.Dennis Paul Batt's lasting legacy
The local arts community loses its No. 1 fan
Kinsee Morlan
The local art community has been hit hard by the news of the death of Dennis Paul Batt, an artist, curator and volunteer who dedicated countless hours of service to the arts.
According to the county Medical Examiner, Batt, 59, died on Jan. 30 of natural causes at his Carlsbad home. A memorial will be held from 4:30 to 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 25, at the Oceanside Museum of Art (704 Pier View Way). In lieu of flowers, his family asks that donations be made to the nonprofit Synergy Art Foundation. Batt was a member of the foundation’s board.
“I think, since news of his passing, there’s been a real feeling that, in his lifetime, we didn’t thank him enough for all he did,” said Patricia Frischer of the San Diego Visual Arts Network. “I think he was the No. 1 cheerleader in San Diego for the arts. He went to every single opening—you never went to an event where Dennis wasn’t there.”
Batt founded the San Diego Visual Artists Guild, an online directory of local artists. For a nominal fee, Batt built artists a profile page and included their information and art on the site.
“It was something Dennis did in order to give artists who didn’t have a website a place where they could easily post their work,” Frischer said. “He spent thousands of hours on that site.”
Batt helped organize and curate art exhibitions, fundraisers and events at formal and informal venues throughout San Diego County, including the 2009 exhibition Commesso: Made in America: Gemstone Fine Art at the Oceanside Museum of Art. He served time on several local arts organizations’ boards and committees and is the co-founder of the Outdoor Art Foundation and other arts ventures. In Second Life, the online world, Batt built a virtual fine-art gallery, where a cyber memorial was held Feb. 12. Batt was known for his computer skills and helped several arts groups build and maintain their websites.
On Batt’s Facebook page, Ann Berchtold, executive director of Art San Diego Contemporary Art Fair, called him the “unsung hero of the San Diego art scene.”
Batt’s own artwork includes paintings, sculpture and photography, but he became most known for his gemstone art. According to his website, he worked with hundreds of fellow lapidaries to build a database called American Masters of Stone to gain wider acceptance of the work in the fine-art world.
David Gough, a San Diego oil painter, said Batt was an energetic organizer who took other artists under his wing and successfully bridged the gap between the city’s underground and mainstream art scenes.
“In a sort of city of no’s, he was one of a handful of yeses for me,” Gough said. “And he was always the last person out the door with the box, you know? He was always pushing himself to help and be involved. He’s going to be missed—he’s really going to be missed.”
New San Diego art galleries, the U-T's defense of 'Unconditional Surrender' and more
Quick and pretty San Diego arts news
Kinsee Morlan
Sometimes, my Facebooking pays off. This weekend, I caught wind of two new San Diego art galleries: Eighteen o Five (1805 Columbia St.) and Sparks Gallery (530 Sixth Ave.). Eighteen o Five has already put a call out to artists and Sparks has put out a survey asking people what they want to see in an art gallery.
My Facebook feed this week has also been filling up with responses to the U-T San Diego's editorial defending the merits of the "Unconditional Surrender" sculpture that stands on the grass near the USS Midway Museum and is scheduled to be removed at the end of the month.
From the Harlem Globetrotters to The Pearl's documentary film series
Our Red List roundup is better than that fresh after-rain smell
byDigable to-do
We know from experience what a beaming joy it is for a small child to see the Harlem Globetrotters in action. It’s a show all families should take in, if only once. The Globetrotters, selecting Harlem as an adopted home largely because it sounded cool in the name, were born in Chicago in the 1920s and have been entertaining folks with their amazing basketballs skills ever since, perhaps reaching their height of popularity in the 1970s with superstars like Meadowlark Lemon, Curly Neal and Goose Tatum. The current squad will stop in San Diego at 7 p.m. Friday, Feb. 17, at Valley View Casino Center (3500 Sports Arena Blvd.). Who are they playing? A spokesperson says it’s one of two teams. But you know what? It doesn’t even matter.
The Nat brings the Titanic to Balboa Park
Put your hands on an iceberg, wander through the ship's remade cabins and experience the world's most famous sunken ship
by Melanie Ehrenkranz
A hundred years later, the San Diego Natural History Museum (The NAT) in Balboa Park has recreated Mayne's and the rest of the passengers' journey on the Titanic, from the departure to the sinking of the ship in Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, which opens to the public Friday, Feb. 10. Viewers are invited to take a chronological tour through the exhibit, gaining a glimpse into the ambiance of the ship with re-creations of rooms and more than 200 recovered artifacts from the ship's ruins.
The South Bay's scene
An SDSU class works to uncover the community's arts and culture
Kinsee Morlan
Nothing goes on in the South Bay: That’s a myth Kimberly Feilen wants to dispel.
“But I got this notion that even the South Bay itself was asleep,” says Feilen, a lecturer in undergraduate studies at San Diego State University who was born in San Diego and has family living in the South Bay. “They weren’t aware of the kind of arts practices happening, and that’s what fueled me.”
Feilen designed a special course at SDSU and enlisted students’ help in conducting a South Bay needs assessment. But what was intended to be a 15-week course in project-based research and community engagement morphed into four semesters of students’ hands-on work in the South Bay, which will culminate in an event, heART on CENTER, happening outdoors on Center Street (at Third Avenue) in Chula Vista from 4 to 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 11. National City’s Youth Theatre Ensemble, Southwestern College, Casa Familiar’s Ballet Folklorico and other South Bay arts and performance groups will be on hand to introduce themselves to the community.
Feilen’s classes, which became known as the LoCAL Arts Collaborative and eventually got so popular that dozens of people were turned away every semester, had college students engaging directly with South Bay’s arts and community leaders through interviews, surveys and site visits.
“One of my students told me she felt like we were making history,” Feilen says. “She felt like we were doing something for the South Bay that no one had ever done before.”
The students found that South Bay already had an active art scene. They found formal and informal arts groups and individuals who simply needed a venue or platform. The students came up with heART on CENTER, an event they hope will become an annual tradition.
“We really hope the community will take this and run with it,” Feilen says.
New Encinitas arts center?
Art Pulse bids on the Pacific View Elementary School property
Kinsee Morlan
According to a recent study by the San Diego Foundation, Encinitas and Leucadia have the highest concentration of artists in San Diego County outside the area that includes University Heights, North Park and South Park.
“There are 60 or more arts organizations based in Encinitas, and there’s no dance place, no theater or music hall or anything like this,” says April Game, executive director of the nonprofit Art Pulse.
Art Pulse is one of five bids to purchase the former Pacific View Elementary School property in Encinitas and turn it into something else. Game wants to develop it as an arts center designed by James and Drew Hubbell and says she recently enlisted the help of John DeWald, a developer and board member of the Downtown Encinitas Mainstreet Association.
