The Santa Paula Art & Photography Show is celebrating it’s Diamond Anniversary, those attending the March Good Morning Santa Paula learned.
The Chamber of Commerce-sponsored event was held at Glen Tavern Inn, with breakfast prepared by Enzo’s.
Virginia Gunderson, whose family settled in Santa Paula in 1867, said the famous show was founded in 1937 when a group of area artists decided a competition should be held. Gunderson’s uncle Douglas Shively was a show co-founder, and an exhibit of his work and life was tied into the show’s gala anniversary with the retrospective display at the Santa Paula Art Museum.
With 377 entries in the 75th annual exhibit, Gunderson said it was a far cry from the first competition co-founded by Jessie Arms Botke and Cornelis Botke. “That first show was held at the Chamber of Commerce office and there were 27 pieces entered... and the first purchase,” the seedling of the noted Santa Paula Art Collection, “was made by the Chamber,” which waited until the winning oil painting was announced.
Within a few years the Chamber was also purchasing prize-winning watercolor works, and continued investing in public art until 1977. In 1992 the Chamber finally gave up staging the annual show, then taken over by the Santa Paula Society of the Arts that has been organizing and staging the event for 20 years.
Over the years students from the high and elementary school districts raised the funds to purchase paintings for their schools, and Blanchard Community Library and the then Santa Paula Memorial Hospital started other collections. The Santa Paula Historical Society “saw some pieces were deteriorating and needed restoration, and started a program” to bring the paintings back to prime condition.
Gunderson said the Society of the Arts also had a similar program. “Some of the old originals, in fact one my uncle did in 1927,” were deteriorating due to the lack of canvas preparation “like they do today.” The approximately 400 paintings owned by the various entities are now known collectively as the Santa Paula Collection.
And, “Naturally, a site for a museum became a part of the conversation” of how best to preserve and show the collection. For more than a decade supporters considered one building after another, but found that restoration costs would be too high. The group even explored building a museum, an idea that was rejected due to cost.
“Then one day Mary Alice Orcutt Henderson,” president of the Historical Society who had spearheaded the effort to create a collection museum, had a conversation with Limoneira Company President/CEO Harold Edwards. Edwards, said Gunderson, offered the historic former Limoneira headquarters building on North 10th Street to the museum for their use.
Now “Douglas Shively: A Retrospective” is being shown in the Great Hall, while “Then & Now: A Look Back at the Santa Paula Art Show” is featured in the Shively Gallery. The latter show is mirroring the first by requiring artists to paint only subject matter within eight miles of the city of Santa Paula.
The local area, said Gunderson, has always been popular with artists. “We’ve had artists from Disney, artists from Laguna Beach” and others who would travel to the Santa Paula, an area famous for its artistic scenes. The “Then & Now” exhibit “is the same theory, the same guidelines used by contemporary artists.” Now the Santa Paula Art Show has added Photography to its title as well as to the categories artists can enter in, ranging from oil/acrylics and watercolor to mixed media/graphics and pastels.
The Douglas Shively Retrospective runs through June 17, and the Then & Now show through July 8 at the Santa Paula Art Museum, 117 N. 10th Street.
Gunderson said those who would like to see the 377 entries in the 75th Annual Santa Paula Art & Photography Show have until April 4 to view the exhibit at Blanchard Community Library, 119 N. 8th Street.
