Artists Creating Gallery in City Storage Space

Artists swapped paintbrushes and easels for shovels and wheelbarrows Tuesday as they remodeled a dingy third-floor storage space at Ventura City Hall into an art gallery.

“It’s a Mondrian painting in gray,” said sculptor Paul Lindhard, 49, referring to Dutch artist Piet Mondrian as he took a break from shoveling wet cement. “It’s not too exciting at this point, but it will be an art gallery.”

In a different incarnation, the 6,000-square-foot room in the west wing of City Hall housed a women’s jail. Come May 3, it will be transformed into the appropriately named “3rd floor gallery . . . city hall,” a haven for artistic expression with expansive ocean views amid the bastion of bureaucracy.

“They wanted to call it the jail show, but someone shot it down,” said Elena Brokaw, municipal cultural affairs coordinator.

For now, Brokaw refers to the gallery as temporary. There are no plans for further shows once a juried exhibit that will run in conjunction with the Ventura Chamber Music Festival concludes June 14.

Four art groups--the San Buenaventura Artists’ Union, Buenaventura Art Assn., Studio 83 and Goldcoast Water Society--have pooled resources to revamp the long-neglected room.

“It’s the city’s own treasure,” Lindhard said. “It will be a far more valuable space when we’re through.”

On Saturday, more than 50 people helped haul away broken glass, old filing cabinets and broken furniture that filled the dusty chamber. About $1,000 will be spent to repaint, erect temporary walls and fill in remnants of jail cells.

“If the city was to do this it would cost, I’m sure, $50,000 to $60,000,” Brokaw said. “Nobody has been able to get up here for 10 to 15 years.”

To be fair, art is nothing new to City Hall. Two revolving art galleries on second-floor corridors have displayed a variety of works for at least four years, Brokaw said.

The third-floor gallery will retain its industrial ambience, with pipes protruding from the ceiling and about 350 boxes of yellowing municipal records remaining in one corner shielded from art lovers’ eyes by dry wall.

“I like to see art in a space that has some roughness--it creates drama,” Lindhard said. “[But] you feel like you’ve arrived at a place that’s a sanctuary.”

The upcoming exhibit is open to all Ventura County artists and will be juried by Richard Peterson, Ventura College art instructor and nationally known artist. For more information, call 658-4783 by April 26.

Gallery hours are scheduled for noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, May 4 to June 14.