ART / WILLIAM WILSON : Social Issues Find Home in Long Beach

The other day while waiting in line to get on the freeway, I spotted a grizzled old derelict holding a hand-scrawled cardboard sign. The sight has become so familiar it’s almost invisible. This was a little different. Instead of the usual pathetic plea about willingness to work for food, this guy’s placard read: “I won’t lie. I need a drink.”

It turned out the incident was a perfect introduction to the largest of three inaugural exhibitions at Cal State Long Beach’s new University Art Museum: the traveling show “Homeless; Portraits of Americans in Hard Times,” the result of a yearlong project by photographer Howard Schatz. It includes a selection of oversize prints taken from the 76 duotone plates reproduced in the catalogue.

In lighting, pose and texture Schatz creates a vision of today’s homeless as a ragtag band of heroic individualists, often the last of the cultural renegades to cleave to the trashed idealism of the ‘60s.

Eric K. von Richter wears a black T-shirt reflecting his nickname, “Blacky.” He’s 53 but looks a decade older as he peers longingly at an unanswering sky.

“I guess I’m a dreamer from the past,” he says in a biographical rumination. In San Francisco’s Haight during the Summer of Love, he knew everybody from Janis Joplin to Jim Morrison. He says he’s now too old to get a job. He won’t accept welfare or food stamps. He hopes to die in Golden Gate Park. “I love this park,” he says.

Sarah Smith from San Antonio is only 25, but her drug addiction has already wrecked a profitable career as a call girl. She poses in punk mufti, tattooed arms pocked with needle bruises. In the eight months preceding the photograph, she saw five friends die of AIDS and other complications of street life. “The only thing that I really, really want,” she says, “is to know true happiness and to have a child.”

Jubilee Hasty hangs out in the redwood country up north around Arcata. He’s 21 and thinks that homeless is a misnomer, “ ‘cause I own the ground that I stand up on and that’s what gives me strength and faith.”

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Schatz perpetuates an American admiration for the underdog that stretches from Tom Paine to the Beat poets. There’s a romantic idealism at work here that can’t quite deal with the fact that being down on your luck is normally neither literary nor glamorous. This work is not the whole truth, but then nothing is. It has the overriding virtue of reminding us of the individuality, humor and resilient intransigence it takes to survive the street.

Noted Belgian artist Marie-Jo Lafontaine looks at the phenomenon of race on a changing planet. Her installation encompasses monumental portraits of six young women of mixed racial origin. Its French title is awkwardly translated as “To Know, Hold on to, and Secure that which is Sublime.”

The young women have a kind of otherworldly beauty. They are no longer easily identifiable as members of this or that race. They told Lafontaine they regretted that.

Lafontaine’s project has a courageously idealistic subtext. It wonders about the wisdom of rigidly cleaving to old ideals of racial identity in a world currently fragmented by retribalization. It contrasts separatism with the idea of healing through a natural process of hybridization with its biological promise of enhanced vigor.

There is nothing wrong with the third exhibition that wouldn’t be cured by being somewhere else. Called “Wall Works,” it consists of perfectly harmless multiples from Cologne’s Edition Schellmann. These tend to be interactive art projects carried out by the buyer following written instructions from artists like Sol LeWitt or Damien Hirst.

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Resulting works on view are both fun and an instructive way of schooling people in arts basics. Unfortunately, placed alongside the sociological works of Schatz and Lafontaine, they look like rococo dalliances from a decadent culture.

The new Cal State Long Beach museum opened March 1 and is a bracing bit of cultural enhancement in an era of Draconian educational budget cuts. Just 4,000 square feet, it’s nonetheless sleeker and more accessible than the old campus digs. It allows Director Connie Glenn’s ever-professional exhibitions program to glow in a new way.

* Cal State Long Beach University Art Museum, 1250 Bellflower Blvd.; Tuesday-Thursday, noon-8 p.m., Friday-Sunday, noon-5 p.m., closed Monday, to April 24 . (310) 985-5761).