San Diego Art Scene: Is It Dead or Alive?

When two of downtown’s most important contemporary art galleries shut their doors in 1987, the downtown art community suffered what felt like a death blow. But the paralysis passed, and other galleries and arts-related businesses have since moved into the area centered on G Street between 6th and 9th avenues.

On paper, the downtown art community now appears to be flourishing, but those active in the city’s visual arts scene continue to question whether downtown has what it takes to be a cultural destination.

“It’s not a place where people want to go. It hasn’t hit a critical mass yet,” said Linda Moore, who opened the Linda Moore Gallery in Mission Hills in 1990. Moore said she seriously considered locating the gallery downtown to benefit from the synergy that results from proximity to other arts-related businesses, but personal and practical concerns dissuaded her.

“I talked to a lot of people, and I felt that this area is not ascending. It’s descending, and it’s not the time to move in.”

Moving in, however, is just what gallery director David Lewinson plans to do. The Del Mar gallery that bears his name will soon move to smaller quarters in Del Mar, and Lewinson hopes to open a second, larger exhibition space downtown.

“I think downtown is getting to be a serious place. Slowly, the transformation that people want to see happening is happening down there,” Lewinson said.

For others, downtown has long been a serious place. Physician and art collector Doug Simay opened Java, a coffeehouse and gallery, at 9th Avenue and G Street in 1986, and two years later launched ABC Books/Art+Architecture next door. Simay stages changing art exhibits at both sites, featuring work from his own extensive collection as well as work by both emerging and more established local artists.

“Everyone tries to analyze an art scene by determining if it’s arrived, but it’s a developmental process. I think things continue to grow downtown, but you have an up blip and a down blip. There is a slope to this line, and it’s heading upward, but we’re on a little bit of a down side now. It has a lot to do with the economy. Rather than the patient having cancer, I think the environment has cancer.”

Changes in the downtown art district have sent mixed signals in recent years, giving credence to Simay’s vision of a jagged course of progress. Among the more encouraging signs of maturation has been the establishment of the Center City East Arts Assn. (CCEAA). The 2-year-old organization has enhanced communication and coordination among galleries and other businesses downtown.

Andrea Hattersley, manager/owner of ABC Books and president of the association, says the general goal of the CCEAA is to support the arts in downtown San Diego, and toward this end it organizes synchronized open houses one Friday evening of every month, arranges cooperative publicity and publishes a map of the area showing the locations of all 34 arts-related business members.

Another promising sign is the increasing presence of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum operated a low-profile downtown space from 1986-89, but is scheduled to open a new, 10,000-square-foot facility next summer. Located in a free-standing building in the America Plaza complex at Kettner and Broadway, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art Downtown, as it is currently known, will be a short trek from the concentration of other galleries downtown, but it may provide a new westside anchor to the downtown art scene.

The previous anchors were pulled in 1987, when the Patty Aande and Mark Quint galleries closed. Others have since followed, including the Natalie Bush Gallery, the Dietrich Jenny Gallery, the Wita Gardiner Gallery, Spectrum Gallery and Photowest.

They have been replaced by new galleries that tend to be smaller and less ambitious in scope. Brushworks, Options, Circa 9 and BB La Femme focus primarily on local artists of varying accomplishment. But several others have helped sustain a high level of energy and credibility for visual arts offerings downtown.

The three-year-old Oneiros Gallery has consistently presented engaging work of a spiritualist/surrealist bent. Sushi Performance Gallery has exhibited art for more than 10 years, but has just started giving exposure to promising artists nationwide. The International Gallery and Faith Nightingale Gallery expand the menu downtown to include folk arts and contemporary crafts, and the Rita Dean Gallery, newly opened in September, has infused a healthy renegade spirit to the scene. Sandwiched between two gun shops on 6th Avenue below Market Street, the gallery picks up where owner James Healy’s former Tohubohu gallery left off, showing work of raw, youthful vitality.

“I know that San Diego needs a lot of help, but the city is ripe,” Healy said. “It’s very conservative, so it’s ripe for what I’m doing.”

Staying afloat financially is not a major issue for Healy or for the Oneiros Gallery, neither of which depend on sales for survival. Healy and his wife live behind the gallery, so the gallery’s operating expenses are simply factored into their cost of living.

Bill Beck, owner with his wife, Kathleen Benton, of the Oneiros Gallery on Eighth Avenue near G Street, described their situation in terms echoed by others in the downtown arts community.

“We started this as a labor of love. We’ve not relied on this to make a living. An undercapitalized person trying to sell the least commercially viable art available in this city--it’s going to be a difficult financial road to hoe. But we persevere.”

Beck and other gallery owners downtown cite the lack of walk-in traffic in their neighborhood as a problem for business, but gallery owners citywide face the same dilemma. Drina Randall Krimm and Margaret Porter Troupe opened the Porter Randall Gallery several months ago in the Birdrock area of La Jolla. Though they “strongly considered” the downtown area, they settled on an accommodating space with high ceilings on La Jolla Boulevard.

“We looked at downtown, La Jolla, Del Mar, and what it came down to was that we would have to promote our gallery wherever we were located,” Krimm said. “We couldn’t depend on walk-in traffic. We would have to bring the clientele to us.”

Though walk-in traffic throughout San Diego is confined mainly to shopping malls, downtown business owners say pedestrians are especially wary of their neighborhood for safety reasons. Whether the danger is real or perceived is a subject of some dispute among members of the downtown arts community.

“There’s probably less violence going on in downtown than in La Jolla,” said Java’s Doug Simay. “It appears on the surface that downtown is scarier, because you see more of the elements on the surface. In the bedroom communities, it’s camouflaged, but it’s all a matter of what people expect.”

Lynn Schuette, founding director of Sushi on 8th Avenue, says she has witnessed a decline in the area’s crime.

The prevalence of homeless people on the streets of downtown has had an impact on the arts community--it was a factor in the move of Installation Gallery out of downtown. After a two-year hiatus to hire a new director and secure more funds, the nonprofit gallery had reopened early this year in its third downtown space, on E Street. High rents and the homeless recently spurred the organization to find yet another home, this one at the foot of Washington Avenue in the Mission Brewery Plaza.

“It was a little scary because the homeless would wander into the gallery,” said Randy Robbins, president of Installation’s board of directors. “We tried to set up the gallery so you could walk in freely and not see a person behind a desk, and that was scary for the women who worked in the office.”

The loss of Installation, which had a strong downtown presence on and off for more than a decade, may not be debilitating for the downtown art community, but it is another of those blows that weakens the scene, a scene that continues to need all the strength it can get.

“We would rather be downtown, it’s important,” Robbins conceded. “But we’re in another important area now, and we can help energize that area.”