When workers at the local brand design firm MiresBall would go to art shows, they’d buy a piece, eye another, snag one more. Then they’d purchase pieces from the artists they hired for the firm’s clients. After 20 years, the result was a helter-skelter art collection spilling from the nooks of their old office in Little Italy.
So when they moved up the road, they designated certain walls specifically for displaying the robust art collection.
We went to check it out in our latest installment of “What’s on Your Wall?” — a series that previously included walls in Golden Hill, Encinitas and East County.
You’re reading our weekly collection of San Diego arts news and profiles from our pages and elsewhere: the Arts Report.
Cuts, Proposed and Real:
• Two local theaters cut jobs this week, three at the La Jolla Playhouse and one at Broadway/San Diego. (Union-Tribune)
• Steve Francis, erstwhile mayoral candidate, thinks the city should consider spending less money on arts. (San Diego News Room)
In Other News:
• The 600-pound bronze moose that was part of a slew of statue thefts we mentioned in last week’s Arts Report mysteriously reappeared on the southwestern outskirts of Ramona. (North County Times)
• Making photos of Tijuana’s other facets: an interview with a photojournalist and SDSU grad student living there. (Will Parson’s U-T blog)
• A dustup over nude paintings being denied spots in a public walkway gallery in one of the former Naval Training Center arts buildings drew a crowd to a forum discussion last Wednesday. CityBeat’s Kinsee Morlan, who first wrote about it, concludes in a follow-up post that she doesn’t believe it was “censorship per se.”
• Talking interactivity with the artist behind one of my favorite pieces in the recent Museum of Contemporary of Art San Diego show of local artists, “Here Not There.” (U-T)
• An 80-something local artist climbs the steep stairs into his studio every day; he has a show of new work up at Sushi through June 15. (CityBeat)
Onstage Talk:
• San Diego Opera opened its second opera of the season, “Der Rosenkavalier,” Sunday afternoon to a standing ovation. We stopped by the Civic Theatre in the last days of rehearsal to compile numbers on how many yak-hair wigs are used and how many musicians are in the pit. We brought our partners from NBC San Diego for our weekly video segment, too.
• The Union-Tribune’s James Chute reviewed the opera, as did the L.A. Times’ Mark Swed and SanDiego.com’s Ken Herman. In our comments, Fran Zimmerman says “They don’t call it ‘grand opera’ for no reason.’”
KPBS talked with opera reps about the “opera lover’s opera;” the North County Times interviewed with the starring mezzo-soprano, a woman who must play a boy who plays a girl and back again. UCSD-TV’s Opera Spotlight television piece also took a tour through the production.
(Want to recommend this arts newsletter to someone? They can sign-up here.)
Please contact Kelly Bennett directly at kelly.bennett@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.325.0531 and follow her on Twitter: @kellyrbennett.