‘Good Citizen’ Cribb Credited for Arts Blend

Fondly dubbed “Joe Good Citizen” by a leader of one of Santa Ana’s arts groups, longtime Santa Ana resident Don Cribb was largely responsible for bringing together the arts groups and the Community Redevelopment Agency at a workshop earlier this month.

Cribb, an antique conservator who grew up in Santa Ana, said recently that he believes in the city’s “enormous human resources, which I didn’t think were being explored. . . . Santa Ana has such a wide-ranging, albeit disorganized, cultural life,” Cribb, 40, said. “With some organization, some promotion, some education, there would be a real basis for a cultural community. I just started building bridges. I felt people should know who other people were.”

Nosing around the Redevelopment Agency “to ask questions” about two years ago, he began chatting with Erica Taylor, now a project manager presiding over the fledgling Cultural/Arts Community Program.

The catalyst for his current involvement, he says, was learning that the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art was looking at a potential new site near UC Irvine.

It bothered him that the art cooperative would move out of the city, only reinforcing the negative stereotype of Santa Ana (“Why is it that if there’s a shooting, it’s always in Santa Ana?”), as opposed to the cultural high profile of some other Orange County cities.

“He brought to my attention the fact OCCCA was looking to go elsewhere, and he felt it was part of a distinct trend,” Taylor said, adding that Cribb also helped her identify nonprofit arts groups in Santa Ana.

Cribb remembers growing up in Santa Ana and being taught that “art was effeminate and non-cerebral, and only happened in another time and another place.”

Since then, he has majored in film at USC, worked for a while as a photographer and befriended artists--among them, he says, David Hockney and Santa Ana’s own Nick Vaughn. Although he enjoys the arts life of Los Angeles, where he maintains a second home, he remains an enthusiastic supporter of Santa Ana’s arts groups.

“I felt a sense of responsibility to bring (my interests) home,” he said.