DIRECTOR BUFFS GALLERY’S LUSTER

Gerry McAllister once had the requisite creative goods as a visual artist. Whether she had what it takes to succeed in that ultra-competitive arena, we may never know, because she nipped her own career in the bud.

Instead of art, McAllister chose art administration, a felicitous choice because she is considered a wheeler-dealer par excellence. The woman can strike bargains that would make a boulder yield blood--gallons of it. This year she began her second decade at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery, which, largely under her creative guidance, has become one of the county’s premiere showcases for contemporary art. Not only does she put install thought-provoking shows of emerging artists in the gallery at the west end of Mandeville Center, she somehow manages to occasionally snag an exhibition that normally would elude a gallery such as the Mandeville with its small budget.

She doesn’t mind going out on a limb. Nine years ago, when McAllister heard that a traveling exhibit of paintings by Frida Kahlo, the wife of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, was coming to this country, she got on the phone to say that the gallery wanted the exhibit. What McAllister didn’t say was that she had no money for the show.

“I actually signed a contract without having the money. When you work like we do on a shoestring, you have to take some chances. It was a real coup for a university gallery to have people flying in to see an exhibition that we were fortunate enough to have.”

McAllister got the “Pioneers in Paradise” exhibit of West Coast folk artists earlier this year for a greatly reduced fee when she heard the show was going into storage. She “stored” it in her gallery. Similarly, in 1981, McAllister lassoed an architectural show, “Site: Buildings and Spaces,” for no fee when she learned it was going into storage. She picked up an Alfred Jensen exhibit for $96 when the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art could not present most of the show because of renovation.

Not everyone can work on a shoestring, but then, McAllister is the antithesis of a university bureaucrat. She clearly loves what she does, even though her budget allows $2,500 for each of the gallery’s six or seven annual exhibitions. She has to raise the remainder for the shows in the gallery, which is under the umbrella of UCSD’s visual arts department. Like the directors of many small commercial galleries, McAllister has a knack for creative cost cutting, but also knows how to find money when necessary.

For the current exhibit, a retrospective of San Diego artist Belle Baranceanu, McAllister had to have a catalogue that would match the excellence of Baranceanu’s paintings. “I thought that in San Diego I could surely be able to raise the money to support a catalogue.”

But three grant applications drew exactly zero dollars, and McAllister went after private donations and matching funds. A woman whose children had studied art with Baranceanu heard about the exhibit and called McAllister, who asked if the woman could help with the catalogue. She received $2,500, and took it to the university for a match. Soon the students of Baranceanu, who for more than 20 years was head of the Francis W. Parker School, began contributing to the catalogue. Meanwhile, fully confident, she was typing the copy for the catalogue into a computer. Eventually $10,000 was raised to fund the handsome and scholarly catalogue.

McAllister gets involved in the actual installations, often hanging the shows herself. Her staff consists of two part-time assistants and graduate students, who function as helpers and security guards.

McAllister’s art career began late in life. She was almost 40 before going to college. Her formal college art training culminated 11 years ago when she earned a master of fine arts degree from UCSD. She was 50.

But in the heady ferment of the university’s visual arts department, questions began to nag her. “Am I going to be one of these artists who is constantly working, trying to find recognition, trying to be in exhibitions, or am I going to do something that’s realistic and get into the administrative side of art? I had to make that decision.”

Today two of McAllister’s large creations, reminiscent of the color-field painting and process art of the 1960s, hang in her small office, witness to her earlier ambitions. “Those are vestiges of my past,” she said with no trace of acrimony. “I no longer paint. I no longer make art.”

After seven years as gallery director, she loves to greet visitors when possible and talk about the art on exhibit. The exhibitions are primarily for the the art students to see, “but also for the community to look at,” she maintained.

“We hope they like one out of six shows . . . but that’s not our intent, just to have beautiful, pleasant little things in the gallery that people can walk in, walk through and don’t have to ask any questions--don’t have to bring anything to it. What I try to convince people is you don’t have to make a value judgment. What you really have to do is find out the artist’s intentions.” It’s all right ask questions, she said.

“We’re not aspiring to get everybody to like contemporary art, because that’s not going to happen. But you have to question and understand that ever-present content, whether it be that that painting is about color or that sculpture is about something political or it has some special symbol or narrative or allegory. I don’t think many people are trained to look at art that way. You really have to understand what the artist is about.”

However, not all of the Mandeville Gallery shows are shockingly contemporary or demand such rigor in viewing. The season-opening Paul Brach exhibit was not considered particularly demanding. However, the January exhibit, “Symbol/Allegory,” and The Drawing Legion (a group of performance artists from Iowa) in March should be thought-provoking.

Meanwhile, McAllister is dealing with more prosaic concerns, like getting a corporate or private endowment to help fund the gallery’s operation and lining up funding to build a more eye-catching entrance to the gallery that is virtually hidden at the western end of the spaceship-like Mandeville Center.

For McAllister, there is always the thrill and sometimes the pain of creating shows. “You have an idea and you create something . . . concrete from this idea. You also continue to learn. I learn something every single day.”