No ordinary school project
Nine paintings from the school’s notable collection are on display at the Autry.
Nine paintings from Gardena High School’s art collection are being displayed at the Autry museum.
Forget Silver Lake — an art show at the Autry National Center of the American West in Griffith Park helps make the case that the home of the proto-hipster might have been Gardena.
Consider that in the early days of the 20th century, even Gardena’s high school encouraged its students to become art aficionados.
In April 1932, a Los Angeles Times reporter wrote that Gardena, “through its high school, has won national fame as a place where one can live close to nature and raise a few chickens and salad greens without sacrificing the contact with art which is one of the compensations for life in the roaring metropolis.” All that’s missing is the single-drip coffee.
For almost four decades starting in 1919, Gardena High students would pick a new painting to add to their school each year, creating an impressive art collection.
They included canvases of crashing surf, twilight views of the desert, images of cowboys working their way through the High Sierra — some of it by quite notable California painters, such as Edgar Payne (1883-1947), known for his Impressionistic landscapes, and Maynard Dixon (1875-1946), who approached Western scenery with a Modernist eye.
Now nine paintings from that collection are in the Autry exhibition “California Impressionism: The Gardena High School Collection.” The show features mostly landscapes from the school’s inventory of roughly 90 pieces. Dixon’s striking 1931-32 canvas “Men of the Red Earth” shows a pair of indigenous figures standing over a Southwestern arroyo.
“No other high school in Los Angeles collected on this scale,” Autry chief curator Amy Scott says of Gardena’s museum-worthy paintings. “Other schools have art collections, but nothing, to my knowledge, that was the result of something as concentrated and focused as Gardena.”
The program, launched by then-principal John Whitely, was a veritable community event for Gardena. Students would visit art galleries and meet with artists as part of their research, then vote on which works to acquire. The annual exhibition was such an event that in 1930 California’s lieutenant governor showed up to give a speech.
The tradition came to an end in 1956, when the high school moved to a new building and the collection was put in storage, where it languished for years. But works from the collection have begun to turn up at exhibitions. Though the collection still belongs to the students of Gardena High, a number of the paintings are on longterm loan to the Autry.
“It fills a gap in our collection,” Scott says. Plus, the museum can help maintain them in a climate-controlled environment, thereby better preserving them.