San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Learn: Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History celebrates its 25th year
If you’re going to make it to your 25th anniversary as a couple, it helps if you can keep the relationship fresh by trying new things. The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, a 25-year-old merger of the Art Museum and the Santa Cruz Historical Society, has certainly taken that advice to heart over the years — and even more so since the coronavirus pandemic began.
When its doors were forced to close in early 2020, the MAH, as it’s widely known in Santa Cruz, debuted its first-ever online exhibition, “Queer Santa Cruz,” which will move into a long-term gallery space in October.
Since cautiously reopening in March, the museum has brimmed with innovative couplings of art and history, including last spring’s series of specially commissioned live performances in Evergreen Cemetery — one of several historic properties managed by the museum — and “The Art of the Santa Cruz Speed Wheel,” a new exhibition showcasing decades of work by iconic “Screaming Hand” skateboard artist Jim Phillips.
Later this month the museum will present Frequency: A Festival of Light, Sound & Digital Culture, its first-ever festival devoted to the digital arts. The multivenue, mostly free, event will include installations, performances and immersive experiences created by local, national and international artists. Centered in downtown Santa Cruz Sept. 16-19, Frequency is intended to be a biennial event, alternating with CommonGround, a festival of performing and visual arts throughout Santa Cruz County.
“It’s a way to share art with folks and tell our stories in a different space,” said Robb Woulfe, the museum’s executive director, who started three weeks before the pandemic began. Dealing with the lockdowns and continued precautions around coronavirus has forced the MAH to consider “how do we get out of our four walls and how do we meet community where it is — sometimes on-site, sometimes off-site, sometimes online,” Woulfe said.
Some of the stories currently told at the museum are poignant, like those in “Out of the Ashes: Stories
from the CZU Lightning Complex Fires,” a collection of art, objects and stories of individuals affected by the wildfires of August 2020 that destroyed more than 900 homes and burned more than 80,000 acres.
Just as they had after the Loma Prieta earthquake that devastated Santa Cruz in 1989, Santa Cruz Sentinel photojournalist Shmuel Thaler and NPR radio producer Nikki Silva teamed up to document the personal impact of catastrophe. The museum also solicited artworks by artists affected by the fire and the artifacts and remembrances of others dealing with what are still “very raw emotions,” said Marla Novo, director of exhibitions and programs.
“We invited people to come last year, while the museum was closed, with the objects that they found in the ashes when they went back to their homes,” Novo explained. “There’s a toy train from a young boy whose grandmother’s house was destroyed. He has memories of going over to the house and playing with these toy trains. … There are heirlooms that maybe don’t have monetary value, but they have value as being your family heirlooms.”
Novo said she has also been touched by some of the stories of “Queer Santa Cruz,” based on 40 years of LGBTQ+ archives from the Diversity Center of Santa Cruz County, which the museum acquired in 2016, and oral histories of “trailblazers and pioneers of advocacy for queer folks” that the center began collecting in 2013.
“I enjoyed learning about the gay men’s volleyball club that began in 1979, which was a really great community, a safe community where men were able to gather and play sports and have this commonality,” Novo said. “It was a place where they could be themselves, by the ocean and at the beach, and there was something liberating about that.”
The exhibition also contains a “really powerful” section on the AIDS crisis, Novo said.
“These are young people getting sick, and other young people taking care of them. Nobody’s ready for that, but especially not with young people,” Novo said. “There’s some really moving oral histories about that — people were not equipped for that at the beginning, but they quickly did take care of each other.”
On a lighter theme, “The Art of the Speed Wheel,” on view through Jan. 2, is “really a celebration of our Santa Cruz identity, which surf, skate and bike culture are part of,” Novo said. The exhibition features original drawings and creations by Jim Phillips from his time as an art director at the Santa Cruz-based skateboard company NHS.
“It’s a celebration of art and innovation in skateboards, and thousands of skate decks, t-shirts and stickers and advertising ... It’s an art and a history exhibition,” Novo said.
The Frequency festival will be uplifting and literally illuminating, lighting up downtown and the plaza next to the museum, where acrylic pillars will feature crowd-sourced “Poems of Positivity,” Novo said.
Inside, British digital arts collective Squidsoup will take over the MAH’s main gallery with its kaleidoscopic “Ocean of Light: Submergence,” an immersive experience of light and sound that will also remain on view through Jan. 2.
Another piece in the festival is “Zoom Meeting,” an LED wall “that will sort of mimic what it feels like to be in a Zoom meeting and try to make human connection with each other,” Novo said. “I’m looking forward to that.”
Woulfe described the