A change of weather? - art exhibits and museums in San Diego, California

Art in America, July, 1997 by Leah Ollman

As a city shaped more by climate than culture, San Diego has long been ambivalent about art's place in the community. Recent demographic shifts, however, hint at more receptive times ahead.

San Diego sells itself to the outside world as "America's Finest City," a year-round recreational paradise where natural resources outshine all others. The better the climate, the less evolved the culture -- so goes the common perception. The numbingly beautiful weather here is, indeed, both blessing and curse, for it locks art leaders in a perpetual struggle for audience interest and patronage against the formidable draw of other, primarily outdoor "recreational enticements," as one museum director put it.

Demographics have shifted significantly in the past two decades, boosting San Diego into position as the sixth largest city in the country. It now boasts thriving biotech and telecommunications industries, excellent universities and a younger, better-educated population than ever, but it has not entirely shaken its image as a small, conservative town dominated by retirees and the military. The recent demise of the San Diego Symphony (due to chronic mismanagement more than lack of audience) further bruised the city's reputation. While Los Angeles and San Francisco engage in an edgy rivalry for cultural superiority, San Diego is still widely regarded as too immature to join the game.

In fact, all of the conventional components of a healthy art scene do exist here, though in somewhat skewed proportions, and more often as strong undercurrents than visibly integrated elements of city life. An unusually rich pool of artists lives here, for instance, but there are relatively few local galleries to show the work produced. The city has an exemplary collection of site-specific, outdoor sculpture as well, but its location on the campus of the University of California at San Diego limits its audience somewhat. Underrecognition is a given here, both within the city and beyond.

General Interest Museums

The San Diego Museum of Art, the city's oldest and largest art museum (founded 1926), occupies a central place in Balboa Park, among 18 other museums and four theaters set within 1,100 acres of eucalyptus-framed meadows. Its collection, while not distinguished, has its inspiring moments, including a sizable array of Toulouse-Lautrec prints and some fine examples of Spanish painting from the 15th to the 19th centuries. But the museum's best-kept secret is the Binney Collection of South Asian Art, comprising over 1,400 paintings and manuscript illuminations from the 12th through the 19th centuries. The collection, bequeathed by Crayola heir Edwin Binney III in 1986 and formally accessioned in 1990-91, instantly transformed the museum into one of the greatest repositories of Indian paintings outside India. Although the museum presented one stunning exhibition of the collection's highlights in 1991, it has produced no catalogue, and now the collection is visible on an ongoing basis only through a small rotating selection of images in a remote hallway. Wondrous in itself and a potential boon to the museum's amorphous institutional identity, the Binney Collection deserves better.

Neglect of the Binney Collection is symptomatic of broader, systemic failure at the museum, centered on the lack of support for in-house curatorial scholarship. Packaged, touring shows that originate elsewhere dominate the museum's exhibition schedule. Only one of the seven exhibitions on the museum's 1997 calendar -- visionary architectural drawings by Achilles Rizzoli (1896-1981) -- is organized by the SDMA, and that via a guest curator. Last year's schedule was similarly imbalanced.

The museum's programming, too, presents problems, suggesting condescension toward its audience. In the name of public accessibility. director Steven Brezzo has pandered to sensationalistic and popular extremes, staging glittering spectacles (Faberge eggs. Cartier jewels and, coming this fall, Romanov diamonds) and celebrating pop culture heroes like Babar, the Muppets and Dr. Seuss, at the expense of more challenging possibilities. Brezzo contends that the realities of the community force him to take this approach. "It's a challenge to engage people. We have to compete for the discretionary time that people can spend. To do that, we have to err on the side of being popular, exciting." Brezzo weathered a scandal in the fall of 1995, when the San Diego Union-Tribune published a series of stories scrutinizing his lavish travel and entertainment budget. The museum cleared several audits. made minor procedural adjustments and continued with business as usual, while its curatorial practices -- more scandalous, but offering less media bounce -- escaped unscathed.

While one would expect the oldest and largest art museum in San Diego to serve as an anchor for the local art community and a gauge of its overall stature, the SDMA is neither. Pandering to the public it's meant to educate, the museum is further hobbled by its lack of leadership and credibility.