Just imagine, L.A.

ARISE, ye seekers of mystic visions and faith-based brushwork, and behold the Highland Park field office of state Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles).

Here hangs a painting called “The Soul’s Progress,” showing three hooded figures and a jumble of symbols that include a cross, a crescent, a rainbow and a bull’s-eye. Over here, a series of UFOs hover beneath text that’s part English, part Romanian. And here on the counter sits a batch of chicken feet, painted blue and reaching up toward a crucifix like the hands of a dense, blue church congregation.

Be not afraid. This doesn’t mean that Goldberg, an impassioned civil libertarian and the state Assembly’s only Berkeley-educated Jewish lesbian, is rethinking the separation of church and state. It means that Goldberg believes in finding venues for art, a spokeswoman says, and that Goldberg likes the ambition of those who organized this seven-artist exhibition of spiritual works, “The Art of Belief.”

The organizers want to start a Visionary Art Museum of Los Angeles, and these artworks, with their imagery ranging from mainstream Christian to profoundly esoteric, are a first step.

The idea, co-organizers Peter Tokofsky and George Villanueva say, is to showcase “creativity that thrives beyond the latest trends in arts schools and galleries,” the same sort of raw inspiration that led Simon Rodia to spend 34 years building the Watts Towers. Indeed, one of the show’s artists, Cruz Sanchez, is a 62-year-old gardener whose works include a crucifix made of sticks, stones and yard cuttings.

Tokofsky, who works by day as an education specialist at the Getty Trust, served about a year as director of the Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM) on Wilshire Boulevard, then left in 2004, along with several board members, amid accounts of a standoff over the organization’s direction.

Although CAFAM’s current “Free Spirit” show explores the same sort of territory that Tokofsky is talking about, the Wilshire Boulevard museum often focuses on international subjects, from Haitian flags to Armenian paintings to Ukrainian Easter eggs. Tokofsky and company say they envision a more homegrown haven for works by self-taught creators handling spiritual themes.

Their institutional model, they say, is the 10-year-old American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, which draws about 65,000 visitors yearly.

“It would be wonderful to have that in Los Angeles,” says Marjorie Fasman, a Beverly Hills philanthropist and former CAFAM board member who bankrolled the show in Goldberg’s office. “We need to get some imagination back into our thick heads.”

In fact, the Baltimore museum’s founder and director, Rebecca Hoffberger, who has spoken with Tokofsky and Fasman, says she has flirted with the idea of westward expansion, once her museum’s modest endowment is fatter.

“This kind of art is so narrative, and no city in the world is as story-telling as Los Angeles,” Hoffberger says.

“There are literally hundreds of collectors around town,” says Doran Ross, former director of the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History and a booster of the “visionary” idea. “The first test would be a series of exhibitions and the response to them. And then one has to move toward some kind of permanent exhibition space.”

Accordingly, Tokofsky, Fasman and their confederates say they’re listening to hear, as Tokofsky says, “what kind of resonance there might be for this kind of art in Southern California.”

This kind of art (some just call it folk art, some say “outsider” art) has been winning over larger audiences, from museums to galleries to the walls of your local House of Blues, since the early 1980s. An Outsider Art Fair in New York in January featured more than 30 dealers. Works by big-name “outsiders” such as Howard Finster, Mose Tolliver and Jimmie Lee Sudduth now are offered at four-figure prices on websites that take credit cards.

But starting and sustaining a museum is almost always an iffy proposition. CAFAM Executive Director Maryna Hrushetska says she’d welcome another museum to the scene but warns that “it would require a lot of effort to develop a following.”

Goldberg’s field office is a storefront operation on Avenue 56, just off Figueroa. The artworks, which will remain through March 10, are positioned cheek by jowl with brochures on sober graduation and neighborhood pride. There are no household names among the artists.

But there is a dominant presence. Edith V. Tenbrink, a Los Angeles woman who came up with her own cosmology around 1935, made dozens of paintings, including “The Soul’s Progress,” to illustrate her lectures to prospective converts.

Though Tenbrink died at 80 in 1963, 40 of her paintings turned up only a few years ago in a suitcase at a Venice thrift shop. (They were found by Bobby Furst, an artist himself, who bought them all and offered 10 of them on loan for this show.)

“I love the story of Bobby finding them: art on the doorstep of a thrift shop,” says Tokofsky. As for the art itself, he adds: “It’s clearly not driven by art school technique, aiming for painterly perfection. It’s very much about belief and something coming from within.”

Also represented is Leonard Knight, whose “Salvation Mountain” near the Salton Sea has startled passers-by with its vibrant colors and Bible quotes; and Robert Dolan, a Jesuit priest whose assemblage-encrusted arch stands in the middle of the office.

Romanian-born Ionel Talpazan -- who says he has been preoccupied by UFOs since a traumatic encounter at age 7 -- contributed several colorful works, including an almond-shaped, olive-hued UFO regarding the viewer through an eyelike yellow-and-blue portal.

“If we keep our eyes open, there’s art around us everywhere,” says Tokofsky.

And since he envisions a relatively spartan museum space in a gritty urban setting, “I think one could get this off to a really good start with five to 10 million dollars.”

For now, the museum idea is many miles from fruition. Until they complete the paperwork to become a recognized charitable organization, the museum’s boosters are operating under the umbrella of Community Partners, an agency that aids fledgling nonprofits. Even their rosiest scenarios foresee a few more itinerant shows before they’d make an effort to secure a permanent address.

But somewhere, surely, it is written: If visionary art is about anything, it’s about thinking great big, optimistic, implausible thoughts.

“The United States is losing its imagination. It’s losing its sense of purpose, it’s losing its values. I think it’s the quickest civilization in history to go down on its nose,” muses Fasman. And yet, she says, a roomful of visionary art “just makes your day.... I’m sort of goofy over it, because it makes you feel wonderful.”

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‘The Art of Belief’

Where: Highland Park field office of Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles), 106 N. Avenue 56, Los Angeles

When: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays

Ends: March 10

Price: Free

Contact: Co-organizer George Villanueva at Goldberg’s office,

(323) 258-0450