WESTSIDE (AND OTHER) STORIES

Looks like gorgeous weather in store for this month's First Friday Art Tour. Downtown art venues will be hopping, as usual, from the Elijah Pfotenhauer show at Motiv to the Charles Prentiss exhibit at Artisans (those are Charles' luscious aloes, on the left); from paintings by Russel Brutsché at India Joze, to the Barbara Lawrence exhibit at Michaelangelo Gallery, to the multi-artist, mixed media LGBT Community Art & Pride show at Louden Nelson Center.

For something a little off the well-trodden art path, check out the art installation at Saffron & Genevieve by book artist Jody Alexander. Titled "The Odd Volumes of Ruby B.," the installation at the back of the store purports to be "the living and working space of fictional character Ruby B.," and features a variety of reconstituted books, wall hangings and various objets d'art crafted from textile, thread, and photo collages.

This month, there's even an opportunity to make your own 3-minute First Friday movie, the top three of which will be screened next week at the Santa Cruz Film Festival (details here).

And if you haven't already seen it (or even if you have; I'm planning to go again) don't miss the Big Creek Pottery show, going into its second month at the Museum of Art & History. Not only is this exhibit bursting with functional ceramics—vivid, playful, witty, and unique—from students and masters alike (that's a saucy little 1977 pitcher from Maestro John Glick, above), the show is also a time capsule of Santa Cruz cultural life in the 1970s, featuring 140 vintage photos from the heyday of Bruce and Marcia McDougal's fabled Big Creek Pottery School up Swanton Road. Drop in around 5:30 pm, and meet the MAH's brand spanking new Executive Director, Nina Simon.

But there's also some extra cool First Friday stuff going on on the west side. The R. Blitzer Gallery in the old Wrigley Building is hosting a massive show called EDGE: Art on the Westside. Curated by bronze sculptor Lila Klapman, the show features 16 local artists, all of whom live and work on the westside of town, including Barbara Downs, Andrea Rich, Jamie Abbott, Hildy Bernstein, Gloria Alford, Roy Holmberg, Andrew Purchin, and Susana Arias, among many others. Work includes painting, ceramics, steel sculpture, woodcuts, and various mixed-media, so there'll be plenty to see!

Then hike around to the other side of the Wrigley Building and trot upstairs to the Digital Media Factory, for the World Premiere of the pilot episode of Junk Art Scramble. Five weeks in the making, and countless hours of video footage later, Santa Cruz's own home-grown reality show, art competition, and experiment in creative green ecology is ready to be unveiled. (Read all about it here.) Will Team Cabrillo or Team Tannery walk away with the prize? Find out when highlights from the pilot episode air at 6 p.m., and at 8 p.m., Friday evening at the DMF. As an extra bonus, the art structures created by these two enormously talented teams will be on display as well, so prepare to be amazed. (And while you're there, check out the cool DMF facility itself, the best-kept secret in Santa Cruz.)

Need more of an art fix than even First Friday can provide? Come to beautiful midtown Live Oak this Mother's Day weekend, for the fourth annual Art & Chocolate Art Studio Tour. 12 neighborhood artists in nine venues will open their studios to the public 11 am to 5 pm, Saturday and Sunday, for this free event. What's the best part? Free chocolate will be available at every single venue on the tour!

Participating artists include abstract painter Beth Shields, figurative painter Richard Bennett, ceramic sculptors Geoffrey Nicastro and Carole DePalma, landscape painters Maggie Renner Hellman, Lou Renner, Amy Stark, and Paul Rodrigues, stone sculptor Mike McClellan, painter/collagist Myra Eastman, Janet Ferraro, painter of horses, and James Aschbacher, aka Art Boy. (Um, we haven't figured out what his painting style is called, but "fun" and "whimsical" most often spring to mind, as you can see by his "Cat Juggling," above.)

All nine studios are within a mile of each other here in Live Oak, for your viewing and sampling pleasure. So treat your mom, your kids, your sweetie, your BFF, or anyone else (including yourself) to an afternoon of dynamic art and tasty chocolate to satisfy your deepest inner cravings. (Click here for maps and info.)

