From April 23 to April 26, the San Diego Museum of Art celebrated its centennial anniversary alongside its annual Art Alive fundraiser. The four-day floral exhibition featured special galleries, interactive art-making events, and pop-ups around San Diego. Nearly 80 local floral designers contributed to Art Alive this year, creating floral interpretations of the gallery’s pieces that explore what art “can be” and eliciting viewers’ artistic sensibilities.
The heart of this “centennial soirée” lies in the special exhibition “Cafés and Cabarets: The Spectacular Art Of Toulouse-Lautrec,” which depicts the vivid scene of 19th-century Parisian nightlife. The exhibition sits on the museum’s second floor in gallery 18 and will be on display until Sept. 20. However, the accompanying flower arrangements in this gallery and the entire museum were exclusively for Art Alive.
Walking around the SDMA’s dozens of rooms, the fresh scent of flowers wafted in the air. As I wandered through the “Art of the Americas” and “Pearls from the Ocean of Contentment” galleries, I noticed the unique choices each floral designer made based on the source art piece’s medium. Some focused on highlighting the shapes of a sculpture or enhancing the colors of a painting. Others enlivened the dynamic interactions between various subjects of a mural.
“[Each floral design] allows visitors to see the art in a new way,” Kate Merena, associate director of membership at SDMA, said in an interview with The UCSD Guardian. “You’ve got this sort of circular way of experiencing that art and looking at it, which I think really gets visitors thinking. It can be surprising; it can be evocative; it can be emotional; it can be funny.”
The poignancy of these words hit me again and again in my conversations with other attendees who also appreciated how resonantly arrangements captured original pieces. A few designs particularly struck a chord with me, especially in the “Art of East Asia” gallery. Fine detailing of wooden sculptures, bronze bodhisattvas, and porcelain vases challenged these floral designers, but they rose to the occasion. The subtle colors and reinterpretive silhouettes evoked their reference pieces. Judi Yeager Lang’s floral interpretation of “Two Camels” — an uncredited sculpture from the Tang Dynasty — accentuated the vibrant colors of the original and emulated the two-humped silhouette of the Central Asian mammal.
Perhaps the most alluring of the floral designs on the first floor was Susan and Michael Gable’s take on Jules Tavernier’s “Kīlauea Caldera, Sandwich Islands,” a vivid painting of the inside of a volcano. The floral designers’ use of ghost wood mimicked the shape of the volcano’s winding rocks while bright orange flowers evoked the fiery lava of the original piece. The Gables’ design won first place in the Members’ Choice Award along with the Docents’ Choice Award, which were chosen on the first day of the event at the member-exclusive preview.
I made my way upstairs to “Cafés and Cabarets.” Featuring a vast array of lithograph posters of young men and women dancing in Toulouse-Lautrec’s free-spirited art style, the fragile condition of century-old paper and lithograph printings means these pieces are rarely out on public display. In fact, while the museum has owned these pieces since the ‘80s, the last time they were exhibited was over 30 years ago; after this year, it may be another 30 until audiences can publicly view this artwork again.
“Toulouse-Lautrec works are iconic — when you see them, you know them,” Merena said. “He was one of the first people to kind of create the poster that gets sort of pasted up and is intended to be this ephemeral work of art that doesn’t last. And so, the fact that we, 130 years later, still have some of these works, it’s pretty remarkable.”
I was instantly sent back in time the minute I walked into the gallery. Nancy Hagen Baldwin’s interpretation of Toulouse-Lautrec’s “The Simpson Chain” evoked the momentum of the late 19th century’s bicycle craze. She mimics the roundness of the bicycle wheel through circular props to create movement in her arrangement, and this thoughtful floral design spoke to the motif of motion Toulouse-Lautrec emphasized in his art. The vivacity of his collection encapsulated the entire event’s upbeat energy, and the exhibition was a wonderful choice to define Art Alive. The event managed to combine local artists with SDMA’s diverse collections, creating a unique fundraiser that all viewers could enjoy.
“The empathy that is built through the experience of art is critical, now more than ever,” Merena said of the event’s impact. “Being able to serve the community in that way, to be that conduit for folks to have a deeper understanding of themselves, of other people, of other cultures, is truly a privilege. And so, my hope is just that we get to continue to do this for another 45 years and beyond that.”
