The Latest: AAA Westways Feature on Saving the Art of Home Savings

Millard Sheets portrait, from the newest Westways magazine

Here’s the latest from a friend of the blog, Vickey Kalambakal, on Sheets’s work, and celebrating four of the works around the state: “Saving the Art of Home Savings,” for the September 2010 issue of Westways.

She discusses the partnership between Ahmanson and Sheets that created the string of banks bearing many of the iconic images, and the relationship between the Pomona bank tower and the pedestrian mall just discussed in the Image of the Week last Friday.

Brevity meant Vickey kept narrowly to these four images, with a concise description of how the banks and their art came to be, and how Tony Sheets, Millard’s son, sees the changing patterns of banking and bank security affecting the art’s display. But there is a great sense of those connections between art and place, history and community, on display there.

Vickey mentions the brochures that were available at the Hollywood bank, to identify and describe the artwork; it was titled “From Oranges to Oscars,” and I have recently seen a copy. I’ll be posting about it in the weeks ahead.