WHAT'S IN A POT? (BIG CREEK POTTERY II)

Despite drenching rains (geez, what next, a plague of locusts?), the Big Creek Pottery show went on at the MAH over the weekend. Settling in for a four-month run (through july 17), the exhibit features 70 gloriously functional pots from Bruce and Marcia McDougal's personal collection—their own work (like Bruce's pitcher, right), an abundance of student work, and several pieces by the master craftsmen and women who taught workshops at their school over the years. These include diverse work from such iconic ceramicists as John Glick, Michael Cardew, Warren McKenzie, Toshiko Takaezu, John Reeve, Jim and Nan McKinnel, Michael Casson, Karen Karnes, Cynthia Bringle, and a few other names I'm sure I'm forgetting.

While personal styles vary widely, what all the pieces in the show have in common is their functional aesthetic. Insisting that their students learn the basics of pottery-making—from building their own kickwheels to throwing and glazing clay, to a variety of firing techniques—the McDougals and their guest instructors promoted the ideal of beautifully hand-crafted work wedded to utility. The work in this show is a testament to that ideal, a happy blurring of the distinctions between humble pottery and "fine art." These wonderfully glazed platters, jars, bowls and covered pots, elegantly shaped pitchers and vases, command as much respect as any other artwork you'd find in a museum gallery, yet they're just itching to hop down off their pedestals and get to work in a functioning kitchen.

(If I had to pick my personal best of show, it would have to be Bruce McDougal's playful pair of goblets. They're about 8 inches tall, wide-bowled, and glazed in deep midnight blue, but Bruce has unleashed his inner cartoonist with the stems: two sturdy little figures bear up one goblet bowl; the other stem is a jaunty little robed wizard.)

Visitors should also prepare to be amazed at how the Solari Gallery has been transformed with a few new coats of paint, in colors personally selected by Bruce and Marcia. Gone are the plain, white gallery walls, replaced with a palette of the vivid, earthy, folk art colors—curry, deep brick, pea-soup green, aqua—that the McDougals surround themselves with every day.

These colors not only provide a suitably warm setting for the pots, they make an effective backdrop for the 140 vintage black-and-white photographs from the heyday of the school (open from 1968-1983) which is really the heart of the show. Simply as a time capsule of '70s-era commune life (not to mention the hairstyles and clothes), these photos would be worth the price of admission! Kudos to guest curator Karen Thuesen Massaro for amassing this wealth of material (including a display box of old BCP flyers, brochures, and several other pieces of fascinating paper ephemera, as well as correspondence from some of its esteemed visitors) into a coherent, thematic, and relatively chronological exhibit. Check it out this week on the First Friday Art Tour.

The flyer that launched a thousand enrollments

(My only suggestion: move the identifying labels to the front of the pedestals. Too many of them are posted around on the sides, which makes them harder to see, especially if there's a crowd in the room.)

INCANDESCENT MOMENTS

New MAH exhibit celebrates the alchemy of fire, clay, and imagination that was the Big Creek Pottery School

Bruce and Marcia McDougal have always thrived on "the excitement of the moment." Ask what this means, and Marcia offers a typically direct and resonant response: "Like the first time your baby smiles at you."

The McDougals' lives as artisans, craftpersons, and local cultural icons have been full of such incandescent moments. Potters, jewelry-makers, teachers, hoteliers, international travelers, collectors of doors from all over the world, longtime proprietors of the Davenport Cash Store and Bed and Breakfast, they have been at the heart of cultural life in Santa Cruz County for close to 50 years. But it's their role as founders of the fabled Big Creek Pottery School, up Swanton Road, from 1968 through 1983, that is currently drawing them once more into the spotlight. The McDougals, their work, and their school are the focus of a major retrospective opening this week at the Museum of Art and History: "Big Creek Pottery: A Social History of A Visual Idea."

The exhibit is guest curated by Karen Thuesen Massaro, herself an accomplished ceramic sculptor, educator, and Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year for 2003. Massaro moved to Santa Cruz from Wisconsin in 1980; she was never a student at Big Creek Pottery, but she remembers seeing enticing ads for the school in "Ceramics Monthly" magazine as an art professor in the Midwest. But it wasn't until she curated the exhibit, "Time and Place: Fifty Years of Santa Cruz Studio Ceramics," for the MAH in 1997, that she met the McDougals in person. Interviewing them for that show, she became fascinated by both the history and influence of BCP. (Read more)

That's Marcia and Bruce today (above), still intrepid, and full of ideas and enthusiasm. Here's a photo from the multi-media MAH show of Bruce evaluating student work hot out of the kiln at BCP, 1970.

The Big Creek Pottery exhibit opens at the MAH this Saturday, March 26, and will be on view through July 17. (Click here for more info.) The show includes 70 pots and some 140 vintage photos, so plan to spend some time and take it all in.