Arte Para La Gente Has A Deadline

Michael Sedano

Ninety days--and counting down--to the closing date of Arte Para La Gente. If today's the Ides of March, or later, fewer than 90 days remain to attend this vitally important art exhibition.

Immense visual satisfaction hangs on the walls at Los Angeles' gentefied Olvera Street museum, LAPCA, Los Angeles Plaza de Cultura y Artes (link). Seeing such a wide-ranging collection of Garcia's canvases offers a lifetime experience for anyone who appreciates the best of United States American art; the kind of exhibition the Smithsonian or NY's MOMA needs to hang for East Coast eyes. Most importantly, Margaret Garcia's arte fills a need most viewers don't know they badly need: to see this work.

La Plaza, as folks call it, is an important museum that meets the definition of gentefied. Staff welcome visitors warmly and readily exchange repartée and pushy questions from a guy with a camera. The guy with the camera doesn't deny that Rhett Beavers, the photographer's host for the visit, knows everyone and everyone knows Rhett, and the photog got introduced to everyone who passed by. That aside, LAPCA feels like a museum should feel--open to all, richly informative, affirmational.

Rhett Beavers illustrates the scale of the exhibition's signature piece depicting pink sunset light on Echo Park lake. This canvas is one of the first two reproductions in the museum's collection series. Beavers, Garcia's husband, learns during the visit, the first run of prints is hot off the press and for sale in the tienda.

Garcia's Fire Series lights up the room, especially when the museum displays the work with such drama. The painting at right sits under glass. The unframed painting on the left shines its reflection on the neighboring glass, adding a unique dimension to the glassed painting: the viewer sees the painting under glass, simultaneously, the reflected painting on the glass surface creates dimensionality teasing and engaging a viewer's perceptions, separating the images while holding them as a unity, both at once separately and totally cool. Make that hot.

Luckily, there's a soft cushion seat to let it all burn into your memory.

Like any sensible museum, there's no prohibiton on taking fotos. The show is well-lighted so no one gets home disappointed at the quality of their fotos.

The museum provides English and Spanish information.

LAPCA occupies an historic building across from the kiosko at historic Olvera Street, a magnet drawing thousands of schoolbuses to view the birthplace of Los Angeles. A visit to LAPCA makes an ideal stop on the itinerary.

Margaret Garcia organized The Stamp Project as part of her Creating Cultural Currency initiative. The project aimed to create low-cost reproductions for artists to sell at affordable prices. Arte para la gente, in other words. Michael Sedano's stamp, "Charlotte Enters the Gallery" hangs at the right end of the second row up.

The project linked contemporary artists, a preponderance are raza, to artists in 1931 who raised money to defend nine black youths accused  of raping a white woman, the case of the Scottsboro Boys (pdf in link).

During the visit, Abelardo de la Peña, Jr., the museo's Direector of Marketing & Communications stopped to chat. He was happy to relate the hands-on staff development project recently completed using The Stamp Project to model personal visions.

In the "I wouldn't ask you to do something I wouldn't do" vein of cultural leadership, the staff development project extends the hands-on activity room where visitors create their own stamp. 

Cecelia Gonzalez reflects on her Stamp Project stamp. Cecilia is La Cocina Store Manager.

Any visit to a cultural institution should wrap with a purchase supporting the place. La Plaza de Cultura y Artes has delightful original arte on sale, along with its new series of arte posters.

Concluding our visit to LAPCA, Rhett and I made the short drive to Figueroa Street in Northeast LA where Margaret Garcia works to finish a mural commission. She takes time to greet us, decline a lunch invitation, and receive the first copies of the museum's print run.

Garcia smiles at the view of Figueroa Street, looking south from her studio door. The painting illustrates one "secret" to Garcia's arte, intense color, rich contrast, and the ineffable sense of home, of being of a place and here it is.

The exhibiton's signature image, her first look at the print. A happy artist. 

Light on water shines with a mysterious quality that physicists and psychologists have big words for. Garcia has been working to find the right words to express in print what her paintbrushes so eloquently whisper, shout, sing. Rhett explains he's putting touches--not necessarily final--on a catalog of the exhibition. Margaret is polishing her essay for the publication, which remains a future accomplishment. The catalog will be a requirement as the exhibition moves to new museums.

A Personal Note

Margaret Garcia took one look at the Coast Live Oak growing in front of CasaSedano and saw a painting. Then she created the painting. Then someone, not we, bought it.

Michael Sedano will be leaving that oak tree in a few weeks when he vacates the house his wife Barbara fell in love with in 1985.