Angels Gate Cultural Center, 40 Years as Art Aerie Atop San Pedro
As one of the international cities, you can find just about anything in Los Angeles. But San Pedro ain’t LA, not really: it’s a port town more than 20 miles down the road with only one library and a population that barely cracks California’s top 100.
But take a winding drive up Gaffey Street and you come across Angels Gate Cultural Center, a rustic 7-acre campus that features programming to facilitate everything from painting, ceramics and printmaking to welding, ukulele and kyudo. (Yeah, I had to look up that last one, too: it’s the Japanese martial art of archery.)
On June 25, Angels Gate celebrated its big four-oh with 40th Anniversary Gathering of Angels, an exhibition featuring work by over 60 current and alumni artists of the Angels Gate Studio Artist program.
But if you’ve never heard of Angels Gate, you’re not alone.
“There’s not a lot of press about Angels Gate,” says Amy Eriksen, AGCC’s executive director for the last 11 years. “It has been like this little hidden place. Nobody knows it’s here. […] Until about 15 years ago, this place was run by like two or three staff — and their goal was to have a gallery that was open, have some community classes, and to take care of the studio artists that were here. So I don’t think press was their first priority — or their fifth […] And not every artist comes here for the community. So I think it was never a high priority to tell other people about it.”
Nor has keeping a record of Angels Gate’s history been job one. A lot of what Eriksen tells me about Angels Gate’s early days comes to her as “lore.” The story