Carnegie Art Museum

There are a few perennial sources for getting a sense of the diversity of artistic activity going on in these parts. Group shows, while inevitably beholden to the biases of their jurors, offer a valuable finger on the pulse of what Ventura County artists are up to--and who they are. For six years, the Carnegie Art Museum has hosted what it calls "A Classic Competition," a friendly competition, really, now showing throughout the museum.

The protege/mentor tradition in art is deeply entrenched, despite the basic truth that making fine art is a fairly solitary business. But interaction is especially relevant within fine art photography, a medium in which artists can easily create portraits of each other, engage in shop talk about art and chemicals and exert influences.

When new Police Chief Art Lopez arrived fresh from the LAPD, some of the first concerns he heard from his officers went straight to the heart: the Oxnard Police Department badge. In Los Angeles, police officers carry a time-honored, if occasionally tarnished, symbol of sturdiness and reliability: a gold shield studded with an image of L.A.'s stately City Hall.

A recent trip to the East Coast was a reminder that building materials help define an aesthetic. Stone, brick and mortar suggest cultural as much as structural permanence. Walking down big-city streets, past tall edifices and throngs of humanity, makes us part of the roaring, rumbling machinery that drives civilization. In big cities, culture as much as commerce is carved from stone.

Maribel Hernandez, a local artist with a special interest in teaching children the traditional arts and crafts of Mexico, will show how to decorate calaveras, or skulls, at a workshop Saturday. This is a traditional craft--generally employed for the autumn celebration of Dia de los Muertes (Day of the Dead)--where sugar is sculpted and decorated into images of skulls.

It would be hard to imagine a better midsummer day's art exhibition than the carnival of notions now filling Oxnard's Carnegie Art Museum. "Current Devices: The Electro-Mech Art of Andy Schuessler" offers a fine and imaginative example of kinetic art of the plugged-in, whimsical sort, deceptively light in its attitude and eager to bring new life to kitchen appliances.

Ojai-based Alberta Fins is clearly one of those contemporary artists for whom the process of making art is more than a means to an end. The final artwork is, by her reckoning, only partly an artifact: It is also proof of the mental and especially the physical manipulations that have gone into its making. The surfaces tend to look withered, smeared, tattered--yet beautiful in their own ragged, rugged way.

Some people think anything that involves TV watching is the opposite of art. Holly Woolson and Lucinda Naboa, museum educators at the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard, have their own rather upbeat view on this supposed conflict. Operating on the theory, "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em," a few years ago they took to using a video screen at the museum to expand the artistic consciousness of kids.