Showplace for a town’s history in art

In Santa Paula, art has always been everywhere and nowhere.

For seven decades, the agricultural town’s civic art collection has been scattered through municipal offices and public buildings, but not assembled in any one spot.

People being rushed to emergency appendectomies at Santa Paula Hospital might get a glimpse of some California Impressionists in the hallways. High school students could eyeball landscapes as they chowed down in the cafeteria.

Now, as some cultural institutions cut their hours or even shut their doors, a hometown group has opened a museum to display paintings that have become a source of local pride.

About 350 works have been amassed by and for local institutions since the Chamber of Commerce started an annual art show in 1937. Prizewinners were often bought by the library, the city, the schools, and by residents who promptly gave their new acquisitions to the public. Now about 50 of them -- including shimmering Southern California landscapes and selections from the homegrown De Colores collection of Latino art -- are on display at the new Santa Paula Art Museum.

It’s next door to the California Oil Museum, where Union Oil was founded, and two blocks from a former feed store that’s being turned into a farm implement museum.

As light poured through three 20-foot-high arched windows, Jennifer Heighton, the museum’s director, paused before “Spring Fantasy,” a gauzy view of mythical figures communing with each other by a sparkling blue river.

“If memory serves, this used to be in the high school library but had to be removed because students would draw organs on some of the figures,” she said.

Art has long reached out to Santa Paulans. In the 1930s, everyone in town knew banker Douglas Shively, a native son whose father founded Citizens State Bank in 1890. Shively, an avid amateur painter known as “Mr. Sycamore,” was the driving force behind Santa Paula’s art show. At his bank, he ripped out the tellers’ cages and high marble counters -- the better to display the paintings that lined the walls.

“He was from the old school, when gentlemen were gentlemen and ladies were ladies,” said his niece Virginia Gunderson, a museum board member who has long been active on the Santa Paula arts scene. “He was a blessing to this community.”

Outside of work, Shively, who also ran an avocado ranch, cut a dashing figure in his riding twills, green velvet shirt and flat-brimmed hat. He contributed heavily to local causes and was so taken with his town that the art show initially accepted only paintings of scenes within eight miles of Santa Paula.

In the first year, prizes were awarded by popular vote. Now a jury of artists winnows down the choices.

“There was too much politics,” Shively later acknowledged in an interview. “Lobbies were formed to vote for pictures by favorite sons and daughters. But we had to start somewhere.”

In truth, there was quite a bit of local talent. The very first winner was “Sunset in the Canyon,” a landscape by Robert Smith of Santa Paula. “He and his wife Marge owned Smith’s Bazaar, a notions store at 918 E. Main St.,” notes a museum plaque.

Before long, artists who had achieved some regional and national recognition were drawn both to the show and to the town. Far and away the most famous was Jesse Arms Botke, who lived with her artist husband, Cornelis, on a ranch in secluded Wheeler Canyon outside town.

“She was the best known Art Deco painter of the era,” said Jean Stern, executive director of the Irvine Museum and an authority on California Impressionists. “She did beautiful scenes of exotic birds in exotic colors, often with gold leaf to enhance the effect. It was art to wow you.”

As in other small communities sponsoring exhibitions, the annual art show drew tourists and gave the town a shot of municipal pride. In 1957, a Santa Paula newspaper headline said it all: “Immortality of Local Art Pondered.”

Downtown Santa Paula is more Ohio than it is Ojai. It’s not in-your-face artsy. Main Street has its share of empty storefronts and struggling mom-and-pop stores, but its all-American feel has made it a popular backdrop for movies. It even starred in a Budweiser commercial shown during the 2010 Super Bowl. (In the spot, more than 100 worried locals ran down the rain-slicked street to aid a beer truck stranded at a washed-out bridge.)

“Areas like Santa Paula are a capsule of the past,” said Nancy Moure, a former museum curator who has written several works on California art. “People collect these early California paintings because they want to know what it used to look like here.”

The museum, whose board is studded with descendants of the town’s old farming families, opened with private donations totaling about $450,000. Limoneira Co., a big citrus and avocado company, offered the first floor of its two-story, 1924-built headquarters building for a nominal rent.

The building holds as much history as its collection. Designed by highly regarded Santa Paula architect Roy Wilson Sr., it was renovated by a hometown contractor, Chris Wilson, who happens to be the architect’s grandson, and Chuck Teague, the grandson of Limoneira’s first general manager, C.C. Teague.

“That is just so Santa Paula,” said Heighton, the museum’s director.

steve.chawkins@latimes.com