Museum of Sonoma County honors 35 artists from its 35-year-old collection

With museums closed due to the coronavirus pandemic for most of last year, assembling new exhibitions, even for online presentation, became problematic.

“We’ve had to be creative and adjust and figure out how to continue,” said Jeff Nathanson, executive director and art curator of the Museum of Sonoma County.

For 2020, the museum, which opened in 1985, had planned to celebrate its 35th anniversary with a yearlong slate of special events.

“All of those plans were thwarted by COVID. We were closed for three-fourths of the year,” Nathanson said.

Beyond that, stay-home restrictions posed a challenge to assembling any major exhibition.

“Loans of artwork from other museums, galleries and artists were blocked by COVID,” Nathanson explained.

The solution was to be found in the museum’s own basement and storage areas.

“Our museum has a collection of more than 18,000 objects. Many of them have been seldom seen by the public in recent years,” the director said.

So Nathanson and his staff delved into the museum’s own treasure trove to create the new exhibit, “35: Thirty-Five Artists for Thirty-Five Years,” which opened online at museumsc.org last month and continues through March. When pandemic restrictions are lifted, it also will be open to the public at the museum in downtown Santa Rosa.

The show features multiple sculptures and paintings by 35 of the artists represented in the museum’s permanent collection. Rather than trying pick one artist for each year, the museum staff aimed to choose representative samples from the entire collection.

Undoubtedly the most famous artists on the roster are Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose nearly 25-mile-long “Running Fence” was completed in Sonoma County in 1976.

“Christo is one of the more important artists in our collection. We have one of the largest collections of his artifacts of any in the United States,” Nathanson said.

In 2001, the late Tom Golden, a local Christo supporter and collaborator, donated to the museum his collection of more than 100 original drawings, sculptures, collages and photographs tracing the careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Golden died in 2002.

“A significant portion of the Tom Golden collection was organized into a traveling exhibit, which is still on the road and currently in Florida,” Nathanson said. “Our show includes recently acquired Christo items and additional Christo works from our collection.”

The newly acquired pieces are a caftan made of fabric from the “Running Fence” and collages by Christo.

Another artist represented in “35: Thirty-Five Artists for Thirty-Five Years” is Maurice Lapp, who was a longtime painting teacher at Santa Rosa Junior College until he died, in 2014.

“Maurice Lapp was a much-loved teacher here,” Nathanson said. “There are other teachers in this show. Maria de los Angeles, who is from Santa Rosa and had a solo exhibition here in 2019, now teaches at Pratt Institute in New York. Kurt Kemp recently retired from Sonoma State University, where he taught drawing and printmaking. The educational aspect of this show is important to us.”

The exhibit also emphasizes some large sculptures from the permanent collection that are not often on display, including “Errant Levity (The Jockey)” by Robert Williams and the bright pink “Nobody’s Poodle” by Pat Lenz.

“COVID presented serious challenges, and we had to look for new opportunities,” Nathanson said. “One was to look at what we have in our collection. It took weeks of research and looking at our database.”

It was a chance to share the collection as a resource that even local art lovers might not be aware of, the director said.

“A lot of people don’t realize that we are a serious collecting museum and an associate of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., which means we follow best practices for acquiring and maintaining artworks,” he explained. “We couldn’t keep our associate status without doing that.”

Even though the museum has a large collection, the quest for new acquisitions will continue.

“In the future, we will be aware of allowing people to view parts of our permanent collection,” Nathanson said. “And we are looking to diversify our collection, including women artists and artists of color from the North Bay and Bay Area region.”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On Twitter @danarts.