Joe Mountie mosaic, Mt. San Antonio College, Walnut, c. 1965

With the semester well underway, I am spending time on my campus, grading and teaching, which made me think of one of the campus art completed by the Millard Sheets Studio.

The Garrison Theater and other spaces around the Claremont Colleges come first to mind, along with “Touchdown Jesus” at Notre Dame and the tapestry in the Foley Communication Arts Center at Loyola Marymount. But Mt. San Antonio College (lovingly called Mt. SAC by those in the know) provides a few intriguing examples — and a question of missing art.

As you walk into the newly renovated Mt. SAC library, there is a brightly colored mosaic of “Little Joe,” a retired version of the school’s Joe Mountie the Mountaineer mascot, grinning up from the pavement. Though the faux-Indian facepaint, the coonskin cap, and the rifle are more reminiscent of the Indian mascots and caricatures of 1964-1965, now mostly phased out around collegiate sports, the mosaic still catches the eye, and probably has a Sheets Studio connection (if more likely to be student work than the Studio itself.)

Sue Hertel, “The Water and The Lion,” mural detail, Mt. San Antonio College, Walnut, c. 1965 (from Hall and Pietzsch, comp., 1996)

But the clear Sheets Studio (and friend-of-Sheets Studio) work for Mt. SAC was (is?) the set of library murals created by Susan Hertel and Tom Van Sant. According to the 1996 Mt. SAC history, Van Sant created murals symbolizing the social sciences and humanities; Hertel’s showed physical and biological sciences, with The Bull, The Flowering Tree, The Horse, and (as seen here) The Water and the Lion. From this photograph — all I have seen of the work — it is clearly linked stylistically to the wood panels and mosaic work of the Sheets Studio for Home Savings, especially (at this moment) reminding me of Pomona and Arcadia.

But where are the murals? If on wood panels, they could easily have been removed; canvas murals from the Sheets Studio can also be rolled up. Are they in storage? Covered? Egad, destroyed? I wish we knew more. (I asked around the library in June, but haven’t heard anything.) I hope these murals can be placed back in the public view, ideally at Mt. SAC art gallery or in a public, secure place nearby.

Please be in touch if you know more about these works!

Millard Sheets, The Pageant of History in Northern California, for American Trust Company of San Francisco, 1954

In historical research, the most important sources often come to you incomplete.

So it seems with these remarkable images, done as a lithograph to celebrate the centennial of the American Trust Company, which was founded in 1854 as the San Francisco Accumulating Fund Association by Ephraim Willard Burr, who went on to be mayor of San Francisco. The company, which once owned a lot of northern California land, merged into Wells Fargo in 1960. The company president, James K. Lochead, was proud to introduce them as commissions from Millard Sheets, “himself a Californian.”

I first saw these prints at the UCLA Special Collections, and then I was fortunate to find copies for sale from Alan Wofsy Fine Arts; Alan also has the 4-page brochure where Sheets explained the images in detail (six paragraphs per image, like a long version of what the Van Ness branch has) and concludes this was where “the past becomes legend and the present, soon to be legend, begins.”

The images tell the history of the greater San Francisco Bay area, and they are a remarkable preview of what will appear in Home Savings images later: vaqueros and missions; wagon trains and railroads; women at the beach and sailboats out at sea; eagles and skunks and deer and lots of cows and horses. There are also other historical scenes that do not appear later: Fort Ross; the takeover of Monterey and the establishment of the Bear Flag Republic; the Ferry Building; the UC Berkeley Campanile; the Capitol building; large airplanes crossing the bay and grain elevators on the landscape. The farm equipment and industrial agriculture buildings likely reflected some of American Trust’s customers; the proliferation of American and Californian flags makes one wonder why these did not play a larger role in the later Home Savings works.

The American Trust and Savings branch at 10th and L in Sacramento once had three painted panels by Sheets — were these of the same them, or different? And who created the design for these works, and how did they relate to the Home Savings commission, the same year, which moved from a general and abstract history of finance and California life to the kind of specific history you see here?

I have tried the Sheets Archives without much information, and the Wells Fargo history center without getting a response; ideas and tips welcomed! I do think these remarkable prints hold a key window into the choice of historical scenes for the Home Savings buildings.

