Nothing Sugarcoated Served Here

Maggi Owens was born on an Alabama farm; her mother died when she was 7, and the girl spent her adolescence living in a particularly rough neighborhood in Detroit with an uncaring father.

There, a neighbor was raped, mutilated and murdered, and Owens discovered what it’s like to be reviled as an outsider.

Kids called her “redneck” because of her Southern accent.

Humiliation deepened when teachers sent Owens to a school for students with learning problems. She didn’t have one, she says; she just lacked the sort of training her classmates had.

Today, Owens holds a master’s degree, and she knows that adversity motivates.

“I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me, because I’m a tough broad,” she said, “but I respect that I’m as tough as I am because I went through that stuff.”

It’s also why Owens, co-director of Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, doesn’t curate happy-face exhibits. Her shows--raw, subversive, challenging--unflinchingly explore race relations, religion, sex, death and gender politics. Her current effort, “Juvenescence,” examines innocence lost, JonBenet Ramsey-style.

“I like to question contemporary social and moral contradictions,” Owens said, “and exhibit thought-provoking art that will create dialogue.”

Such an approach has repeatedly won the gallery critical praise in the eight years she’s been at the gallery. During that time, Owens has split curatorial duties with co-director Richard Turner, who founded the gallery in 1972. Together, they have advanced Orange County’s standing in the broader contemporary art community, observers say.

“Maggi’s done some extremely astute curatorial programming for Chapman,” said Bolton Colburn, director of the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach. “Most of her shows are really content driven, and a lot of them are about pertinent social concerns.”

Sparking Reactions

The dialogue Owens’ exhibits elicit can be acrimonious. One visitor to 1993’s “Different Strokes” blasted a gallery attendant about the sexually explicit material. Chapman President James L. Doti regularly gets protest letters. One, he said, came from the wife of a deceased Chapman trustee who was sufficiently perturbed to pull her financial support from the private, Christian school.

“I find some of art there revolting, not consistent with my own sensibilities or morality,” Doti said. Yet he has never interfered with the gallery’s programming. In fact, he asked Owens to curate displays for the Doy and Dee Henley Galleria, a hallway space in the school’s bustling Argyros Forum classroom complex.

“I’m a great believer in academic freedom and freedom of expression,” Doti said, “and that kind of openness challenges people about how they perceive and think about issues and ideas, and that leads to wisdom.”

Owens, 59, worked at a Detroit ad agency through high school, climbing the rungs after graduation to become vice president of sales at a Motor City consulting firm. She concurrently fed a creative hunger she’d known since childhood with evening art classes, earning enough credits to enter UC Irvine’s art department when she moved to California after marrying in 1975.

She earned a bachelor’s from UCI in studio art, going back 20 years later--after raising four children--for a bachelor’s degree in art history. Around 1990, itching for a creative outlet, she took a volunteer job at the Guggenheim.

She started curating almost immediately, grouping such established artists as Edward Kienholz and Kim Abeles with lesser-knowns from as far as England and as near as Newport Beach, traveling to galleries and art fairs around the country to stay abreast of trends.

Bold Perspective

Turner named Owens associate curator after one year. She became co-director last year, after earning a master’s degree in exhibitions design and museum studies at Cal State Fullerton.

“She has a dramatically different perspective on the art world than I do,” said Turner, who favors Pacific Rim concerns and formalism, art involved with execution and composition. “She’s brought a whole different world of artists and shows to the gallery.”

The self-deprecatory Owens, whose short, sandy blond hair softly frames her face, doesn’t come off as a “tough broad.” Still, she’s never shied from tough or touchy issues.

The “Different Strokes” show addressed the tensions between prevailing social attitudes and sexual secrets, predilections, fantasies and prejudices. Two bunnies copulated in Nayland Blake’s installation about the innocence of the pre-AIDS era. Keith Boadwee’s photographs, spoofing contemporary body art, featured his genitals.

In this year’s “Same Difference,” Owens took on ethnic stereotypes. A work by African American artist Michael Ray Charles exercised the theory that the only way to defuse degrading imagery of minorities is for those groups to regain control of them. It pictured the head of a black character with devil horns and a grinning mouth filled with watermelon chunks.

“The exhibit essay,” Owens said during a recent interview at her Corona del Mar home, “expressed the hope that it would reprogram the way people think about cultural stereotypes and help them unlearn prejudices.”

“Juvenescence,” on view through Dec. 2, came out of Owens’ growing awareness that children were increasingly being depicted by artists conscious of the effects on adolescents of sex and violence in today’s films, television, video games, news reports and commercials.

“Childhood has been transformed,” Owens said, “but much of society still wants to think it’s the age of innocence. It’s definitely not. It never was for me.”

The recent works in “Juvenescence”--by 10 artists from Los Angeles, the Bay Area, New York and London--include Rebecca Midwood’s “Untitled,” a painting in which a demonic father seems to be getting a sexual charge out of beating his son, who is bent over and blindfolded; Laura London’s “Bathroom Girl No. 7,” a documentary-style photograph of a pretty, nose-pierced teen crouching in a graffiti-plastered bathroom; and Elaine Brandt’s “JonBenet Ramsey Memorial Birthday Party,” an installation.

Tablecloth, frosted cake, party hats--nearly every object in the sickly pink scene in Brandt’s piece bears a glossy magazine image of the beaming 6-year-old beauty-contest queen who was slain in Colorado in 1996 in a case that remains unsolved. Wall charts pose accusatory questions: “Did her parents know that they were routinely sexually objectifying their daughter?”

Job Satisfaction

The exhibit may not help parents change abusive behavior or reprogram the taste of network TV executives. Still, stimulating discussion has resulted, Owens said.

“Some people are uncomfortable with the JonBenet installation. One [woman] said, ‘If I were a little girl and I was killed, I’d just want it to be left alone.’ But I think a little girl’s death should not be. . . . “

Sustaining a high profile for the Guggenheim, which, like other university galleries, faces the challenge of how to attract off-campus visitors, is critical to Owens. She doesn’t like to boast, but Owens expresses hearty satisfaction over what she’s done at the gallery.

“Pride is not the right word,” Owens said, “but I feel a sense of great accomplishment to have seen that happen while I was employed here.”

* “Juvenescence,” Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Noon-5 p.m. Monday-Friday, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. Free. Through Dec. 2. (714) 744-7028.