Art Curator Donates His Services for Civic Arts Plaza’s First Show : Exhibit: Two Thousand Oaks artists will be among six relative unknowns whose works have been selected.

On the way to visit his brother in Thousand Oaks, professional Los Angeles art curator Jeff Phillips used to drive by the Civic Arts Plaza construction site. Curious about what was behind the scaffolding, he made a few inquiries.

And then he got an idea.

“It dawned on me that maybe they would like to have art shows there,” Phillips said. “So I wrote them a letter.”

After sitting in a file for at least a year, the letter finally found its way to Marta Timm, a volunteer who had been given the task of turning the Civic Arts Plaza’s vast hallways and lobby into an exhibit space.

Now Phillips--who has curated 25 shows at the Director’s Guild building in Los Angeles--is donating his time to put together the debut show for the plaza’s Visual Arts Committee. The exhibit opens Sept. 11 with an evening reception--featuring foods from more than a dozen local restaurants--and runs through Nov. 6.

Called The First View I, the show will kick off a series of what Phillips, Timm and other organizers hope will be innovative art shows, featuring emerging artists from around Southern California.

Timm admits that when she started the project last year, she had fantasies of pulling in major exhibitors, of covering the Civic Arts Plaza’s violet walls with canvases by Georgia O’Keeffe and Max Ernst.

But after talking to experts at the Smithsonian and looking at the costs of insuring those kinds of exhibits in what is essentially an open, public building, Timm said she got realistic.

“These kinds of things will not work for this space,” Timm said. “I still dream of Georgia O’Keeffe on the wall, but it’s not going to happen.”

The visual arts committee will focus instead on artists who are still relatively unknown, painters and sculptors who may have been featured in group shows in the Southland, but who are not represented by galleries and haven’t made it “big” yet.

“We want to help them emerge from the cocoon of their studios where they have been all of their lives,” Phillips said.

Two of the artists who will be featured in the show live in Thousand Oaks--Barbara Bouman Jay and Stephen Newman. Newman’s canvases are like “mini-tapestries filled with historical images,” Phillips said. Newman is working on a canvas specifically designed for the Civic Arts Plaza, he added.

Five of the six artists who will be part of the exhibit are people Phillips has worked with before. But Jay, a Newbury Park resident who does abstract paintings, is new to him. “I came up to see her in her studio,” Phillips said. “I was just blown away by her work.”

The works of Vadim Grinberg, a Russian immigrant who specializes in abstract works painted on a very thin aluminum sheet instead of canvas, will be in the show, as well as those of Monika Malewicz, who is from Poland.

Two Los Angeles artists also are participating: Sally Lamb, who paints semi-realistic images of Santa Monica, and Don Greenwood, who is painting a special canvas--his largest ever--designed for the huge wall spaces at the plaza.

Phillips hopes the first exhibit will prompt other local artists to be part of future shows.

“I’m hoping they’ll start coming out of the woodwork in the area,” he said. “I want to see these artists cross-pollinate and influence each other.”

“This is not decorative art work,” Phillips added. “This is cutting-edge.”

But Phillips recognizes his audience in Thousand Oaks will be a little different from the hipsters who crowd into gallery openings in New York’s SoHo, worshiping the avant-garde.

“I try to curate eclectically so that there will be something for everybody,” he said.