California Art Club - Special Exhibitions

Special Exhibitions

Under the leadership of Peter and Elaine Adams, the California Art Club organized a series of thematic exhibitions at both art and natural history museums. The Adams saw that there was a natural relationship between landscape art, ecological awareness, and natural history. In 1996, the California Art Club organized the California Wetlands Exhibition at the Natural History Museum in historic Exposition Park in Los Angeles. This exhibition included works by artists such as Bill Stout, Marcia Burtt, Meredith Brooks Abbott, Debra Hulse, Arny Karl, and Peter Adams. In May through August 1998, the CAC mounted Treasures of the Sierra Nevada at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, featuring works by historic California artists like Edgar Payne, Jack Wilkenson Smith, and Theodore Lukits, as well as contemporary painters like Adams, John Budicin, Dan Pinkham, and Karl Dempwolf. The Carnegie Museum in Oxnard, California, hosted a large exhibition of works by painters from the California Art Club in 1994, entitled, "The California Art Club: 85 Years of Art," where Adams' work was featured prominently. In 1997, Peter and Elaine Adams and the California Art Club organized a traveling exhibition which contrasted the work of American Impressionists and Classical Realist painters from the East and Midwestern United States along with the California Impressionists. Titled, "East Coast Ideals West Coast Concepts," the exhibition traveled from the Carnegie Museum in Oxnard to the Springville Museum of Art in Springville, Utah to the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. Among the historic artists represented were William McGregor Paxton and R.H. Ives Gammell, representing the Boston School, and Theodore Lukits and Maurice Braun, representing the California Impressionists. Contemporary artists included the works of Richard Lack, Allen Banks, and Stephen Gjertson, representing the East coast and the Midwest; and Peter Adams, Gregory Hull, and Tim Solliday representing the West coast. The California Art Club also organized and sponsored a traveling exhibition entitled, "Theodore Lukits, An American Orientalist," dedicated to the Asian-themed works of Thedore Lukits, who had first been a member of the California Art Club in 1922 and was later made a Life Member. This exhibition of colorful still lifes and figurative works originated at the Pacific Asia Museum in the fall of 1998 and traveled to the Carnegie Art Museum in the winter of 1998 and 1999, then concluded at the Muckenthaller Cultural Center in Fullerton, California, in the Spring of 1999. Later in 1999, the California Art Club began a relationship with the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in Malibu with the exhibition entitled, "On Location in Malibu," which was another show that brought awareness to the troubled California Coast. The exhibition, organized by Peter and Elaine Adams and curated by the Weisman's Michael Zakian ran from May to August, featuring the work of dozens of CAC painters including David Gallup, Alexey Steele and Stephen Mirich.