California Art Club

The California Art Club (CAC), founded in 1909, is one of the oldest and most active arts organizations in California. It celebrated its centennial in the spring of 2010. The California Art Club originally evolved from the Painters Club of Los Angeles. The new organization was more inclusive, as it accepeted women, sculptors and out of state artists. Most of the major early California painters belonged to the CAC, including William Wendt (1865–1946), Edgar Payne (1883–1947) and Franz Bischoff (1864–1929). As the members of the first generation of California Plein-Air Painters aged and died, the membership was filled by a handful of younger professional painters, along with amateur painters and commercial artists. By the 1980s, the membership of the CAC consisted of aging artists and the organization had lost momentum. In 1993, Peter Seitz Adams (b. 1950) was elected President of the CAC. He was a generation younger than most of its members and he and his wife, Elaine Shelby Adams, revitalized the organization, recruiting many of the California's best known landscape and figurative painters. Today its membership consists of representational artists and sculptors, but it is broadly inclusive and includes many women painters as well as painters and sculptors who emigrated to the United States from Europe and Asia. The CAC hosts an annual Gold Medal Exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art each year along with a number of other smaller public and special museum exhibitions. Headquartered in one of the large bungalows that was part of the historic Vista del Arroyo Hotel in Pasadena, the California Art Club has a number of chapters throughout California. It also has a Collector's Circle consisting of patrons of both contemporary and historic painters. The California Art Club is an unusual non-profit organization that attempts to serve several very different constituencies, the more elite, well-established CAC Signature Members, the emerging Artist Members as well as Painting Patrons Members who are often serious amateur artist as well as collectors. Balancing the large and varied membership of the CAC is a difficult task and not without its controversies. Its most recent activities include a large 2010 exhibition of works inspired by Wagner's Ring Cycle held at the Los Angeles Cathedral in conjunction with the Los Angeles Opera's production of the Ring.