Millard Sheets, The Panorama of Today in Northern California, for American Trust Company of San Francisco, 1954

Albert Stewart, Bill Megaw and Millard Sheets Studio, “Horse and Man” sculpture for United Savings Bank, Manchester and Sepulveda, 1957

Hello! Curbed LA has been posting great materials for their Millard Sheets Week, drawing on this blog, the L.A. Conservancy tour last March, and their reporting. Great stuff, and welcome to their readers!

I am back to teaching at UTEP and so back and forth from LAX a bunch again. And so I have had occasion to visit this Millard Sheets Studio sculpture, originally commissioned for United Financial (or Imperial Bank — see below), and to observe it odd bedfellows on the corner of Manchester and Sepulveda.

From the Sheets Papers, it seems the sculpture is of marble, and is credited to Bill Megaw. (UPDATE: The commission is listed in the Albert Stewart memorial volume as “Horse and Man,” 1957.) It reflects, to me, the pose in George Caleb Bingham’s Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap and some pioneer sculptures around the country, as well as Lawrence Tenney Stevens’s Monument to Young Farmers which I just saw again, along with Tony Sheets and his wonderful exhibit at the L.A. County Fair. According to the correspondence from 1975 between Sheets and Kenneth Childs, once a Home Savings executive, it is marble, and by Bill Megaw. BGuilt for United Savings Bank, there was an effort to move it for Imperial Bank. Clearly, it stayed in place!

Bank sculpture and its current setting, Manchester and Sepulveda, 2012

It is also a reminder of how many projects the Sheets Studio did. S. David Underwood, the subject of some upcoming posts, was the primary Sheets Studio architect, and with Rufus Turner and others they worked on Home Savings, but also on interiors, remodels, and other buildings that sometimes showed the same style–and sometimes were completely different. In the “definitive list,” which needs updating, there are lots of occasions where the Sheets Studio did a mosaic, or ordered furniture, or something, and so many traces of their influence on Mid-Century Modern art and architecture  hiding around town–or already lost.

More examples in the weeks to come, but just one here: late in life, Millard Sheets provided a video oral history for Home Savings at his home in Gualala, taped by a time led by George Underwood. In that account, he mentions that Howard Ahmanson contacted him about the Home Savings work after seeing a March 22, 1953, article in the L.A. Times about Sheets’s work for Pacific Clay Products, at 4th and Bixel, which helps date their collaboration. The building is now the offices of the Children’s Home Society of California, and I don’t think the interior or exterior show influence of Sheets’s work — if so, let me know! — but it did launch a legendary partnership. And that is the most prominent of the ways the Sheets Studio work is hiding all around us.

Sue Hertel and Millard Sheets Studio, San Diego Children’s Zoo, c. 1975-1977

I know I have posted these mosaics before, in regard to dating and process… but classes have begun at UTEP this week. So, while I have some longer posts in the works and research questions out there, I just wanted to revisit another “home” branch for me, in San Diego — as I look forward to being there Labor Day weekend and checking on the status of the mosaics, sculpture, and paintings.

These families look a bit solemn for the fun they should be having, but they are clearly enjoying timeless San Diego pastimes, from the animals at the San Diego Zoo petting paddock to the sights of California Tower, and an old tram that looks a lot like the current San Diego trolley system in its red trim. (No more elephant rides at the zoo — they stopped those decades ago — but I think the LA County Fair might offer that along with the Sheets Center for the Arts mentioned last week.)

Sue Hertel and Millard Sheets Studio, “The Harbor,” Mission Bay Drive at Garnet, San Diego, c. 1975-1977

Here, sailboats in the harbor compete with gulls diving after bread crumbs, the orcas of Sea World frolic on the left while fish and other creatures hang out in the tidepools at the right. Up the middle, the lighthouse of Cabrillo National Monument and the “world’s oldest active sailing ship,” the Star of India, highlight the centuries of European exploration and presence in the land of the Kumeyaay, but they wear their history lightly–the way I often found it, growing up in town, and the way many Home Savings art depicts it–just enough to make the local feel the bank belongs here, celebrating your home.

More from San Diego and beyond in the weeks ahead — for now, grasp the last summer you can! The Star of India even has visitors this weekend for the Festival of Sail.

Marlo Bartels, ceramic tile mosaic for Columbus, Ohio, Home Savings, 1988; as photographed in Gail Paris Discovery Garden, Clinton Elementary School, by Terry Miller, courtesy Shirley Hyatt

One of the fun summer activities here in southern California is the Festival of the Arts / Pageant of the Masters bonanza in Laguna Beach. I went as a child (and have seen it since copied on Gilmore Girls), but this year I had a chance to return thanks to spending a few days in the studio and around town with Marlo Bartels.

