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

Art in America, July, 1997 by Leah Ollman

Also in La Jolla is Tasende Gallery, the city's sole contender in the category of international blue-chip dealers. Since opening in 1979, owner Jose Tasende has organized weighty shows by Jose Luis Cuevas, Mark di Suvero, Andres Nagel, Tom Wesselmann and Eduardo Chillida, but in the last few years the gallery has scheduled fewer and fewer solo exhibitions. In March, the gallery shifted the focus of its operations to a new space in Los Angeles, where a more active schedule of shows is planned, beginning with Chillida (see review on p. 99), who was followed by Helen Frankenthaler. Another fixture of the La Jolla scene, Thomas Babeor Gallery, which showed high-caliber contemporary work as well as old master drawings, recently closed. Babeor, who is now dealing privately, has been instrumental in supporting the work of one of the area's most promising young artists, Stephen Curry, whose lushly painted still lifes evoke the grandeur of Caravaggio and Zurbaran as filtered through postmodern formalist doubt. Another emerging San Diegan, Liza Lou, last year caused Manhattan jaws to drop at the New Museum's "Labor of Love" exhibition, where her life-size, fully beaded kitchen was on view. Lou is currently in Los Angeles, working on a full-scale beaded backyard, which will be shown this fall at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Galleries at UCSD, San Diego State University and several community colleges function as alternative spaces, picking up much of the slack from the small gallery scene. There, one can often catch a glimpse of San Diego's multifarious artists -- Deborah Small, James Luna, Jay Johnson, Anne Mudge, Wick Alexander, David Avalos, Raul Guerrero, Judit Hersko, Mathieu Gregoire and others. Artists Bill Kelly and Michele Burgess direct Brighton Press, a dynamic enterprise in book arts that occasionally mounts exhibitions of its work. Often commissioning sculptors and painters who have not previously experimented with the book form, the press (like the Stuart Collection) extends the trajectory of its artists' careers, while also continually redefining the possibilities of the medium. Manuel Neri, Robert Cremean, Harry Sternberg and Deloss McGraw are among the artists who have worked with the press in collaboration with writers such as W.D. Snodgrass, Nancy Willard and Mary Julia Klimenko.

One of the reasons that most of the artistic energy in San Diego remains subterranean is the lack of press coverage. The chronic downsizing of American newspapers hit San Diego particularly hard: within just a few years, as the '80s gave way to the '90s, the Los Angeles Times ceased publishing its San Diego County edition, and the local afternoon paper merged with the morning paper to become the San Diego Union-Tribune, now the city's sole voice in newsprint, and the only remaining local outlet for art criticism. The situation reached its extreme when Robert Pincus left the critic's position at the Union-Tribune last summer for a job in Cleveland. The position remained empty, casting an unhealthy silence over the gallery scene until early this year, when Pincus returned to San Diego and resumed his post.