“Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes/How do you measure, a year in the life?” How about art? According to Rent, the correct answer is love; but is there even a difference? After all, you wouldn’t have heart without art, and Northern Santa Barbara County saw plenty of it throughout 2019—with enough exhibitions, competitions, theatrical productions, poetry readings, book signings, and other events to encompass much more than 365 days. Please enjoy this special trip down memory lane to revisit some of my favorite happenings in the Central Coast art scene last year.
As its first exhibition of 2019, the Ann Foxworthy Gallery—located on Allan Hancock College’s Santa Maria campus—took part in Before I Die, a global art project with more than 4,000 displays set up in 71 countries. After the loss of a friend, the exhibit’s creator, Candy Chang, set out to find a way for people to avoid hiding from the realities of death. So she made a stencil that read “Before I die I want to” and painted the prompt on the side of an abandoned building in her neighborhood. Soon after, messages flooded the wall, with people leaving notes about lifelong dreams and bucket list goals. Santa Maria’s iteration of the project opened in mid-January and ran through early February.
The Lompoc Civic Theatre’s production of Bloomsday opened at the end of March. Anne Ramsey (pictured, left) was Cait and Craig Scott (right) was Robert, a couple who meet in Dublin during a special tour honoring the journey that Leo Bloom (hence the holiday’s name, Bloomsday) takes in author James Joyce’s literary masterwork, Ulysses. Other productions of the theater group’s 2019-20 season included the musical A Dog’s Life in May and a staged reading of Mark Rothko’s Red in July.
Creatures Big and Small, an exhibition showcasing animal portraits by local painter Laura-Susan Thomas, opened at Valley Art Gallery in Orcutt in November. “I love painting animals and making a connection between the human and the animal world,” said Thomas, who hopes her paintings will inspire proactivity in wildlife conservation. “I hope we can connect people emotionally to these animals so we can be more proactive in how we interact with them and look to conserving the habitats and wild places in our world,” she told the Sun. Earnest intentions aside, many of Thomas’ works share a whimsical tone, including one portrait of her dog, Roo, in a tutu (pictured). If a canine in ballerina attire doesn’t sum up 2019, I don’t know what else possibly could.
Orcutt Community Theater (OCT) opened its production of The Haunting of Hill House in October, with performances held at the Klein Dance Arts Studio in Santa Maria. The plot follows an investigative scientist, Dr. Montague (Bob Larsen, pictured, center right), who invites multiple strangers to reside with him at Hill House, which he believes to be haunted. Soon enough, the estate’s tenants are plagued with horrifying voices, laughter, and other demonic noises during the late hours of the night. Other productions from OCT during 2019 included Rumors in January, The Elephant Man in March, and Annie in December.
Charlotte Baldiviez took first place in dance at the 2019 Individual Grants in the Arts Competition in May, for her expressive dance set to “Prayer” from the musical, Ghost Quartet. Baldiviez was selected by a panel of three judges, as were the rest of the competition’s first-place winners Brooke Johnson for drama; Kevin Park for music; and Donna Olivera for visual arts. Since 1972, the Santa Maria Arts Council has used the competition to award more than $300,000 in grants to local artists, dancers, actors, and musicians. To find out more about the program, visit smartscouncil.org.
On March 31, the Corazón del Pueblo Cultural and Creative Arts Center of the Santa Maria Valley opened its doors with a mission statement to promote creative expression in all areas of art—performing, visual, and literary—and to offer the community a venue to celebrate culture as well. The Squire Foundation donated several sculptures, created by sculptor Morris Squire, on loan to the Center. Later in June, the Foundation also donated 19 outdoor sculptures to the city of Guadalupe, which installed the artworks downtown, outside various businesses and public areas. Visit thesquirefoundation.org to find out more about the organization.
Goleta-based landscape painter Carrie Givens depicts locales as far as the desert terrain of Baja California and as close to home as the pastures of the Santa Ynez Valley. “The locations I like to capture are usually places where I live or visit,” she told the Sun. Givens was one of the three artists—along with fellow pastelist Morgan Green and oil painter Ellen Yeomans—showcased in Three Viewpoints, which opened at Gallery Los Olivos in August. “The three of us each have a different style to our artwork,” she said. “We each see the world with different eyes.”
Real-life husband and wife Michael Brusasco (left) and Emily Trask (right) portrayed lovers Jack Worthing and Gwendolen Fairfax, respectively, in the Pacific Conservatory Theatre’s (PCPA) production of The Importance of Being Earnest, which opened at the Marian Theatre in Santa Maria in late August. The show also ran at the Solvang Festival Theater and closed in September. Other PCPA productions of 2019 included Shakespeare in Love, The Wolves, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Million Dollar Quartet, The Addams Family, and The Little Mermaid.
The Book Loft in Solvang hosted a wide range of local authors, working from a variety of genres, over 2019, including Nipomo-based writer Kathryn Blanche, who signed copies of her fantasy books at the store near the end of June. Blanche is best known for writing the Laila of Midgard series. The author used her background in fencing and stage combat to help verbally illustrate some of the sword fighting sequences in her novels, she explained. “Basically, I write a fight on the page in a similar way to how it would be choreographed for a film or the theater,” Blanche told the Sun. Other featured authors at the Book Loft in 2019 included Eldonna Edwards, Robert Eringer, Deborah Tobola, Elayne Klasson, and Steven Rea.
This article appears in Jan 2-9, 2020.
