A Devilish Egg Salad a la Faberge : S.D. Gallery Cooks Up Irreverent Companion to Soviet Arts Festival

Someone had to do it. The pomp and heavy hype embellishing the upcoming show of Faberge eggs was ripe for a satirical swipe. Few in San Diego were as fit and willing to do it as James Dean Healy, proprietor of downtown’s Tohubohu Studio/Gallery and self-professed renegade of the local art scene.

Healy put out a call for contributions to the show, “Fabulous Egg Salad,” and eggs began rolling in from as far as Los Angeles and Arizona. Nearly 50 of the artist-designed ovoids will be on view starting Oct. 19, just days before the kick-off of the city-sponsored San Diego Arts Festival: Treasures of the Soviet Union.

As the centerpiece of the festival, the precious Faberge Imperial eggs promise to send a constant hum of “oohs” and “aahs” through the galleries of the San Diego Museum of Art. Meanwhile, their irreverent cousins at Tohubohu will prompt plenty of giggles and guffaws. The eggs range from the humorous to the political, said Healy, citing the “Steve Garvey Egg,” its bases loaded with women, and the “Maureen O’Connor Egg.” Healy will serve--what else?--deviled eggs at the show’s opening reception.

“Fabulous Egg Salad” is the most frivolous of the many fringe events running concurrently with the San Diego Arts Festival. Other gallery shows may lack the levity of Healy’s spoof, but they will add their own brand of vitality to the festival by presenting a variety of contemporary and historic Soviet art.

The most ambitious of the independent shows will introduce “unofficial” contemporary Soviet art to San Diego. “Contemporary Art from Leningrad: The Fellowship for Experimental Art” will contain more than 50 paintings by artists working outside of the Artists Union. Without membership in the union, Soviet artists are denied the privileges of studio space, ready art supplies and exhibition opportunities.

“The work is very colorful, bold and expressionistic,” said gallery owner David Zapf, who co-curated the show with Kathleen Stoughton, director of the Mesa College Art Gallery. “All of the paintings seem to have some underlying irony or political connotation.” The show, consisting of cityscapes, nudes, genre scenes and other figurative works, will be divided between the David Zapf Gallery and the Mesa College Art Gallery.

The Fellowship for Experimental Art “has used the inadequacies of the current rules of culture policy in its own favor,” according to a member of the Fellowship’s council. Artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid found these rules insurmountable and left their native Russia for Israel in 1977, moving to the United States the next year. Working as a team since the early ‘70s, Komar and Melamid were kicked out of the Moscow Union of Artists for “distortion of Soviet reality and deviation from the principles of socialist realism.”

“They were some of the leading contemporary artists in Russia before they left,” said Gerry McAllister, director of UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery. During the San Diego Arts Festival, the gallery will show 23 of Komar and Melamid’s conceptual, autobiographical works, including paintings and mixed media works from their recent series on New Jersey’s “Bergen Point Brass Foundry.” The artists will make their first visit to southern California to deliver a lecture in conjunction with the show.

The Photowest/W. Bradley Lemery Gallery will cast a glance backward in time with the show, “USSR in Construction,” featuring experimental photographic and typographic montages from the 1930s, many of them published in the monthly, “SSSR Na Stroykie.” Featured artists include Alexander Rodchenko, who regarded the artist as a “constructive” force in the design of post-revolutionary Soviet society, and El Lissitsky, who taught constructivist principles of art at the famed Bauhaus school in Germany.

In a curious twist on the festival theme, the Acevedo Gallery will present “Russian Icons by American Artists,” with works by Nathaniel Hauser and Robert Lentz. Hauser, affiliated with a Benedictine monastery in Oceanside, paints religious subjects using the traditional media of egg tempera and gold leaf. Lentz, an American of Russian descent, paints 20th-Century heroes and martyrs, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. His icons “celebrate the uncanonized modern-day saint,” according to the gallery.