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Westward Ho to Santa Monica
| Article
# : |
19171 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
1,713 Words |
| Author
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Julia Braun Kessler
Julia Braun Kessler is arts editor for LA West magazine in Los
Angeles. Her articles appear in Travel & Leisure and other
national publications. |
Sleepy by the sea might well have summed up the little community of Santa Monica, California, not so long ago. One of the many peripheral municipalities laced into the megalopolis known as the City of Los Angeles, this small town used to be where people drove out for a Sunday outing, or rented a beach cottage for the summer. It was also where Jane Fonda lived in the days of her marriage to Tom Hayden. But today, Santa Monica is the center of a major migration westward. It has become the cutting edge of the West Coast's art world. Connoisseurs are calling it "the art-friendliest city of Southern California" and "the hottest little art spot in the West."
Unlikely as this may seem to the community's longtime residents, they are confronted with instant evidence every time they drive into Santa Monica by way of Wilshire Boulevard, passing under the grand sweep of Tony Delap's steel-arch sculpture, Big Wave: Gateway to Santa Monica. If they head to the city's Colorado Avenue on any Saturday afternoon, at any time of the year, they encounter elegantly turned-out collectors stepping from their BMWs to join a stream of leather-clad art fanciers and tourists. A stroll under the jacarandas and fan palms on Santa Monica's newly renovated mall, the Third Street Promenade, greets them with a parade of huge copper and steel dinosaurs, woven into topiary fountains by the sculptors Claude and Francois La Lanne. Flying above an island with running water and exotic plants on that sunny walkway are brilliantly colored banners in abstract patterns specially designed by local artists Michael McCall and J. Michael Walker. And, should residents choose a beach walk just north of Pico Boulevard, they become, willy-nilly, an audience for Douglas Hollis' huge Singing Beach Chairs, whose tones are piped by the breezes all day long.
The irony of it all is that with such delightful new public art, along with the many galleries within easy walking distance, one now actually finds people on the streets of Santa Monica. If that doesn't strike you as unusual, a bit of history may be in order. After all, this is still greater Los Angeles, where until recently--or so local lore has it--merely to be seen on foot without a dog on a leash automatically provoked police interest.
A combination of circumstances within the last five years has favored this dramatic migration to the seaside--the ambitious dream of Santa Monica as a potential Fifty-seventh Street, or even a SoHo. First, the traditional areas to the city's east, once widely regarded as Los Angeles' art districts (such as La Cienega and La Brea boulevards), began to change. In the middle and late
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