California State University, Fullerton | www.titanmag.com | titanmagazine@fullerton.edu
California State University, Fullerton | www.titanmag.com | titanmagazine@fullerton.edu
On this street just a few years ago, homeless men lurched through the night seeking a safe
space where they could unroll their blankets, uncap paper-bagged bottles and
huddle against the cold.
The scene was something that Goya or Edward Hopper might have painted, filling
a canvas with slumping, shrunken figures cowering in palette-knifed shadow.
But now this portion of 2nd street east of Broadway has become a plaza at the
heart of the Santa Ana Artists Village. And on the first Saturday of every month,
a painter could capture its essence by emulating the vibrant stipples and brushstrokes
of Georges Seurat (whose circus performers soar and turn somersaults), Camille
Pissarro (whose pedestrians bustle down the Boulevard Montmartre), and Claude
Monet (whose impoverished painters converse at a table piled with empty cups
and plates).
“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul,” said renowned preacher Henry Ward Beecher, “and paints his own nature into his pictures.”
The nature of this village is life-affirming, creative and community-building because of the men and women — many with Cal State Fullerton ties — who turned their artistic eye toward an urban landscape mottled by dereliction and disrepair, and saw the possibilities: pottery wheels spinning, sketchpads filling with theatrical costumes and quick studies, galleries color-splashed with canvases, and apartments in which a student could replenish his energy with a bowl of fruit before walking downstairs to take hold of his brush or chisel or soldering iron.
Of his own work, Vincent van Gogh said, “I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.”
There were numerous dreamers who amplified the original concept fostered by community activist Don Cribb. One of these visionaries was Miguel Pulido, a Santa Ana council member now entering his eighth year as mayor. Pulido, who moved to Orange County from Mexico as a child and earned an engineering degree at Cal State Fullerton in 1980, continues to shepherd this area through its renaissance.
“Our hope was that with the university anchoring the Artists Village, other institutions and organizations would come into the area,” says Pulido. “That has happened with the arrival of advertising agencies, post-production facilities, the Orange County High School of the Arts and restaurants. The village is becoming more and more a cosmopolitan environment that is like nothing else in the county.”
Just as a painting has its focal point, just as the yellow house dominates that Vincent van Gogh street, the village centers around the Grand Central Art Building, a block-long edifice of burnished brick and glass. At the end of its first 75 years, the building looked bereft until the city — buoyed by $7.5 million in funds from various sources — gutted and remade its interior to Cal State Fullerton's specifications, and then signed a 10-year lease with the university for a dollar a year.
Like most bold, new ideas, this one had its early pessimists. “In 1993, during a recession, it seemed like a wacky idea,” says Mike McGee, an alumnus and professor of art, director of the campus' Main Gallery and Grand Central's project facilitator. “We wanted to do something that was unique in the country, combining residential, educational and commercial components into one building in a downtown area.”
As project administrator for Grand Central during the planning and construction phase, McGee conversed frequently with Jay Bond, associate vice president of facilities management, to synthesize ideas contributed by art and theater faculty, and representatives of University Extended Education and the physical plant department.
Project planners recognized that the center would need to become financially self-sustaining. They created a framework so that Grand Central generates income from gallery sales, and the rent collected from the apartment-dwelling students and such private businesses as the Gypsy Den, with its vegetarian cuisine, belly dancers and poetry readings, and the Watermark Printmaking Studio, where alumnus James Lorigan “pulls” prints of fine art.
The results of this team effort were unveiled in February 1999, when the Grand Central — emblematic of optimism and renewal as neighboring structures awaited reclamation — was dedicated during a balloon-festooned event.
Before a crowd of well-wishers, President Milton A. Gordon lauded the partnership between Santa Ana and the university, and then nodding toward the building's first occupants, said, “Representing a range of disciplines from painting to graphic design to sculpture, the founding residents are to be recognized for their pioneering spirit and vision of the potential of this unique living/learning art environment.”
An eclectic group of graduate art students settled into the building's high-beamed apartments and studios, and began to share ideas, dinner dishes and 10-mile commutes to classes at the Fullerton campus.
The center has attracted students from disparate backgrounds. After decades typing and taking shorthand, senior citizen Betty Bennett uses her fingers these days to paint, polish, carve and sand plywood until it reveals its true nature, a process that she said “puts me into a different world.” Frank Swann, who now works in the lobby after earning his M.F.A. last year, combines fabric and acrylic paint to create work that has hung in the Grand Central gallery.
Richard Littlefield buys cheap plastic soldiers, “tarts them up' with pink paint and gaudy material, and presses them into collages that pose “questions of sexuality, sarcasm and confrontation.” Suguru Hiraide of Japanese fabricates robotic sculptures out of metal and found objects.