As we have discussed, a number of artists were given Home Savings commissions in the final years of the art program, beyond just the Sheets Studio. Many of these locations are outside California, and often the local community does not know they are part of a larger series — hence they are even more threatened with destruction.

Marlo Bartels, “Third Reef,” Brooks Street ceramic mural on stair risers, 2009-2010

Marlo Bartels creates wonderful ceramic tiles by hand, shaping grooves and choosing glazes, and then matching bright colors and themes to the local landscape, whether it is a set of steps down to the beach in Laguna (replete with sea shapes and colors; see left) or creating artwork for corporate clients such as the Chart House restaurants and Home Savings. (Bartels also created the art for the wonderful Cancer Survivors’ Park in San Diego, my hometown, and has numerous residential and public commissions, as his website explains.)

Bartels’s work in Woodland Hills is threatened; I wonder whether his work for Home Savings in Thousand Oaks, Palm Desert (with Eric Johnson) and Monterey Park (with Astrid Preston); Pembroke Pines and Dunedin, Florida are associated much with his name or Home Savings.

The large image you see above is of Marlo Bartels’s mosaic for Columbus, Ohio, in 1988; a mosaic by Denis O’Connor and Sue Hertel at 6280 Sawmill Road, in Dublin, Ohio, in 1990, is gone, showing how quickly these bank buildings, no longer built for permanence, can disappear.

But the story of Marlo’s Columbus mosaic has a happy ending. As you can see, Marlo’s materials may be different, but he followed a rather standard Home Savings way of creating branch artwork — visit the city, look for something distinctive (the skyline), use local symbols and icons (Ohio state flag; state bird; local animals; shapes that echo those of the Moundbuilder peoples) and then put them into a permanent, colorfast material, such as ceramic, and hope to celebrate the community forever.

Marlo Bartels, Columbus mosaic ready for transport, 1992. Restoration was necessary in part due to vandals knocking over the transport. Image courtesy Marlo Bartels.

But in 1992, just four years after installation, the bank building was torn down (UPDATE: after it and the Graceland Shopping Center it was in were damaged in a fire) and the mosaic was threatened. Thankfully, the Casto Corporation (owner of the shopping center) was willing to help save the necessary wall, and Susan Gaunce of the local Clintonville Area Commission contacted Marlo and brought him to Columbus to help with the reinstallation and teach a few workshops. The mural then became the backdrop for the Gail Paris Discovery Garden at Clinton Elementary School.

I have just heard from Shirley Hyatt, author of Clintonville and Beechwood, that Clinton had been closed for renovations, but when it opened for this school year — this week!–the tile mosaic is to be brought inside, so the kids can see and touch it more often–and where it can be protected, hopefully for decades to come.

Thanks for Terry Miller and Shirley Hyatt for providing this image (and the updates). More of the move, the restoration work, or Marlo’s sessions in Columbus–or any of the outside-California locations–always welcomed!

Albert Stewart and John Edward Svenson, Bull Wall, brick relief at Millard Sheets Center for the Arts, LA Fairplex, 1952 (photograph 2010)

The timing of the LA County Fair is either brilliant or insane.

A county fair is an icon of summer fun (away from the coasts), and the largest in the world is in Los Angeles — and it is held in September, when school is back in session and Halloween has taken over the store promotions. This either is a perfect extension of summer (and often the hottest days of the year here) or a crazy strategy.

Either way, the LA County Fair is intimately tied to the work of Millard Sheets, and his circle of artists and friends in the Pomona Valley. Sheets won the first art competition at the fair, in 1922, at age (corrected) 15, in the year the Fair opened, and by 1924 he was assisting Theodore Modra in organizing the fair’s art exhibit.

John Edward Svenson, The Ranchero sculpture in wood, Millard Sheets Center for the Arts, 1953 (photograph 2010)

In 1931, after Modra died, Sheets was named Superintendent of the Art Department, and he guided the design and selection for the art exhibits at the Fair through 1957, including the 1954 Arts of Daily Living exhibit, which received national coverage and a visit from Frank Lloyd Wright as a celebration of the innovative modern way of decorating, including the artwork of John Edward Svenson, Harrison McIntosh, Jean and Arthur Ames, Sam Maloof, Betty Davenport Ford, Albert Stewart, Rupert Deese, Phil Dike, and others. Many from this circle (or their students at Scripps or the Claremont Graduate School) created the art for the Home Savings banks and other Sheets Studio commissions in the decades that followed.

