Folk Art Gallery Blends Blue-Chip Artists With the Naive Unknowns

Visiting Outside-in, Liz Blackman’s gallery of 20th-Century American folk and “outsider” art, used to take some doing. The gallery was in a converted townhouse on a residential street in West Hollywood and was open by appointment.

Two weeks ago, Blackman moved to let more of the outside world in: She reopened her gallery in a storefront on a colorful block of Melrose Avenue, just east of La Brea.

Blackman is a former reporter who fell in love with folk art during an assignment and became first a collector, then a dealer. She handles naive, figurative work by self-taught artists, who developed far from art schools and the art scene. Within the broad category of folk art, she said, she is less likely to represent the work of what she termed “memory painters” such as Grandma Moses. Her penchant is for “outsider art,” which she describes as “more visceral, more eccentric than traditional folk art--the product of personal vision rather than experience.”

Indeed, Outside-in fairly bristles with personal visions. A wooden tick-tack-toe set by Constance Roberts, for instance, graphically pits hand-carved vices against virtues. The vices are represented by a gambler’s hand of cards (complete with one up the sleeve), an expired parking meter, a passel of french fries and an overdue library book. Arrayed against them are a bottle of cod liver oil, a bunch of flowers for mom, a box of Quaker Oats and a signed check for the needy.

Elsewhere, in a piece by R. A. Miller, an American flag painted on corrugated metal bears the inscription, “You can’t burn this flag.” Artist Purvis Young has produced a pair of paintings in black on the footboard and headboard of a white crib. And in “Batman, Batwoman,” Michael Rogers has sculpted a baseball bat into a totem that is subtly male on one side, female on the other.

“What I’m trying to do is mix some of the blue-chip artists who are very well known”--artists such as Mose Tolliver, David Butler and the Rev. Howard Finster--”with the work of lesser-known artists whose work is consistent,” Blackman said.

At this point, relatively few of the artists in Blackman’s stable are from Los Angeles, or even from California. They are more likely to live in isolated rural areas, where there is less information overload--and more time to devote to a personal craft. “In L.A. it’s a luxury even to have a hobby,” Blackman said.

But just opening her more public space has brought several L.A. artists to her door and to her attention. The signature lizard above Outside-in’s entry, for instance, was executed by Aubrey Selden, a local artist who just wandered by one day.

“There must be some treasures out there,” Blackman said.

Outside-in, 6909 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 657-6369. Open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

A STICKLER FOR STICKLEY: One of the most intriguing differences between a museum exhibition and a gallery show--when both address the same topic--is that the gallery material is generally for sale. In other words, you could conceivably buy it, bring it home, even touch it.

That is part of the appeal of “Arts and Crafts in America” at the Bryce Bannatyne Gallery in Santa Monica, which complements the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s recently opened exhibition “American Arts and Crafts: Virtue in Design.”

The Bannatyne show includes less European material than its museum counterpart, but it is ambitious in its attempt to evoke the arts and crafts movement as “a whole environment, not just as single pieces of furniture,” Bannatyne said.

To that end, the exhibition includes not just significant tables, chairs and cabinets by Gustav Stickley, Frank Lloyd Wright, Greene & Greene and their peers. Also on view are ceramics from potteries such as the Grueby Faience Co., original lighting fixtures by Greene & Greene and others, as well as textiles and paintings of the period.

Like the LACMA exhibition--which is publicized with a photograph of a handsome ceramic fireplace surround--the Bannatyne show even includes a tile fireplace. Made in 1901-02 by the Grueby Faience Co., it once stood in a home in Duluth, Minn. Bannatyne located it--disassembled and boxed--in a New Jersey basement.

Gone are the days, however, when casual collectors could make such discoveries at flea markets and buy them for a song. And prices for important signed pieces in the Bannatyne show can run deep into five figures, even into six. “Over the last 10 to 12 years, prices have started to escalate and the collector base has broadened--we’re now even starting to see things go to Europe and the Orient,” Bannatyne said.

But he resists attempts to characterize the new-found popularity of arts and crafts furniture as fashion or fad.

“I don’t see it as trendy. I look at the Santa Fe interior-decorator movement as trendy, because there’s no historical basis for it--it’s primarily style,” Bannatyne said. “With Stickley and the arts and crafts movement, you’re really dealing with an important movement in history.”

He noted that the commanding simplicity of the furniture even tends to have a strong impact on the lives of the people who choose to live with it today.

“The furniture itself can be very imposing,” he said. “But when people really start to look at it, they have to take a closer look at themselves.

“It just forces you to pare your life down,” Bannatyne said.

“Arts and Crafts in America,” through Oct. 25 at the Bryce Bannatyne Gallery, 604 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica. (213) 396-9668. Open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

SCENIC SENDAK: When the Los Angeles Music Center opened its recent production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” with scenery and costumes designed by Maurice Sendak, the gallery Every Picture Tells a Story threw a party--and threw open an exhibition--in Sendak’s honor.

Sendak, of course, is a near-legendary children’s book author and illustrator. During the past 10 years, he has been crossing over into the adult reaches of opera design. “Idomeneo,” he has said, is his favorite opera by his favorite composer.

Every Picture Tells a Story is a gallery of original art from children’s books. But one aspect of its approach, too, is “trying to break down the barrier of what needs to be for children and what for adults,” according to Abbie Phillips, one of the gallery’s owners.

Through Oct. 28 the main gallery is festooned with the original set and costume designs for “Idomeneo,” complete with monsters, seascapes and threatening skies. None of the watercolors or drawings are for sale.

Rounding out the show are children’s book illustrations by artists that Sendak himself admires, Phillips said. Among them are Richard Egielski, William Joyce, Robert Rayevsky and Laurent de Brunhoff (of Babar fame).

Sendak does not often exhibit his work in a gallery setting; for Every Picture Tells a Story, the Sendak show is something of a coup. For the gallery’s owners, it also seems to be a personal thrill.

“I grew up with all his images. In a way, he’s responsible for my starting this gallery,” Phillips said. “I don’t think what he does is all just warm and fuzzy little bears--he’s showing children in all their complexity. That’s related to what we’re trying to do with the gallery.”

“The Original Art of Idomeneo, by Maurice Sendak,” through Oct. 28 at Every Picture Tells a Story, 836 N. La Brea, Los Angeles. (213) 962-5420. Open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.