New Art in Living Space 4040 Loma Riviera Drive 1965
Marlene Williams pushes her "product" Richard Allen Morris down La Jolla Blvd.
(Published on the KPBS arts blog, Civilisation Lust, May 10, 2010)
By Dave Hampton
The six-yr bridge from 1959 to 1964 was a breakthrough period for new fine art in San Diego. During this fourth dimension, the Art Center in La Jolla (now Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego) nether manager Don Brewer began to focus its exhibition program on contemporary art – a choice that threatened to alienate the arrangement's bourgeois benefactors. The proto-museum opened a schoolhouse with full time kinesthesia of artists and launched a serial of major almanac exhibitions of current California painting and sculpture… all before the UCSD campus opened and Interstate v was complete.
This brief epoch was full of promise, as the Fine art Center drew some of the area's all-time artists to La Jolla with teaching gigs, residencies and exhibition opportunities. For a picayune while, two lively art galleries, supported past the pool of Art Center talent, operated right next door to each other on La Jolla Boulevard, simply south of Pearl St.
Between them, the Art Works Gallery and the i Gallery represented San Diego's avant garde, and while each was connected to the scene at the Art Middle, both short-lived enterprises reflected the legendary personalities of their owners: Lou Sander and Marlene Williams, two people who brought San Diego face-to-confront with the new.
In June of 1962, Louis One thousand. Sander opened the Fine art Works gallery on Adams Avenue with a testify of oil paintings and drawings by Richard Allen Morris. The gallery so followed with a controversial show of mixed media "Ten Signs" past painter John Baldessari.
In a review of the Baldessari testify, Dr. Armin Kietzmann, the San Diego Union's art writer, reported that 1 of the pieces, "10 Sign for a Crucifixion," involved "waste material materials, paint smears and a ragdoll nailed to a splintered postal service." In defense force of his work, Baldessari suggested that "brutal means evoke the Crucifixion more sincerely, perhaps, than a small golden cross worn round the neck."
Baldessari is the nigh famous artist to take emerged from the San Diego mid-century fine art community. While education at Southwestern College (and after at UCSD) he explored conceptual art with his friends, Bob Matheny, Russell Baldwin and Richard Allen Morris, and fueled the growing move on the West Coast.
The Morris and Baldessari shows established Fine art Work's "insubordinate spirit" (Kietzmann'south term) and Sander's outstanding eye for local talent. Sander himself was an enigmatic and colorful guy. "He was a trivial scrap of an operator," remembers painter Karen Kozlow, an Fine art Heart student who after married Sander.
That's a picayune bit of an understatement.
Sander juggled artists (and sometimes their wives or girlfriends); finances (sometimes his wives or girlfriend'south); and gallery shows that contributed to the modernistic art breakthrough in San Diego, with an avid interest in psychedelics.
"He had this wild side, merely he was actually, really a wonderful person" says Kozlow. "When I first met him I idea he was a big wig from New York and I was going to get very famous."
Kozlow, who became romantically involved with Sander, helped finance the gallery's motility to La Jolla a twelvemonth later. Just Sander and Co. were nonetheless on Adams Artery when Marlene Williams, the striking married woman of painter Guy Williams, decided in June of 1963 to open the i Gallery on La Jolla Boulevard, non far from the Art Heart where her husband was teaching.
"Marlene was a pistol!" remembers Kozlow. "She was smart and had marvelous taste and a skillful business concern sense."
"She was very energetic and could operate in the art scene'southward political milieu," recalls painter Fred Holle. His fellow Art Center colleague Don Dudley says she "had ambitions to be something more than just Guy Williams' wife."
Marlene was ambitious. Her programme was to bear witness the work of top-notch gimmicky artists from New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles side by side with her ain "stable" of local hotshots. In retrospect, her 32-artist opening prove was the most pregnant contemporary fine art exhibition put on past a commercial gallery in San Diego at the time.
Forth with local painters, Williams presented now-iconic 20th Century artists similar Sam Francis, Richard Diebenkorn, Louise Nevelson, and Peter Voulkos together for the first fourth dimension in San Diego.
