The overflow crowd at the opening of “Surf City Santa Cruz: A Wave of Inspiration” was a tsunami of positive energy. The Museum of Art and History’s three jam-packed floors of galleries held some 700 excited people greeting each other warmly in their outdoor voices as if after long separation: telling stories, promising to meet, exchanging opinions, issuing invitations, dropping names that even the uninitiated recognized—Jim Phillips, Boots McGhee, Eddie Aikau, Doug Haut—and swapping accounts of recent events at places like Steamer Lane, Maverick, Manresa and Four Mile. A sunny bonhomie was the order of the evening. Story continues below slide show.
Towering over the crowd in MAH’s imposing lobby, a score of streamlined totems stood upright, vivid of color and gleaming with an exhibition shine. On view through July 25, they are formed of balsa, redwood, fiberglass, styrofoam, resin and no doubt something like space-aged spiderwebs—all light, buoyant and smoothed to a mirror surface.
“These are big wave guns, straight and fast, for making slow bottom turns,” explained Mike DeGregorio of BigWaterProductions the day before the opening, taking a few minutes away from helping install the boards to give me the lowdown. The history of board building in Santa Cruz is the story these boards tell, featuring shapers like Johnny Rice who’ve been active here since the 1960s. “This is an old redwood board,” DeGregorio said. “See the hole filled with resin?”
Rice built such surfboards over decades of evolving shapes and materials. The progression is shown here along with boards shaped and painted by Buck Noe, Doug Haut, Matt Micuda, Michel Junod, Ward Coffey, John Mel, Jim Phillips, the Mitchell Brothers, William “Stretch” Rydell and others, with logos that read Haut, Freeline, NHS or simply Santa Cruz.
At the center of MAH’s lobby, a graceful persimmon lozenge stretches skyward. “A summer board,” DeGregorio offers. It’s flatter, blunter, longer and wider than the “guns,” a mellower ride than the cheekier boards shaped for speed. A battered old veteran leans against a far wall, great chunks knocked off its edges, its surface gritty from decades of sand, salt and sun. At the top of the deck is a West Side Longboard Coalition logo and a dozen names. “It’s our town and it’s our turn,” the writing proclaims. Through all the grit, the maker’s name still declares that it’s shaped by Johnny Rice.
“The board builders are the core of the surf industry,” says Trace Tift of Old Skool Surfboards, crafting a wall display for his own 15-foot “homage to the hollow wooden boards of the 1930s.” The board is a graceful impossibility of hydrodynamics, a salute by one board builder to all who went before. “It’s appropriate that these boards and these people are represented in an art museum, this art museum,” Tift says. The buzz at the exhibition opening echoes the same opinion.
Power of the Primordial
“Surf City Santa Cruz: A Wave of Inspiration” is not so much about surfing but about how surfing is connected to the creative spirit of the greater Santa Cruz community. Curator Susan Hillhouse has been working on the exhibition since she arrived at MAH in 2006, when executive director Paul Figueroa asked her to curate shows responsive to Santa Cruz art and culture.
Beyond the stunning lobby display of surfboards, fins and surf paraphernalia, MAH’s galleries are filled with art by more than 50 Santa Cruz County artist-surfers. Hillhouse writes at the entry: “Some (works) are clearly about surfing and being on and in the water. Others are more subtle in their connection; however, because every artist in this exhibition is inextricably, profoundly connected to surfing, each work radiates the euphoric flow of creativity found in the power of the primordial tidal pull.”
Two surfers are bucked off one of these primordial waves in a humorous mural painted by Dave Gardner on the wall behind MAH’s grand staircase. “It is better to regret something you have done than regret something you haven’t,” Gardner writes as a meditation for the climb to the second floor galleries.
Upstairs one finds a wall of new works by Stan Welsh. In steel-framed diptychs he pairs large black and white photographs of a horizonless, glistening, unbroken ocean with a second panel made of unpainted plywood the concentric grains of which mimic the watery pattern. A steel shelf mounted amid the vastness holds a shiny white porcelain figure. In one, a woman looks into the distance. In another is an island, conveying stillness, immeasurable space and a human’s perspective on it. I asked Welsh how surfing influenced his work.
“When you surf you are generally facing away from the land, staring out into a vast empty space, waiting and anticipating the next set of waves,” he said. “I am trying to capture that sense of space and anticipation: symbolically, the idea of ‘facing the future,’ wondering what is going to happen next and the anxiety that goes along with that. Surfing didn’t have a direct influence on much of my past artwork, but surfing always influences how I feel, and helps me have a positive attitude about my life.”
‘Washing Things Away, Bringing Things Back’
Deeper in the gallery, two arresting paintings by Howard Kaneg bespeak this artist’s connection with the ocean. Packed with imagery—water towers, trails of cartoony ants, ripples and roads, listing diagonals of graceful bamboo branches, Japanese characters, calligraphically-painted trees, busy clouds of charming flies over floating flowers—the complexity of content is organized within a fascinating surface using both transparency and opacity, a sense of watery, deep images almost lost beneath the surface. I asked him about the process.
Kaneg works to keep each painting open. He says he starts out with lines, then applies an acrylic wash followed by a medium that pushes some areas back. Then the action starts. “Sometimes I bring forward what the medium pushed back,” he says. “It’s hard to push away images that I think are pretty, or good—hard to let go, but I trust they’ll come forward again.
“I’ve spent 50 years surfing, staring at the water, water covering my eyes,” he continues. “When I begin to compose a painting I stare at and enter that space with single-pointedness. After so much water in my life, I see it washing things away and bringing things back. The movement in my work is pretty much that—like life itself.”
Ea Eckerman’s giant “wave” of tree branches crests above the MAH staircase, while Don Fritz’ 122 raku’d ceramic tiles bespeak nothing of the water but everything of a playful look at life. Christian Zajac paints us into an impressionistic rising swell, while Morning Paddle by Reid Winfrey takes us along in the mist. A Who’s Who of surf photographers fills the ArtForum gallery. The familiar locations show just how close the sport is to life atop the cliffs of Santa Cruz. One memorable Randy Brown shot of Russell Smith at Mavericks finds the yellow-clad surfer plunging down an icy green cliff of water into the blue
Right now at conferences all over the world, curators are discussing how museums can be more relevant to their audiences: How to sound the right note, excite popular enthusiasm while educating, maintaining standards and drawing people back again in the future. This time MAH has found a clear note that rings like a gong.
SURF CITY SANTA CRUZ: A WAVE OF INSPIRATION shows through July 25 at the Museum of Art and History, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz. 831.429.1964.
