In the Art World, January Becomes the Middle of the Year

January may signal the beginning of a fresh, untried year--and in the present case, a new decade--but in the art world, it is a month like any other. More auspicious on the art world’s calendar is September, when the new “season” of shows begins and galleries settle down to business again after the summer lull. Allegiance to an academic calendar that begins in the fall and ends with spring is steadfast among New York galleries, whose clients retreat from the sweating city during July and August.

The same pattern holds in San Diego, though the population here swells in the summer. Galleries hang the traditional summer group shows, university and college spaces shut down, and museums often schedule their most broadly appealing shows.

However nondescript a month for those in the art biz, January is here, now, and it has brought with it the rooted ritual of surveying the year ahead. The view, of one exhibition season half-completed and the next barely planned, is splintered, but telling.

San Diego galleries and museums have on their books for 1990 a globe-trotting schedule that glimpses at the art of Indonesia, Poland, the Soviet Union, Mexico and England. Good neighbors to our area artists, they also keep one foot on local soil, anchoring the visionary with the responsible.

Several voids will begin to be filled in the coming year. Two shows featuring contemporary African-American artists ought to restore at least a temporary sense of egalitarianism to the local scene. One, focusing on printmakers nationwide, opens Saturday at the Lyceum theatre, and was organized by the embryonic African-American Museum of Fine Arts. The other, at Grossmont College (Feb. 1-23), includes local and Los Angeles artists working in a variety of media.

The void left by last year’s closing of Installation, the downtown alternative space, is also expected to be filled this year. The gallery’s board of directors is currently running the organization out of one board member’s home, but they have begun the search for a new director and anticipate getting back on track by the year’s end.

ARTWALK, the downtown art community’s annual open house, coordinated by Installation, will take place April 21-22. Other holes in the fabric of the local art community may be left gaping this year. The large gallery space at 9th and G, recently vacated by Dietrich Jenny and, before him, Mark Quint, awaits another brave soul willing to risk a fragile future as a contemporary art dealer for the sake of helping to keep downtown’s art scene alive.

New voids will also be created in 1990, as the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art closes its downtown space (this weekend) and maybe part of its La Jolla facility in the fall while it undergoes a major expansion. The museum is scouting about town for a temporary exhibition space--or several--in which to continue its programs until the expansion is completed in 1992.

What else to expect in 1990?

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Centro Cultural de la Raza, which will be publishing a book assessing its present and future endeavors. The gallery also plans a rich schedule of shows, from the annual eye-opening “Border Realities” installation by the Border Art Workshop, to a string of one-person and group shows featuring Native American artists, Chicano artists living in the Southwest and muralists from Baja California.

Ambitious global grazing on the part of local gallery directors will yield a promising array of shows this year. Mark Quint Contemporary Art will feature work by the Polish painter and photographer Mikolaj Smoczynski as well as the wry assemblages of British sculptor Richard Wentworth.

Soviet artists return to the local limelight at the David Zapf Gallery, which featured (along with the Mesa College Art Gallery) an engaging selection of paintings by Leningrad artists during last year’s festival. More paintings by members of the Fellowship for Experimental Art will be seen at the gallery this fall.

German sculptor Franz Erhard Walther will present his brand of Minimalism in a series of abstract, dyed fabric works at the San Diego State University Art Gallery beginning February 9. Sculptures, murals, drawings and exuberant reliefs by the Basque artist Andres Nagel will be on view at the Tasende Gallery the following month.

The Iturralde Gallery narrows its Latin American focus to concentrate on a handful of Mexican artists this year, while the Mingei International Museum of World Folk Art extends its gaze southward to present “Mayan Threads,” a show of textile treasures from Guatemala.

Local artists Manny Farber, Faiya Fredman, Graciela Ovejero, Reesey Shaw, David Baze, Nancy Kittredge, Roy David Rogers and others will add solo shows to their resumes this year, and ten as-yet-undisclosed locals will also be included in “Satellite Intelligence: Boston/San Diego New Art Exchange,” this summer at the La Jolla Museum.

Double-takes and murmurs will, as always, greet Sushi’s StreetSites projects this year. In March, the performance and visual art gallery will plant three temporary public art works downtown to engage the community in dialogue on such issues as local growth and development, homelessness and censorship of the arts.

Also bound to raise a few eyebrows is photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s “X” portfolio, to be shown at PhotoWest Gallery this spring. Homoerotic and sadomasochistic images from the series were at the heart of the recent congressional debate over government funding of the arts.

Two dwellings will be temporarily constructed in town this year--one a shelter for the body, the other a refuge for the spirit. The San Diego Museum of Art presents “In the Realm of Ideas” this summer, featuring the work of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. As part of the exhibition, a full-scale “Usonian Automatic House,” Wright’s proposed solution to the need for moderate, custom-built housing, will be erected in the parking lot in front of the museum.

On a more intimate scale, Los Angeles artist Mineko Grimmer will create a site-specific installation for the Mesa College Art Gallery in May. Grimmer’s organic sculptures pay homage to the musical theories of John Cage as well as to the Japanese reverence for the integrity, meditative potential and metaphoric possibilities of stone. Perhaps the most subtle of the year’s offerings, Grimmer’s work will seal the current season of shows and usher in the calm interlude before the next begins.