By the time he moved in next door to the i Gallery, Lou Sander as well represented a solid group of local painters, including Kozlow, Fred Holle and Sheldon Kirby from the Art Center, Cliff McReynolds and the German-born Fred Hocks (a respected elderberry statesman of modernistic fine art in San Diego). When Kozlow won an award at the Tertiary Art Center Annual of California Painting and Sculpture for her painting "Cradled Light," Lou Sander accepted information technology on behalf of his gallery. She "was the outset woman creative person given an award" in the prestigious serial of annuals.
Not to be outdone by Williams' large opening, Sander brought Ed Ruscha, Wayne Thiebaud, Billy Al Bengston and other major California artists to his La Jolla gallery for a west declension pop fine art show called "Six More Plus One." After a couple of months in La Jolla, the mercurial Lou Sander changed the name of his gallery from Art Works to the Sander Gallery.
The two galleries merely lasted for near a year – a short, simply heady run.
"Oh, it was fun!" recalls Kozlow. "We had openings on the aforementioned dark and the Jefferson Gallery joined in with united states of america. Nosotros had a little La Jolla art scene! There was no animosity at all, we were just so glad to exist trying to do art together and I liked Marlene, nosotros were good friends."
Shows from both galleries were reviewed in Artforum magazine, the upstart w coast art bible, which consecrated the La Jolla scene with its acknowledgment, even if the reviews themselves were lukewarm.
According to painter Don Dudley, John and Carol Baldessari were married at the i Gallery "in a wonderfully Dadaist ceremony/ performance." For Richard Allen Morris's solo show, proprietor Marlene Williams was photographed pushing the creative person, her "product," down La Jolla Boulevard in a shopping cart. Morris was close friends with Guy and Marlene Williams and after that couple left for Los Angeles, Lou Sander and Karen Kozlow "took over feeding Richard," says Kozlow.
Late 1964 marked the finish of an era. Major changes took identify at the Art Eye. The school closed and the program of juried annual exhibitions was discontinued as the institution evolved into the La Jolla Museum of Fine art.
Artists who had lent such vitality to the La Jolla scene: Holle, McClain, Dudley and Guy Williams, left San Diego permanently when their Fine art Centre jobs ended abruptly. La Jolla Boulevard'due south miniature gallery row collapsed.
The i Gallery closed commencement, in true period way. "Information technology airtight with a happening," Kozlow says. "Aida Fries (wife of painter Bob Fries) was in a body in her belly dance outfit and John Baldessari'southward wife Carol was sitting in a chair with a stack of pancakes on her lap. And and so they opened the torso and Aida got out and did belly trip the light fantastic. Those are the main things I remember."
Afterwards closing their gallery, Sander and Kozlow (now married) lived in Pacific Embankment. He took a day chore to support them while they made films, staged poetry readings and held a multifariousness of exhibitions. The near publicized of these was an unusual 1965 exhibition of nine artists' work displayed in model units at the new Loma Riviera townhouse development called "New Art in Living Space." John Baldessari, Richard Allen Morris, Karen Kozlow, Cliff McReynolds, Susan Long, Bob Fries and Ed Carillo were among the featured artists.
Later, Kozlow and Sander founded an artist's retreat/commune east of Alpine where late-60's art happenings met transcendental meditation. Sander had become an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church building and their remote, five-acre Ulife Plant was described by creative person Bob Matheny in 1968 every bit both an "informal artist's cooperative" and a "not-sectarian church building" set amid "good oaks, clean air and handsome stone formations." Kozlow and Sander's marriage was also a flake rocky past then and presently subsequently their divorce the Pine Valley Burn down of 1970 swept over the property, consuming all of Kozlow's paintings.
Earlier the fire, Sander started working at the Mail service Office, where he was afterwards elected American Postal Workers Matrimony Local President in 1975. He later married the artist Ellen Van Armada and they moved to Sacramento.
Years after his gallery human relationship with Sander, Richard Allen Morris was approached at his Spanish Village studio by an F.B.I. agent who questioned him about Sander. At that place was "no joking, no grin" and the artist assumed it had to practice with drugs. "I clammed up," Morris remembers. The agent left his carte du jour.
Sander continued to represent artists and sell privately. His diverse interests took him effectually the world and he died in a puzzling aeroplane crash on a rail in Seoul, Korea in 1980. He had apparently changed his name to Ray Van Fleet.
Kozlow and Sander remained shut afterward their divorce, and for years after the reports of his death, she had the feeling that he might still announced ane day out of nowhere.
"That," she says, "would be just similar Lou."
Source: https://www.objectsusa.com/?p=1802