In 1994, the Fine Arts Building at the Fair was renamed as the Millard Sheets Gallery (now the Millard Sheets Center for the Arts at the LA County Fairplex, to be exact). Since 2007, Millard’s youngest son, Tony Sheets, has been directing the gallery and creating wonderful annual exhibits ever since.

This year, the exhibit celebrates “Art and Fair: A 90 Year Celebration,” and includes a look at the Fair’s origins, its architecture and design elements, iconic past exhibits, and a section on “The Work of Millard Sheets: Bringing World Famous Art to the Community.”

On Thursday, September 13, Tony Sheets will speak about the exhibit at a luncheon at Scripps College’s Malott Commons Hampton Room, organized by the Scripps College Fine Arts Foundation. Sounds like a wonderful opportunity — alas, I will be teaching that day in El Paso — but I recommend you grab a seat by contacting Marci Stewart at 909-985-8092.

The Fair runs August 31 to September 30, Wednesday to Sunday. Perhaps I will see you there!

Dallas Mercantile Bank building, c. 1958, archival photograph in the Dallas Morning News, July 2012

Hello everyone!

We have a newborn in my household, so the posts will be paused for a few weeks while we get accustomed to that.

In the meantime, I suggest this great article by Christina Geyer from the weekend’s Dallas Morning News, about the Dallas Mercantile Bank mosaics designed by the Sheets Studio. There were also sculptures and, it seems, wall hangings, plus furniture designed by Rufus Turner, who came to work full-time for the Sheets Studio after this project and is quoted in the article.

The article has a nice gallery of images from the original layout, as well as of the mosaics’ restoration and reinstallation work, along with quotes from Tony Sheets, Lillian Sizemore, and me. Check it out, and see you back here soon.

Vertis Hayes, sculpture for Home Savings, Vermont and Slauson (South Central), before 1973. Image from 1973 calendar, George Underwood

One of the themes I am pursuing in this research comes from my urban-history background: How did Home Savings relate to the multiracial, multiethnic population of southern California? Did it rely on old mental maps from redlining and housing covenants to drive its lending, or socioeconomic data, or did it buck the conventional wisdom of the time?

Twenty years after the L.A. riots and a month after Rodney King’s death. we still have news about racial discrimination by banks–but also stories about how the aftermath of the riots led to real change in South Central (now “officially” just South L.A.).

My hunch is that Home Savings had a record about the same as its competitors. A colleague who grew up in East L.A. remembers none of this ornate art at his family’s Home Savings branch, suggesting that these commissions may have remained in affluent neighborhoods.

But there is the history, still incomplete, of the Compton branch from 1958. And there is this sculpture, by Vertis Hayes, once at the Home Savings branch, at Vermont and Slauson near the heart of South Central.

Hayes was born in Atlanta in 1911 but moved to New York City to study art in the early 1930s. His most famous work was leading the team which created WPA murals for the Harlem Hospital Center. Hayes headed the Federal Art Center in Memphis, Tennessee, from 1938 to 1939, and held a number of teaching jobs, including after moving to Los Angeles in 1951, where he taught at California State College and Immaculate Heart College. He died in Los Angeles in 2000.

While the Compton branch showed (white?) workers, the South Central sculpture shows a family group–a common Home Savings choice–but, in this case, African Americans wearing what seems to be traditional African accessories, including a taqiyah (sometimes called a kufi) for the man, a traditional Islamic cap adopted by various Afrocentric / Black Arts supporters in the United States. But I haven’t seen a picture of the whole sculpture, so I can’t be sure of the whole theme.

This Home Savings branch was destroyed in the L.A. riots–as was the headquarters branch of Broadway Federal, a bank founded in the (informal) Jim Crow era of California history by architect Paul Revere Williams to serve those minority communities not served by other banks. Home Savings committed to rebuilding both  branches and utilizing minority-owned construction firms— though the resulting Home Savings building is a concrete-block rush job, with metal gates to pull down over the glass doors at night.

