By Vivienne Calloway
On the afternoon of August 8, 1927, nineteen artists climbed the steps of a modest board-and-batten cottage at the corner of Seventh and Lincoln in Carmel-by-the-Sea. The house was called Gray Gables, and it belonged to two painters, Josephine Culbertson and Ida Johnson, whose shared home and studio had long been an open door for the village’s creative colony. The nineteen who gathered that day had come to Carmel from all corners of the world — trained in Paris and Philadelphia, New York and San Francisco — and they wanted three things, which they wrote down before the meeting ended: to advance art and cooperation among artists, to secure a permanent exhibition space, and to promote greater fellowship between artists and the public.
By the time the fog came in that evening, the Carmel Art Association existed. Ninety-nine years later, it still does — in the same town, sustained by the same idea, in a gallery on Dolores Street that the founders’ own hands helped build. It is the oldest continuously operating gallery in Carmel and one of the oldest nonprofit artist cooperatives in the United States. And as of this August, it stands exactly one year from its centennial.
The Town That Elected Art
The Association did not invent Carmel’s identity as an art town; it consolidated one that had been gathering for decades. Writers had been praising the beauty of Carmel’s dunes, cypresses, and sea since the 1860s, but the colony itself took root at the turn of the century, and swelled after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire sent painters south in search of refuge and new studios. Their chief exhibition space in those years was a gallery in the old Del Monte Hotel in Monterey.
The cooperative spirit arrived by increments. In 1912, the painters Mary DeNeale Morgan and Ferdinand Burgdorff printed business cards listing the days their studios were open to visitors and distributed them to Carmel’s few stores and two hotels. “Our ‘open studios’ every Saturday afternoon,” Burgdorff would later write in his memoir, “was the very earliest form of the idea that eventually became the Carmel Art Association.” Group exhibitions followed in the old Arts and Crafts Hall, and when those shows began drawing overflow crowds, the artists knew the interest was there. Gray Gables was simply the moment the village’s long conversation about art acquired a signature.
The roster that assembled under the Association’s banner in those early years reads today like a syllabus of California art history. Armin Hansen, painter of the Monterey fishing fleet. Francis McComas, whose watercolors drew favorable comparison to John Singer Sargent. The Irish-born colorist John O’Shea, described in his day as a “creative comet.” Henrietta Shore, of whom the photographer Edward Weston — her friend and Carmel neighbor — said she was “an artist by destiny.” And Paul Dougherty, the marine painter about whom no less a figure than Winslow Homer remarked: “Now I can lay down my brushes and know the great work will be carried on.” No fewer than nine early members were elected to the National Academy of Design. Decades later, even Salvador Dalí — a Monterey Peninsula resident during the 1940s — was counted among the Association’s early artist members, generously lending his time to jury the student exhibitions the CAA sponsored each spring.
The Mortgage on a Silver Platter
The Association’s first home was rented: a room in the Court of the Seven Arts Building at Lincoln and Ocean, thirty dollars a month, soon raised to forty. One of its first exhibitions there, a December show of miniature paintings called “Thumb-Box Sketches,” proved so popular that it became an annual tradition — one the gallery keeps to this day, each December, ninety-odd years on.
But the founders wanted walls of their own, and in 1933, in the depths of the Depression, they got them — through an act of collective sacrifice that still defines the institution. Each artist member donated five paintings to a fundraising drawing to retire the mortgage on the building on Dolores Street between Fifth and Sixth. Burgdorff recorded the celebration with evident relish: “It was a gala night when the mortgage was burned… The mortgage was brought in on a silver platter in the shape of a cone. The cone was lighted from the top, and it was with great joy that we saw it die into ashes.”
The volunteer labor did not end with the fundraising. O’Shea and his wife landscaped the Dolores Street garden and planted everything themselves. On December 10, 1933, the annual Thumb-Box show opened in the Association’s new — and permanent — home. By February 1934 the articles of incorporation were adopted, officers elected with the artist and educator Pedro J. Lemos as first president, dues set at one dollar a month, and the books showed $198.24 in the bank and a building free of debt. “Newer generations,” Burgdorff wrote, “will never know or fully appreciate the sacrifice of good painting time or the physical effort that went into the building of the Carmel Art Association Gallery… The CAA stands as a memorial to them.”
A Living Cooperative
What is most remarkable about the Carmel Art Association, a year shy of one hundred, is how little its essential character has changed. Visitors — some 16,000 a year, from around the globe — still climb the Carmel stone steps and pass through the sculpture garden to galleries whose exhibitions turn over every month. Admission to membership still runs through a rigorous jury of the applicant’s peers, on standards descended directly from those the founders set. And the house style of hospitality endures, captured in an early description the Association still honors: a gallery that is “a hospitable, open door visiting place for all comers,” and a sales gallery only when a visitor finds something so appealing that he feels he must take it away with him.
Since that August afternoon in 1927, more than 550 artists have belonged to the Association; today it represents more than eighty of the region’s finest working painters, sculptors, and printmakers, exhibiting — and living — within driving distance of the same coastline that drew Hansen and Shore and O’Shea. The building has been renovated and expanded twice, first in 1937 and again in the 1960s, but the address has never changed, and neither has the premise: that artists are stronger in fellowship than in solitude, and that a town and its painters can keep faith with each other for a very long time.
Next August 8, the Carmel Art Association will mark one hundred years — and it has already begun imagining the wall of portraits that will honor the pioneers of Gray Gables when the day arrives. The ninety-ninth year, though, deserves its own toast. Wander in some afternoon; the door on Dolores Street is open seven days a week, as it has been through a Depression, a world war, and every tide of fashion since the nineteen came down the steps of Gray Gables into the fog, having quietly founded the institution that made Carmel an art town for keeps.
The Carmel Art Association is located on Dolores Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, Carmel-by-the-Sea, open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Exhibitions change monthly; carmelart.org.
