Our History
The CCMA launched its first exhibition at the Cuesta College art gallery in March 2010, Peter Zaleski: Before the Horizon, a display of nature-themed abstract paintings and graphics by this Templeton artist who is collected internationally but had not previously exhibited in Central California. Before the Horizon was curated by Advisory Council member Tim Anderson, Department of Fine Arts, Cuesta College.
In August, 2010, the CCMA produced its second exhibition at ARTS Space Obispo, Arts Obispo (the SLO Arts Council): Paradiso/Inferno: Drought and Fire in the Central Coast Landscapes of Nicole Strasburg. Santa Barbara artist Nicole Strasburg showed paintings and graphics in a tonalist style that interpreted the destructive fires that have swept through coastal Santa Barbara County in recent years. The exhibition was curated by Gordon L. Fuglie, Advisory Council member and Head of Curatorial Affairs. In addition, a catalog for Paradiso/Inferno was published.
In November, 2010, the CCMA mounted its third exhibition, Sky
Bergman: Burma (Myanmar), at ARTS Space Obispo. It featured photography
from Bergman’s travels in the reclusive, authoritarian and
traditionalist South Asian country, a society at the brink of great
social and political change. Bergman is the Chair of the Department of
Art and Design, Cal Poly, and this is her first exhibit in SLO County
in ten years. The exhibition was curated by David Zapf, CCMA Curatorial
Affairs, and a member of its Advisory Council.
From late
October to mid-November, the CCMA collaborated with Studios on the
Park, Paso Robles, to present E. F. Kitchen’s series, Suburban Knights.
A Los Angeles-based traditional photographer – she uses an old view
camera with film and makes platinum/palladium prints from her
negatives, Kitchen photographed the gatherings of the Society of
Creative Anachronism. Its members dress in medieval garb and custom
crafted armor, engaging in mock battles with fierce hand-to-hand combat.
She posed individual members in full regalia, and the jarring result
is a series of "retro images" produced with a bygone technology -
depicting contemporary people out of place and time. Suburban Knights
was curated by Gordon L. Fuglie, Advisory Council member and Head of
Curatorial Affairs.
Mission / Vision Statement
The mission of the Central California Museum of Art is two fold: First, we organize significant art exhibitions and quality educational programming that focus on historical and contemporary artists from the thirteen-county, mid-state region1 and circulate these exhibitions to arts institutions in California. Our goal is to educate audiences about the depth and richness of Central California artists. Second, we are committed to bringing quality art exhibitions of under-recognized artists from Southern California and the Bay Area to art institutions serving the people of the mid-state.
The Central California Museum of Art focuses primarily on the art and artists of California’s mid-state. Functioning as a regional collaborative entity, the CCMA will create a network of co-operative visual arts institutions and art professionals from Ventura to Santa Cruz on the Pacific Coast, Fresno to Bakersfield in the Central Valley, along both sides of the Sierra Nevada Mountains from Bishop south to Victorville, and extending east to include the northern half of San Bernardino County to the Nevada and Arizona borders.
In establishing the CCMA, its founders recognized that curatorial and scholarly attention to the art of California’s mid-state region has been less consistent and thorough than in the visual art of the Bay Area and Southern California. Yet, since the mid-20th century, Central California has created a distinct artistic legacy and matured its own visual arts institutions. The CCMA will respond to this reality by concentrating the fullest curatorial and scholarly attention on the art and artists of this growing 13-county region.
The CCMA launched its mission in 2010 with (1) an educational website and (2) programming at various art galleries within its geographical area.2 This allowed the CCMA to be not just “a museum without walls,” but something more: a multi-faceted, region-wide, networked “museum with many walls” that develops its collaborative vision with input from the curators, art historians, art critics and journalists, artists, art patrons, foundations, and county arts commissions and councils of Central California.
The CCMA is especially interested in artists, programs and exhibitions - both historical and contemporary - that speak to the varied experiences peculiar to the middle region of the Golden State. In addition, the museum will exhibit important work by artists from the art centers of San Francisco and Los Angeles to (1) introduce its mid-state constituency to a wider range of California art and (2) provide exhibition opportunities to deserving and/or under-recognized artists from California’s northern and southern metropolitan areas.
Who We Are
Timothy Anderson is an artist and, since 2006, has been the Gallery Director at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo. He has been a practicing artist in the following California cities: Chico, Oakland, Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo. In addition, he has installed art exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Southwest Museum, Otis Parsons School of Art and Design (both in Los Angeles), and the Downey Museum of Art. From 2000 to 2006 he served at the curator at the San Luis Obispo Art Center. He earned the MFA in studio art from the University of Oklahoma, Norman.
