It would be difficult to find a more powerful
influence on the development of Southern
California's reputation as a center of 20th Century
American art than Mrs. Nelbert Chouinard, founder
and guiding light of Chouinard Art Institute from
1921-1972. When Robert Perine brought this concept
to Oceanside Museum of Art's Exhibitions staff, we
were amazed by the number of distinguished artists
and revered teachers that have called themselves
Chouinardians. Since the closing of the Institute
in 1972, it is remarkable there has never been an
exhibition that attempted to describe the breadth
of her dynamic legacy.
Having committed to an exhibition
that would celebrate Mrs. Chouinard's contribution,
it was immediately apparent that OMA's galleries
were far too small to adequately honor her
achievement. I was therefore grateful for the
enthusiastic collaboration of Viki Cole, Boehm
Gallery Director at Palomar College, and Diane
Adams, Kruglak Gallery Director at MiraCosta
College, whose support dramatically increased the
scope of the project. A three member curatorial
team was formed that included James Aichison at the
Kruglak Gallery, Ed Flynn at OMA and Robert Perine
at the Boehm Gallery. Special thanks are extended
to James, Ed, essayist Nob Hadwishi and OMA
Exhibitions Department Chair, Peggy Jacobs, for
their dedication and tireless efforts.
-- James R. Pahl, Executive Director,
OMA
It's a good time to celebrate Chouinard, while its
influence is still vibrant in our collective life
as an art community in Southern California.
This exhibition honors the
singular vision and dedication of the determined
woman whose name the art school bore. Nelbert
Chouinard started out with nothing but her love for
young artists and their creative spirit, and her
generous need to offer them encouragement and
training. Her gift reverberates not only through
the impressive fifty-year roster of her students,
but through those whom they, in turn, have taught
or influenced. I'd venture to say there's barely an
artist working in Southern California today who has
not been touched in some way by the vision of this
richly achieving woman.
The exhibition also celebrates
the diversity of Mrs. Chouinard's faculty and
students. It celebrates the famous and the
not-so-famous, the avant-garde along with the
mainstream, the traditionalists along with the
ground-breaking -- inviting us to consider how
speedily the passage of time turns one into the
other. The multiplicity of vision of these artists
testifies to the unpredictability of cultural
preference, as well as to the eventual
pointlessness of assessing the value of an art work
or an artist on the scale of current taste.
That said, the number and
diversity of "well-known" artists who passed
through Chouinard remains astounding, crossing at
least three generations: first, the late Millard
Sheets, Mike Kanemitsu, Lorser Feitelson, the
ever-ebullient Emerson Woelffer, the impeccable
Frederick Hammersly; then the generation who first
came to attention in the late fifties and early
sixties -- John Altoon, Robert Irwin, Connor
Everts, Joe Goode, Ed Ruscha, Llyn Foulkes,
Richards Rubin, John Mason; and the succeeding wave
who came along in the later sixties and the early
seventies -- Guy and Laddie John Dill, Chuck
Arnoldi, Mary Corse, Terry Allen, Larry Bell, Allen
Ruppersberg, Tom Wudl, and Elsa Rady, to mention
just a few. They embody our history from plein air
impressionism to post-surrealism, from Abstract
Expressionism to "Light and Space,"
It may, indeed, have been not
merely the financial crunch but also the advent of
Conceptualism that superannuated Chouinard, since
it challenged everything the school had stood for
since its inception: the traditional skills of
drawing, painting, and sculpting, a reverence for
the art object as a discreet and privileged entity,
the value of slowly acquired mastery. As Dean of
Otis Art Institute, shortly after Chouinard's
painful transformation to CalArts, I watched a
faculty and student body at war with itself over
just these issues. Confusing and distressing as
this turmoil was, I view it now as a necessary
transition, at a moment when one approach to art
had exhausted itself and needed the infusion of new
thought and vision.
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Our institutions are, like
everything else, impermanent. For all the lasting
aesthetic satisfactions of its artworks, this
exhibition offers an important lesson in the
impermanence of such things as art-world
recognition, reputation, and reward. It's important
not only for the names that are familiar, but for
the ones that are less familiar, or not at all; for
it is those who survive as artists, without
critical or commercial approbation, who mostly
clearly exemplify what it means to be an artist --
to give one's life to a creative urge that brings
no tangible reward, but is rather something we are
simply given to do. It is, despite all
discouragement from a world in which "success" is
often measured by outward manifestations, what we
have to do with our lives.
It's a good time, then, to
celebrate the spirit that made Chouinard possible
-- the spirit that pervades this exhibition and
inspired the vision of its founder. Art is not,
eventually, about fame and fortune, or critical
approval. It's about the stuff we have inside us,
and our effort to dig it out and take a look at it.
It's about the tough, day-to-day work of finding
out who we are in relation to the world, of
persisting on the difficult path between desire and
resistance, aspiration and failure. It's about
learning, slowly, sometimes painfully, to see.
This is the great achievement of
Chouinard, where the artist-faculty prepared the
way for creative minds to discover their own path
for themselves, and offered the example of
tough-minded dedication that would keep them on
track regardless of external standards. It is this
vast and largely unseen army of working artists,
far more than the constricted scene of hype and
commerce, that constitutes the real "art world." We
owe a debt of thanks, then, to Nelbert Chouinard
and her art school for helping them along the
way.
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