Susan King left a marriage, her ownership in a Newport Beach sailing club and a home cooled by sea breezes before pursuing the passion for painting that would eventually lead her to Grand Central. While she once dined in the finest eateries, now she feasts on toasted peanut butter sandwiches… and says she couldn't be happier. As she stood at her easel stirring her brush in a jar of turpentine one Saturday, King muses, “I've gone as far out on a limb as you can get. I intend to make my living this way.” She has two modes of expression: watercolors of game fish and intensively expressive portraits in oils. For the portraits, she asks models to sit two or three times so that she can fathom “the layers of personality.”
Kellie Delaney, who remembers when her friend wore jaunty beach attire instead of torn, paint-dappled jeans, says, “Susan inspires me because she takes risks.”
This center is rife with similar risk-takers who look for guidance from the international role models who live amidst them for as long as three months. From Europe, Asia, South America and North America, women and men — chosen by McGee and site director Andrea Harris — have come to Grand Central as artists-in-residence.
“We're looking for artists who want to come here to this supportive environment to take their art into new territory,” says Harris, a figurative painter herself.
During these stays, students and the public are exposed to some of the art world's more daring expressions, including robotics, digital video and installations. Charles Krafft, for instance, who arrived this spring, has built an international reputation for his “Disasterware,” porcelain casts of grenades and AK-47s that have been painted and glazed in the Delft tradition.
Advice for the student artists also is readily available across the promenade in the Santora Building, which houses studios and galleries, one of which has shown the photorealistic paintings of Emigdio Vasquez, an alumus who looks to Mexican-American culture for his subjects.
All of this — these visiting artists, the concept of a university live/work facility redeeming a distressed cityscape, gallery shows that can draw thousands of viewers, and the growing acclaim earned by Cal State Fullerton's fine arts graduates — is generating wide interest from cities and universities that want to duplicate this success and from dozens of journalists who want to chronicle it.
These guests might peer over the shoulder of Cara Nilsen as she illustrates a narrative in the tradition of N.C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish and other practitioners from the Golden Age of Illustration that spanned from 1880 to the 1920s. If they ask her about living and working in the center, she might tell them that “when I can't think of ideas, there are five people who will offer them.”
Customized according to a group's interests, tours usually include a look inside the 87-seat, black-box theater, which presents a spectrum-ranging fare: Aristophanes' “Women in Congress,” a steel-drum trio, a bluesman evoking hardship on the Mississippi Delta and the Preeminents, the university's musical theatre group known for “100 Years of Broadway.”
Visitors also might chance upon junior and senior high school youth learning about Web design and animation at computer workstations during free classes that are conducted as part of the center's growing community-outreach efforts.
These hundred tours a year have elicited accolades. Juxtapoz, one of the nation's leading art magazines, reported that the Artists Village is “one of the most exciting art centers in Southern California” and Grand Central “is the hub of Orange County's artistic education and production.” The writer praised the center for presenting shows by such luminaries as Robert Williams and concluded by calling the village “a place to watch and a place to be.”
“Cal State Fullerton and the city of Santa Ana have been in the forefront of a national movement to create artist enclaves within cities,” enthuses William Gould, an artist-architect and urban designer-architect from Cleveland. “I came home inspired after I first saw the site when it was in construction. Cleveland is a big enough city to nurture several artists villages… one for the visual arts… one for music and dance… in areas where the artists have already clustered on their own. Your program is unique in that the city made the space available to the university to develop its arts program and connect into the neighborhood.”
The highest praise is embodied by the community support given the Artists Village on the first Saturday of the month, when thousands of people — the pierced, the tattooed, the dreadlocked, easily mixing with the sleekly garbed, the exquisitely coiffured — throng this reclaimed avenue. They stream into Grand Central to admire its art and perhaps even buy a gleaming ceramic bowl or custom-made jewelry glinting with gold and silver or a canvas — filled with map-like lines and forms — by student David Michael Lee, who uses his profits to buy more paint. And with each month, as new restaurants and businesses take up residence in the area, these strollers find more surprises, such as Memphis, the nouveau Cajun restaurant, and the complex of live-work lofts that have been put on the market.
One recent first Saturday, puppeteer Franklin Rosero of Ecuador took his dinosaur outside for an impromptu performance. Weeks earlier, he had been welcomed to Grand Central as an artist-in-residence during a party organized by compatriots Eduardo Villacis, a painter and cartoonist, and his wife, Maria. Franklin lives in a land with few resources and so he creates set designs and puppets, such as his dinosaur, from materials he culls from junkyards.
On the promenade, with brother William manning a control box that opened and closed the animal's eyes, Franklin enlivened the dinosaur with balletic undulations and sudden surges that made the children giggle, recoil and giggle again.
Franklin, who was flying home to South America a week later, was asked what he was going to miss most about his sojourn in Santa Ana. Without hesitation, he answered, “Amigos.”
One of those friends is center director Harris' 2-year-old son Alexander, who's always ready to fold into a student's arms and help with an art project. Alexander's been drawing ever since he could grip a pencil nub, and in two short decades, he could be living in Grand Central himself. By then, to capture the exuberant sweep of the Artists Village will probably require a mural-sized canvas… and the observant eye and graceful hand of a new Michelangelo.
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