And the sculpture is gone. I can’t find any traces of where (nor much about Hayes, who lived and worked in Los Angeles for many decades, even in the Pacific Standard Time show at the California African American Museum.) Anyone have a lead?

Thanks for the image to George Underwood, who worked for Galaxy Advertising when it was the in-house firm for H.F. Ahmanson & Co. printing and thought up the idea of using Home Savings art and architecture to decorate the annual calendars.

Hello everyone! I hope you enjoyed the Fourth of July.

On my jaunt through the Orange County and Los Angeles beach cities last week, I drove by this former Bank of America building designed by Paul Revere Williams, the first African American member of the AIA and a distinguished Los Angeles architect of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. (Read more about Williams’s remarkable career here and in two recentbooks by his granddaughter, Karen E. Hudson.)

The Millard Sheets Studio mosaics for the Van Nuys and Long Beach branches are done in a different style than the contemporaneous Home Savings work — and there is a comment in the studio correspondence saying that “if mural is executed in the United States add $10 per square foot,” suggesting that Williams, Sheets, or both had connections in Mexico, Italy, or elsewhere that could do the fabrication. (It is unclear where these were fabricated.)

Ben Mayer and Millard Sheets Studio for Paul Revere Williams, Bank of America, Van Nuys, 1965.

In terms of style, both Van Nuys and Long Beach seem closely aligned with mosaics done by Ben Mayer, including those from the Norwalk Public Library on friend-of-the-blog Vickey Kalambakal’s site — check them out! The timing matches the period when Millard Sheets was becoming more involved with Interpace’s ceramic tile projects, and he seems to have broken any exclusivity deal he had had with Ahmanson and Home Savings. Mayer’s name appears in the Sheets Studio invoices for the Van Nuys location, but the affinity is also evident in the Long Beach work. UPDATE: Another colleague, Lillian Sizemore, has done research to confirm Ben Mayer was the creator, with Maurice Sands listed as design and color consultant, and has found that the Long Beach branch opened June 20, 1967. Interestingly, the (earlier?) Van Nuys branch has a Sheets signature, the Long Beach branch does not.

Ben Mayer and Millard Sheets Studio for Paul Revere Williams, Bank of America, Van Nuys, 1965.

While the Van Nuys branch is still a Bank of America branch, the Long Beach building was most recently a music venue, and is again under renovation. One hopes the importance of the architect and the connections present in the mosaic to local and regional history will help preserve this building and its artwork.

M. Danko of socal-bank-art.blogspot.com has images that far outpace my own.

Anita Thomas, Denis O’Connor Studio, and MosaicArt di D.Colledani, Home Savings, Lancaster, 1986-1987. Photo by James Daniel of Daniel Designs

As promised a few weeks ago, we are back with the details about the other space-themed Home Savings mosaic, in Lancaster, California, in the Antelope Valley.

Here the “triptych” design is not chonological, but shows a farmer and a rancher, an orange tree and some cow grazing, flanking the central image of Edwards Air Force Base, with test pilots and planes from many eras, spanning the twentieth century. (Lancaster also has an Aerospace Walk of Honor, profiling pilots and displaying aircraft.)

This is the only Home Savings design by Anita Thomas, a Scripps and Claremont Graduate School graduate who was married at one time to Denis O’Connor. As she described it, “The process was fairly straightforward. The history of the area was simple to track down, then it was a matter of deciding how to organize it.” After input from Denis and Sue Hertel, the mosaic was fabricated by MosaicArt di D.Colledani in Milan, Italy, near the heart of world mosaic-smalti production and instruction.

When the mosaic was installed, the space shuttle reflected the current state-of-the-art in aerospace exploration; now, with the shuttles retired and making their way to museums around the country, this image reflects nostalgia for that recent past as well.

Thanks to Shel Weisbach, James Daniel of Daniel Designs, Kevin O’Connor, Alba Cisneros, Anita Thomas, and the Denis O’Connor Papers at the Huntington Library  for helping to confirm information about the mosaic. (Even a short post can require a lot of research!)

***

Yesterday I enjoyed interviewing Marlo Bartels about his work for Home Savings and other corporate public-art clients, and I came back via a second tour of Orange County Home Savings locations, along the coast in Newport, Long Beach, Rolling Hills Estates, Redondo Beach, Torrance, and South L.A. More images from those locations will appear here soon, along with updates to the definitive list. Be in touch with any tips on others to interview or unique stories to tell.