SHOWING PRIDE IN THEIR CRAFTS

The crafts, until recently, have not garnered the respect generally accorded to the “fine arts” in our society. Somehow utility is regarded as less worthy of respect, less “noble,” than non-utility. Beauty is considered less pure when it is also useful.

But such attitudes seem to be changing: San Diego features three craft galleries.

The most senior is Gallery Eight in La Jolla (7464 Girard Ave.), formed in 1974 by a group of eight UC San Diego faculty wives (hence the name). Its original location was the International Center on the campus, where it featured exhibitions of ethnic and folk art.

From the beginning, Gallery Eight also performed an educational function through the presentation of workshops and demonstrations by guest artists in such techniques as metal design, woodworking, weaving and basket-making.

During subsequent years, the gallery increasingly incorporated more contemporary crafts in its exhibitions in response to a new generation of craft artisans and growing vitality in crafts disciplines, part of which it had generated through its presence and educational activities.

In need of more space, Gallery Eight moved to the La Jolla location in 1978. While retaining the Gallery Eight name honoring the founding partners, only Ruth Newmark and Barbara Saltman continued in the organization, but they were joined by ceramist Flossie Cohen.

Reflecting ever-increasing interest in and enthusiasm for the crafts in the community, the gallery last summer expanded into an adjoining space. It also acquired a new partner in fiber artist Shere Stougaard.

Gallery Eight prides itself on its representation of emerging artists such as San Diego jeweler Steve Brixner, whose works, though small, have the authority of sculpture. The gallery for many years has shown the iridescent glass of San Francisco Bay Area artist Esteban Prieto.

At Gallery Eight you also may find the elegant bowls of Berkeley wood-turner Bob Stocksdale, the colorful sculptural ceramic vessel forms of Thomas Kerrigan and the fiber basket forms and wall hangings of Los Angeles artist John Garrett.

From among established craft artisans, Gallery Eight last year exhibited furniture by MacArthur Prize winner Sam Maloof.

“We are a gallery committed to finding objects that add visual excitement to people’s lives,” Cohen said.

Downtown, the Wita Gardiner Gallery (735 4th Ave.) represents the same attitude.

“I don’t make any distinction between arts and crafts,” Gardiner said. “Whatever the medium is, it’s a means for expressing a vision. It’s so much more than making teapots.”

In the late 1950s, while studying art and theater at the University of California, Berkeley, she was touched by the effervescence created by revolutionary ceramist Peter Voulkos, who used clay to create expressive rather than utilitarian forms.

Later in New York City, she worked in education at the Brooklyn Museum and then in development at the Jewish Museum. After earning a doctorate in clinical psychology at New York University, she relocated to San Diego with her physician husband and practiced her specialty in marriage and family counseling for a decade.

But the idea of having her own gallery persisted.

“The gallery was just a dream like most dreams that I’d probably not realize,” she said.

But three years ago, she closed her practice and two years ago she opened Reflections Gallery, specializing in crafts, in La Mesa. Last year she took the plunge, moving to a handsome space (formerly the site of the short-lived Conlon-Grenfell Gallery) in the Gaslamp Quarter.

Among its roster of sculptural ceramists, the Wita Gardiner Gallery includes Les Lawrence of San Diego, Bill Abright of the San Francisco Bay Area and Stephen Kafer of Los Angeles. The jewelry of internationally known San Diego State University faculty member Arlene Fisch is exhibited at the gallery as are the decorative body sculptures of Gene and Hiroko Pijanowski.

“I’m hoping to find greater receptivity in San Diego,” Gardiner said. “I want to have San Diegans recognize that the crafts are just another way of seeing.”

To promote that goal, the Wita Gardiner Gallery, like Gallery Eight, has a program of lectures, workshops and demonstrations.

A few blocks away, International Gallery (643 G St.), also represents contemporary crafts and primitive and ethnic art as well. Like the other galleries, it has a varied program of educational events.

The spacious gallery, located in what long ago was a general store and most recently a Vespa showroom, now is a general store of world cultures. It probably is the closest thing to an Oriental bazaar in town.

Rugs from Afghanistan, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Poland and North African nations cover the walls and lay in heaps on the floor. African and Melanesian images and masks gaze impersonally at visitors. Ethnographic jewelry from the Near East amicably rivals contemporary jewelry for attention.

Every medium is represented--clay pots, metal pans, wood screens, glass bowls, silk scarfs.

“Works have to be displayed well,” gallery director Stephen Ross said. “You have to treat all the works with reverence. It all goes together because good art stays good art.”

The compatibility of so many objects representing so many cultures, a kind of United Nations of crafts, proves his point.

The gallery is a family business started by Ross’ parents, longtime area residents Charles and Peggy Ross, in La Mesa in April, 1979, as European Imports/International Gallery. Initially they specialized in high quality gift wares but gradually added more exotic materials.

Believing in downtown San Diego as a market and wanting the cachet of place, they relocated in November, 1984.

“Downtown is central to a lot of locations,” Stephen Ross said. “Being downtown makes it easier for people to visit the arts.”

The Ross family has acquired its expertise on the job, especially through travel.

“A lot of things about art can’t be learned in the classroom,” Stephen Ross said.

“The people you get to meet are from fantastic to incredible,” he said. “There are so many artists out there. There’s so much good work; I just want to show as much variety as possible.

The gallery’s diverse roster of contemporary artists includes San Diego handmade-paper artist David Zapf, San Diego fiber artists Diane Gage(hand-dyed scarfs) and Olga Porteous(hand-painted garments).

“The point about the crafts,” the younger Ross said, is that their worth is really in workmanship and design, not in the materials.”

It is a sentiment with which other crafts dealers, and lovers of crafts and arts, would agree.