LUX INSTITUTE
for Riviera Magazine; December, 2007
A new kind of museum experience arrived in the San Diego region with the recent opening of The Lux Institute, located in Encinitas. Unlike most museums, its aim is not to amass a large collection of already existing art or to cultivate peoples’ appreciation of art through static exhibitions. Instead, its focus is on the creative process itself; on why and how artists make art in the first place. To bring this usually hidden aspect of the art world into wider view, Lux invites artists to take up residence on-site for a couple of months and to use its spacious studio to create new works. It then welcomes the public, especially school age children, to come to Lux to watch the artists doing what they do and to share conversation.
To see what Lux is and to get a taste of its character, everyone is invited to its home at 1550 South El Camino Real on Wednesday, December 19, between 7 and 9 PM, for a tour and gathering to celebrate its transition from idea to reality.
Works created by Chilean artist Tomas Rivas, Lux’s first artist-in-residence, will be on view. He uses routers and similar tools to carve drawings of architectural details into commonly available plaster wall board. Beginning in January, L.A. artist Astrid Preston will take over the spaces at Lux to paint a large and highly detailed painting of the scene outside the sliding door on the studio’s exterior.
The project began nearly a decade ago in the imagination of Reesey Shaw, a former director of the California Center for the Arts, in Escondido. She’s also a considerable artist in her own right and a dynamic presence in San Diego’s art scene since the early 1970s.
The unique approach to showing art that Lux Institute represents emerged from the merging of Shaw’s studio and curatorial experience. “When it comes to helping people to relate to new art, I increasingly recognized that artists as active participants could make a tremendous difference,” she says. “This just reinforced my and other artists’ experience that it’s in the studio, more than in the finished results, where ‘art’ is most alive.”
Ms. Shaw describes how the customary habit with museums showing contemporary art is to have the artist participate only to present a lecture, usually a PowerPoint presentation or slide show; essentially, a one-way conversation. Lux takes a different approach by making artists in action its primary offering. “The human presence,” Shaw asserts, “is essential to forging a link between the important and valuable things that art represents and the large majority of people for whom art, especially new art, is something quite unfamiliar.”
Shaw and Lux are determined to change this situation, directing most of energy to today’s younger generation. “From the beginning, we’ve been strongly focused on school age children because they’re more open to new possibilities and because most of them have had little if any exposure to what art is and can be. They’re also the future,” Shaw states. “Our response to this challenge is a combination of out-reach and in-reach programs targeted at kids.”
One key element of Lux’s out-reach is its “Valise Project,” which was launched in 2000 and has been growing ever since. The effort commissions artists to create artworks in attaché cases and small suitcases. Certified teachers take these to classrooms throughout San Diego County and conduct “show and tell” sessions demonstrating how art can engage ideas and information in innovative ways, and be both educational exciting, too.
One example in the Valise Project is “The Field Box,” created for Lux by New York artist Alison Moritsugu. Cushioned within a carrying case for a trumpet, the artist has placed six sections of tree branches, with one side polished to reveal the rings, the other side painted with a realistic image of what the entire tree looks like. The case also includes six small magnifying glasses attached to wooden rulers which students can use to study the details of the ring structures, and also to see in detail how the artist has skillfully used paints to create the picture of the various trees. This and the other pieces in the Valise Project, while originally intended for kids in classrooms, have also found a welcoming audience in civic and community organizations, and even in the business world – all of whom come to realize that “the art world” and “the real world” share more common interests than either had previously imagined.
This out-reach aspect of the Lox’s Valise Project is complemented by its in-reach program called “Luxcusions.” These are school-coordinated field trips to Lux’s location where students visit and chat with the artist working in the facility’s studio, tour the site’s outdoor art installations, and participate in a hands-on art-making project that’s designed specifically for each group. It’s a day long, lunch-included immersion into the world of art that students can’t experience anywhere else.
Located near the San Elijo Lagoon, the Lux site itself is an inspiration, as well as a demonstration that architecture, too, can be an art. Like the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, although at a must smaller scale, it’s a beautiful campus-like facility on a hillside in a residential setting. Also like the Getty, the landscape surrounding the architecture is used as a forum for artmaking, with current and future elements created by artists for their specific locations.
The main structure, and the first to be built, is the Artists Pavilion. Its simple yet powerful forms, by Chilean architect Renzo Zecchetto, pose dramatically at their site, which is all but surrounded by a 60 acre nature preserve. A trio of towers reach skyward to transport the sun’s light into the interior. Below these, a cantilevered roof arches across the structure’s southern side, forming a kind of parasol and creating a three sided shape that frames ever changing views of the surrounding landscape.
Within the Artists’ Pavilion are a generous apartment for the resident artist and a large, light filled studio where artists can create their work and interact with visitors. There’s also a substantial library and meeting room where scholars can study and students can learn about the artists and the ideas that converge at Lux.
A second structure, to be implemented as part of Phase Two, will consist of large exhibition spaces, a museum store, a small cafe, and an area for special events and performances. When completed, its hilltop location will invite people to enjoy the expansive view of the surrounding landscape while, over the course of the exhibitions and programs that will be presented there, to experience the expansive range of what “art” is and can be.
As nurtured by Reesey Shaw and the generous and energetic board of directors behind her, Lux is a long term vision dedicated to showing people that art can be a serious and thoughtful enterprise that’s about more than skillfully crafted pretty pictures and that creativity and imagination, art’s essential ingredients, are invaluable elements of a rich and enjoyable life, regardless of age.
To see art happening, and for more information about The Lux Institute and its December 19 event, visit www.luxartinstitute.org or call 760-436-6611.