The Santa Cruz Institute of Contemporary Arts is a new thing.
But it’s also a not-so-new thing.
Technically, the SCICA has existed for nine years — though, it was more a concept than an actual place.
“People ask about the history,” said Ann Hazels, one of two directors of the “new” ICA, in reference to her partner Kirby Scudder, “so I say, for years one and two, it was in Kirby’s black backpack, and in years three through seven, it’s been in his green backpack. It’s literally been a gallery on the go.”
On Nov. 17, the ICA will finally have what it has never had before — a permanent home. A spanking new, 1,900-square-foot space in the new Tannery Arts Center will open that day in what its co-directors believe will be a turning point in the visual-arts community in Santa Cruz County.
The new gallery space will exist in a complex of artist workspaces and dance studios that also is home to the Catamaran Literary Reader and the café Rebecca’s at the Tannery, among other arts-oriented business. It looks out onto what will be a large open plaza between the Tannery Lofts and the yet-to-open Performing Arts Center.
“It could be 60,000 feet if we need it to be,” said Scudder of the possibility that the new art gallery could spill out of its interior confines into the plaza.
It’s all a pretty heady experience for Scudder who opened the first temporary ICA space nine years to the day that the new space is scheduled to open, back in 2003, long before the vast Tannery complex was a reality. For years, the ICA happened to exist wherever Scudder — a familiar figure around downtown Santa Cruz on his bicycle with his trademark mesh trucker cap — happened to be.
An ICA is an arts entity that exists on the continuum between private galleries and large museums. They often serve as a landing spot for art that may too provocative or risky to find a home in a museum or a private gallery.
The Santa Cruz ICA, said its directors, will provide a venue for art that is not common in the area.
“We’re adding to what all art venues are doing in Santa Cruz, but with a particular focus on bringing the outside in,” said Hazels. “What we want to offer is work that’s not shown anywhere else in the county.”
That means art from outside the area, be it San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York or abroad. The ICA opens this month with its first exhibit, an exploration of steampunk culture, drawn from artists both who are both local and from outside the area.
Santa Cruz County is already rife with working artists — hundreds of them, many of whom live in the adjacent Tannery lofts. Scudder said that although Santa Cruz still doesn’t have many traditional galleries to show the work of local artists, it has a lot more nontraditional spaces to show art, thanks mostly to the First Friday Art Tour, a hugely successful spin-off of the ICA begun by Scudder and his long-time partner Chip, who is now the president of the Downtown Association.
So, the new gallery will be focused on what might be happening in the art world outside Santa Cruz.
“We would go for the more experimental and innovative than the traditional,” said Hazels. “It could be traditional in the sense of application or technique, but not in the sense of subject. What we want is contemporary art that’s modern, that’s fresh, that’s a new perspective.”
“I’m lucky enough to have been brought up in New York,” said Scudder. “And I could go to five museums in 10 blocks and see stuff I would otherwise never see in a million years. If you’re an emerging artist, you need to be surrounded by stuff like that so that it keeps challenging you and keeps you asking the important questions. I think that’s why some people leave here and go back to San Francisco where they can have that kind of stimulation.”
Even with the richness and variety of artistic styles in Santa Cruz County, Scudder said that there are some arenas of artistic innovation that are not seen here — for instance, technology.
“If you go to Japan or China, technology plays a huge role in contemporary art. We don’t see any of that kind of art. There are so many trends going on that are not visible in Santa Cruz that we want to show. Because of LED technology, to take one example, there is a whole generation of artists who are LED artists.”
“We really want to connect the technology and science component of art,” said Hazels, “which just isn’t a huge component here, even though we can almost reach Silicon Valley.”
Steampunk, the subject of the first show at the new ICA, has been a trend for several years now, combining a nostalgia for old technology and Victorian style, a kind of futurism of the past. Scudder said that the ICA is still looking for other artists to contribute to the show. See www.scica.org for details.
Scudder and Hazels are not ready to announce the subjects of their shows for 2013, but, they said, they expect to mount five or six shows a year on various subjects to show cutting-edge contemporary art, as envisioned by themselves as curators and a board of advisors they’ve put together familiar with the mission and aesthetics of ICAs in other communities.
“I love that feeling,” said Hazels, who moved to Santa cruz in 2009, “of when you walk through an art show and a week later, you’re still thinking about it. Maybe it pissed you off; maybe it was beautiful. But it’s something that charges your batteries. That’s what makes artists grow.”
She also said that the new ICA will become a working venue for other artistic endeavors of a performance or a literary bent. Some of the shows may be politically, sexually or socially provocative and controversial, but they are not designed to shock. “I think good art will have some shocking component to it, but that’s not what we’re aiming for.”
Before now, the ICA has been a series of temporary galleries, all run by Chip and/or Scudder, the last of which was the Dead Cow Gallery on the campus of the Tannery as the lofts were being constructed.
Chip and Scudder both moved into retail spaces in downtown Santa Cruz, spaces that were between tenants and put up art shows until real-estate pressures forced them to move on and find another space.
It was Scudder’s hope that the ICA’s floating art show might trigger a richer, more committed visual-arts community in Santa Cruz. In the decade since then, First Friday has become a huge downtown draw and a signature Santa Cruz event, UC Santa Cruz has opened a new building housing their Digital Arts & New Media (DANM) program and the downtown Museum of Art & History has undergone a radical re-envisioning at the hands of new director Nina Simon. Plus, the Tannery Arts Center has risen on the site of the old Salz Tannery on the Highway 9 side of River Street.
“If you look at Santa Cruz,” said Scudder. “And you look at other places of this size, there’s not nearly as much going on in those other towns. This place is like a small city, a small San Francisco. This is a place that is ripe for exactly this kind of thing.”
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