Artists Take Up Residence in Galleries

An industrial park hard by San Diego’s 805 Freeway hardly seems a likely place for something trendy in the frequently trend-driven world of art.

For one thing, there are the jets asserting their screaming takeoffs from the Miramar Naval Air Station. A screaming fighter can ruin an entire day, if not an entire thought process.

Then there’s the landscape: seemingly the Western world’s largest retail brick yard at one end of the street, the Alcatraz Self Storage at the opposite end. This, clearly, is no SoHo.

But midpoint on La Jolla’s Eastgate Drive in an anonymous building beneath banners proclaiming “67 cents a square foot,” a challenging experiment in the making and selling of contemporary art is going on.

Inside 5268, something different is at work. If you call it by its formal name, you’d say the mouth-filling Quint-Krichman Project. Less formally, you’d discover a private artist-in-residence program, one that brings mainly sculptors and site artists to these hard San Diego plains and turns them loose to work.

Then puts their work on display.

Then lets them wait for the cash register to ring, which it has been known to do.

Artistic residency is a flirtatious idea: many have tried, few have come up smiling. Foundations do it occasionally. Some universities do it, bringing artists here, sheltering them, allowing them free exercise of their creative purposes.

But for a private enterprise to pick up the air fare, to buy the materials, to provide living quarters just for the hope of future gain is just not normal art gallery business. (Just what is normal gallery business may be another matter by itself.)

Yet the artist-at-home program seems to be working for Michael Krichman and Mark Quint. The idea may just have enough appeal to put new life into the generally depressed business of selling art.

The ‘80s belonged to the collectors. The ‘90s may belong to the collaborators-in-residence, a new way of getting young artists before potential buyers.

Krichman is a lawyer for the big Los Angeles firm of Latham and Watkins, but for the past two years he’s been on leave, ever since he joined forces with former gallery owner Quint to set up their projects. Since then, the program has brought six artists--most of them sculptors, all European--set them up in a small home in La Jolla, leased a warehouse in the Eastgate Plaza that doubles as studio and gallery. The artists and owners share receipts from sales along traditional 60-40 splits, the 60% going to the artist, less cost of materials.

“The sales response has been good,” Krichman says. “We are a for-profit operation. We are making a living. One of our artists sold 17 of the 20 pieces he made here. Our original assumption that there would be few sales locally has been wrong. Half of our sales have been to San Diego collectors. The rest to other Southern Californians, people from New York and Philadelphia. We’ve had European collectors fly in to buy. A collector of our current artist, Jan van Munster, is flying in from Holland to see what Jan has done here.”

What Van Munster has done is fill the studio-gallery with 30 constructions and sculptures he made based on various forms of energy, ice works, neon art and marble pieces, and what he calls pyrographics, the symbolic representation of energy. His work will be shown beginning Friday night.

For the visiting artists, their tenure in San Diego usually has been a learning experience--new materials, different requirements. “One of the first things we have artists do is get them to Home Depot, just to open their eyes to what we have here, to see what is available for them,” Krichman says. “It’s always an amazing experience.”

As a complement to the residency program, Krichman and Quint have started their own publication enterprise, producing books covering the works done by the sculptors. They have also published a book on the one artist they represent, the California painter Manny Farber.

The advantages of this project to the artist varies: They are shown to a new batch of collectors, they experience a new country, they work with new materials, their creative batteries are recharged. They make new hard-currency sales. And especially for young, about-to-break-through artists, the residency program provides a chance to be seen in a major American city.

The advantages to the gallery owners are several too: The new artists attract potential collectors, the up-front cost of bringing artists here is offset by savings in shipping, the artists themselves attract new followings. And in the Quint-Krichman program, potential buyers are encouraged to visit with the artists in the workplace, developing, hopefully, mutual admiration societies down the street from Alcatraz Self Storage.

Perhaps the most-established private artist-in-residence program in the United States belongs to Los Angeles’ Gemini G.E.L., where for almost 26 years artists have been invited to create prints and lithographs in the company’s facilities. Their travel expenses, city transportation and hotel stay are covered by Gemini, which in turn owns and sells the work the artists produce. The artists in turn are paid royalties from the limited-edition publishing. The Gemini program is not exclusively for visiting artists, but it is strong evidence that in collaboration there is artistic and commercial endurance.

New York gallery owner Barbara Gladstone is just winding down a variation on the theme of residency. She and her partners, art consultant Thea Westreich and administrator Janis Gui, have for the last year been providing transportation, studio and living space for artists invited to work in Rome in space that Gladstone had once earmarked for a gallery. Eventually some of the work done there will be put into a U.S. traveling exhibition and Westreich hopes to produce a book on the Italian resident program.

Another New York gallery owner has provided a residency program for artists, in his case installation artists from the Soviet Union. On an informal basis, Ronald Feldman in the last few years has arranged for Soviet artists to get to New York, to get over the immigration hurdles, to find them living and working quarters and material. Their work is shown and sold in his gallery and his financial split with the artists is the usual 60-40.

“There is a financial risk in making the up-front advances,” Feldman says, “but the artists need help and I see the cost as just another part of doing business. Now many of them have their works all over the U.S. And since perestroika, we see more who need help here.”

At the Quint-Krichman Project, more young artists are already on their way. Following the Van Munster exhibit, Canadian artist George Trakas is scheduled, followed by German sound sculptor Rolf Julius, and then the first American to enter residency there, Lee Boroson, a young New York sculptor who works with found objects. Residency won’t be entirely new for him. He’s been working as Van Munster’s studio assistant. Before that as a carpenter in the studio.

He knows his way to the local Home Depot.

More importantly, perhaps, will buyers continue to find their way to the warehouses turned studios turned galleries?