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

Art in America, July, 1997 by Leah Ollman

San Diego's newest contemporary museum opened in 1994 in the unlikely locale of Escondido, a semirural suburb 30 miles north of downtown. The California Center for the Arts, handsomely designed by the late Charles Moore, brings together in a campuslike setting two theaters, a conference center and a museum. The center answered Escondido's own revitalization needs after a mega-mae nearby sucked its commercial district dry, but its loftier goal of becoming a major cultural destination in Southern California has proven more elusive. Programming in both visual and performing arts remains ambitious -- more ambitious than its provincial location warrants, many say -- and serious budget deficits already saddle the institution. The museum has used a show-within-the-show format to feature Saint Clair Cemin, Jubo Galin and Graciela Iturbide within several of its large thematic group exhibitions. Such shows deftly bring together regional, national and international artists, but much would be gained by slipping in the occasional one- or two-person exhibition. In 1997, the Center hosts a traveling collection of recent Russian art, mounts its first permanent-collection show and finishes the year with "Tabletops: From Morandi to Mapplethorpe."

Art on the Border

The U.S. border with Mexico, less than a half-hour's drive from downtown San Diego, is an unusual phenomenon. Never before. wrote Jorge Castaneda in a recent Los Angeles Times editorial, "have the quintessential traits of underdevelopment hugged 21st-century affluence as they do where Tijuana and metropolitan San Diego meet, clash and coexist." The friction and fusion of these two worlds have spurred tremendous artistic activity here, especially during the last decade, and have given artists of the border region a distinctive voice in current dialogues on place, politics and personal identity.

Since its founding in 1984. the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo has done much to draw attention to the bifurcated region. Its quasi-annual "Border Realities" exhibitions, created by a changing cast of artists, students, educators and activists, explore the metaphoric and conceptual nature of borders while examining specific social conditions, misperceptions and injustices [see A.i.A., Dec. '89]. Characterized by sprawling, labyrinthine installations (at the Centro Cultural de la Raza). the shows ofteri demand something physically of the viewer -- sliding through a tunnel on an unhinged door, for example, or sitting in awkward spaces -- and in return they provoke a powerful shift in perspective on issues like the English-only movement or the living conditions of undocumented workers.

Another collaborative -- unnamed and also fluid in makeup, overlapping in places with the Border Art Workshop -- has been generating sharp public discussions of issues usually glossed over. The group, which in varied combinations includes David Avalos, Deborah Small, Louis Hock. Elizabeth Sisco and Scott Kessler, has exposed the local tourist economy's dependence on undocumented labor the excessive use of force by the San Diego Police Department, and the department's downgrading of certain homicide investigations to "NHI" status (No Humans Involved) when the victims are prostitutes or drug addicts. The projects, concise and jarring, commonly take the form of bus posters or billboards, since advertising, in the artists' view, is the only available arena left for public discourse.