Peggy Ferris is a Santa Barbara -based abstract artist and graphic designer. She studied fine art and design at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Holland, and at Art Center College of Design where she graduated with a BFA in graphic design/packaging. Working in both hard-edge http://www.peggyferris.com and gestural http://ferrisabstractarts.com abstract styles, she was recently featured in a major solo show at the San Luis Obispo Art Center. Her work is held in collections throughout the U.S. and Europe.
A California native, Gordon Fuglie has been involved as a curator with public art galleries, museums and collections since 1980. He has worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum, UCLA's Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, the Laband Art Gallery (Loyola Marymount University), Mulvane Art Museum (Washburn University, Topeka, KS) and the San Luis Obispo Art Center. He currently writes on art for IMAGE: Art -Faith -Mystery and Journal Plus: Magazine of the Central Coast. He has in M.A. in Art History from UCLA.
Dorothy Halic is the Principal of Pat Butler Elementary School, Paso Robles Joint Unified School District, where she is also involved in art education through the GATE (gifted and talented education) Program. Prior to receiving her MA in Educational Administration from Cal Poly, she worked in these Los Angeles contemporary art galleries: Fred Hoffman Fine Art, Salander-O'Reilly and Gemini, GEL, where she coordinated traveling exhibits. Halic also earned the MFA in Studio Art, Sculpture, from the University of Oklahoma, Norman.
Judy L. Larson holds the R. Anthony Askew Chair in Art at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, where she directs the Reynolds Gallery and teaches courses in art history and museum studies. With thirty years of museum and gallery experience, Larson was most recently the director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
Larson has also directed the Art Museum of Western Virginia in Roanoke, served as Curator of American art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, and worked at UCLA's Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art while earning the M.A. in art history at UCLA. She completed a Ph.D. at the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University, Atlanta, in 1998.
Nancy Moure is the Senior Art Historical Advisor for the CCMA. She holds the M.A. in Art History from UCLA and served for fifteen years as Assistant Curator of American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her Dictionary of Art and Artists in Southern California Before 1930 (1975) was a pioneering work in the field of California art history. In addition, Moure has published more than 50 books and articles on California art. Moure's best known book is her magnum opus, California Art: 450 Years of Painting and Other Media (1998), the first historical survey of the state’s art from its Spanish colonial beginnings to the end of the second millennium. She is currently at work on an exhibition and publication of Central Coast artists.
Ani Garrick worked for many years as a freelance artist’s representative and has organized and installed exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco and on the Central Coast of California since the 1980s. Beyond her exhibition design work, projects include residential and fine art products. Her photographs have been exhibited nationwide and have been published internationally. Garrick earned her B.A. in Art from California State University, Long Beach, and a post-Baccalaureate in Photography from The San Francisco Art Institute. She continued to study with and assist various fine art photographers in the 1990s. Garrick presently works as a tour guide at Hearst San Simeon State Historic Monument and continues her education at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, where she is developing ceramic skills, working with porcelain.
Robert Frear studied commercial and fine art photography the Center of Creative Studies, Center of Art and Design in Detroit. After moving to Los Angeles he worked in film processing at A&I Color Lab. In the 1990s he re-located to Santa Barbara where he began documenting the unique terrain and mountains of the Central Coast. This eventually led him to working with archeologists in the Los Padres National Forest, photographing Native American pictographs in remote areas of Santa Barbara County. For this work Frear was awarded was awarded an Artist in Residency grant from the James Irvine Foundation. His photographs from this period have been exhibited at the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum, Westmont College, and the San Luis Obispo Art Center.
Frear’s current work integrates traditional film base and digital reproductions “to push the boundaries of this hybrid medium.” He also is a web site designer and oversees the CCMA site and produces its exhibition graphics.
San Joaquin Valley native John (Jack) Huneke and his wife Julie Harcos are co-founders of the Stonehouse Residency for the Contemporary Arts in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Fresno County (www.stonehouseresidency.org). Passionate art collectors, they have acquired numerous works primarily by Northern California and Mexican artists, as well as creating an extensive fine art library in their Miramonte home. Jack has
served as a docent at San Francisco MOMA, and (with Julie) at the Di Rosa Art and Nature Preserve in Napa. Currently, he also coordinates ShadequARTer.com, a consortium of Southern Sierra/San Joaquin Valley artists.
Jack holds the M. S. in Physics from the University of Minnesota, and has worked at the Naval Ordnance Test Station in China Lake CA, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, and Caltech in Pasadena. He recently retired from the Evans Analytical Group, an international testing and research firm.
