'Artful' Spring '19 CA-Modern - Page 2

"Throughout the nation, architects, planners, and preservationists have watched as many buildings from the 1940s to the 1970s have come down," Dave Weinstein notes, building his case for preservation efforts. "Some of the threatened buildings discussed here are sure to go. Others could be rescued—perhaps with your help."

Our story features a dozen striking, California mid-century modern structures that have avoided the wrecking ball so far, but whose futures are considerably less secure. Among them are numerous closed businesses, including a hamburger joint, two movie theaters, a shopping center, a bank, and a savings and loan. Architects of the 12 buildings include Richard Neutra, Edward Durell Stone, and partnerships like Anshen and Allen and Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons.

While all those buildings are still around (knock on wood!), one imagines that is not the case with several art pieces fashioned by the ten Bay Area jewelers profiled in the latest installment of our 'Unsung Masters' series on mid-century culture.

That story traces the birth of the Metal Arts Guild in San Francisco of 1951 and the wearable, avant-garde creations by its founders and early members like Florence Resnikoff, Merry Renk, Peter Macchiarini, and a pioneer who set the pace for them all.

"I think they were all influenced by her, whether [or not] they admitted it a lot," says jewelry retailer Libby Cooper about Margaret De Patta, first president of the Metal Arts Guild and a woman whose remarkable art helped changed the world of studio-produced jewelry.

Upland-based painter Chris Trueman can perhaps be excused for being more concerned with making art than art history. In 'Pushing the Limits,' the omnipresent Dave Weinstein himself paints the portrait of an artist who mixes styles to create unique pieces.

"Everything kind of gets mixed up. It's like cooking—fusion cooking, like Korean tacos," Trueman says whimsically of making art that draws from hard-edge painting as well as abstract expressionism.

"When I look at Chris's work," rhapsodizes gallery owner Edward Cella, "there's a kind of joyfulness, there's a kind of extemporaneous-ness. There's a kind of motion that happens in his work that makes me feel a kind of freedom, a kind of boundlessness with how I experience the world around me."

So when the world around you includes the spring 2019 issue of CA-Modern magazine, it includes art lovers like Cella and other admirers of Trueman alongside trailblazing metalsmiths, endangered designs, kitschy lunchboxes—plus even a few stories that eschew art altogether, like Cherry Capri's 'Dear Cherry' advice column and the Feature Storyboard about one of Joe Eichler's final housing tracts, the tightknit Palo Alto neighborhood of Los Arboles Addition.

Call those two profiles in the art of life.

If you don't already get the print issue of CA-Modern delivered to your mailbox, click here to order. Meanwhile, here's the flip-book edition of the entire issue for your immediate artistic and literary enjoyment.