Smithsonian Show Helps Escondido Boost Image

“Paloma Roja,” a plump pigeon, rendered by a child in red and yellow feet, struts across a rectangle of paper on the gallery wall at the Mathes Cultural Center in Escondido.

Not far away hang boldly colorful landscapes, scenes of harvesting, bull fights, modern pollution and history such as a stern-looking visage of Benito Juarez, the Mexican national hero.

The exhibit of 80 paintings in crayon, tempera and pastels by Mexican children, “Mexico as Seen by her Children/Mexico Visto por sus Ninos,” reflects much of the color and history of Mexico and the ability of art to communicate.

This is the first exhibit distributed and co-organized by the Smithsonian Institution to come to Escondido. The show is presented here by the Felicita Foundation, an organization that increasingly is shaping and even creating much of the cultural life of this city of 76,000.

Although relatively new--the nonprofit foundation was founded only six years ago and operates on a shoestring budget of less than $80,000--Felicita has embarked on a $35-million fund-raising campaign to build a cultural center adjacent to the new City Hall.

A group of culturally oriented citizens created the foundation in 1981 in the wake of a National Endowment for the Arts program that reflected poorly on Escondido. The particular NEA program is only offered to culturally deprived areas, said Ann Lievers, a co-founder of Felicita.

“Basically, the NEA declared Escondido a cultural disaster area,” she said. “That sort of rankled some of us. We shared that distinction at the time with Oxnard and El Centro and other neat places; although since then Oxnard has improved, too.”

An initial group of seven women and two men set about changing that by helping bring dance, drama, music and the visual arts to Escondido. “We resurrected the old Escondido Regional Arts Council,” Lievers said, but in the absence of theaters, the foundation has focused mostly on the visual arts and its children’s arts education program.

The City of Escondido joined the foundation’s cultural effort by renting half of the old city library to the foundation as its home for $1 a year. The stacks of books were removed and the library transformed into the Mathes Cultural Center, primarily an art gallery and dance studio, which Lievers describes as “a window for the community.”

Lievers hoped that 200 guests would come to the opening of the first exhibition in September, 1982.

“We had 560 people, an interesting mix of new people and old-timers,” she said. “It was a big boost. We took it as an indication from the community that it wanted something to happen.”

Along with regularly changing art exhibits, the foundation launched a diverse educational program. In the wake of Proposition 13, Escondido schools have neither arts in the curriculum nor an art consultant at the school district level, said Liz Schaude, who directs the foundation’s youth education program that offers classes in dance, drama, music and visual arts to students on a fee basis after school. Schaude also works closely with the local Patio Playhouse’s youth program.

Today, growth and success are changing the foundation. Membership has soared to more than 600. But the labor of planning, arranging, receiving, mounting and shipping a new high quality art exhibit every five or seven weeks has become an increasingly tough task with strictly volunteer help.

Last year, the foundation hired a professional part-time curator of exhibitions and Schaude as part-time director of the youth program. There is also a part-time office manager to handle the mountain of paper work that goes with a nonprofit business.

“We were being killed by the paper,” Lievers said. “When I was president I spent 30 hours a week on the foundation. We were killing our volunteers off.”

The changes have brought inevitable growing pains. For the first exhibition of the new season, the new curator, Reesey Shaw, scheduled a landscape show, but put a contemporary spin on it. She chose landscapes by some acclaimed living artists from Los Angeles and New York including Tony Berlant, Vernon Fisher and Suzanne Caporael. The modern art landscapes created a stir.

“We almost had a mutiny on the board,” Lievers said, only partly joking. “We know this is a conservative community. We have tried not to tell people what art is, that it’s OK not to like what’s up, to hate it.”

The foundation will show traditional and familiar art, but it will also continue presenting what is innovative, Lievers said. One reason for that is the specter of Escondido’s new $52-million civic and cultural arts complex that has galvanized the foundation to raise its sights and expand its vision. A number of foundation board members have worked for an arts complex to go with the new civic center. The foundation, which sponsored a national architectural design contest for the complex, will work as a private partner with the city in building and operating the arts part of the complex.

The foundation has hired a firm to guide its board in raising $35 million to help pay for a complex of two theaters and a 28,000-square-foot visual art and educational center. Of that, $10 million will provide an endowment to operate the center, which is scheduled to open in five years.

Last year, the city, for the first time, began to fund the foundation’s operations in addition to subsidizing its rent.

This year, the foundation expanded its programs by joining as a co-presenter with the new North County Cinema Society. It’s a strategic move aimed at gaining the foundation new audiences.

Lievers is happy with the group’s growth.

“We have done what we’ve set out to do,” she said. “The job is just getting bigger.”