art beat / By Katherine Almy

First Street Gallery abides

(July 5, 2007)  If you’re like me and you enjoy watching artists develop from the earliest stages of their careers, you’ll be interested in the exhibition at the First Street Gallery this month. The Young Alumni 2007 show features works by 17 recent graduates: paintings, photographs, prints and clay sculptures by artists with lots of energy and talent.Gallery staff was still working on installing the show when I was there this week. I went to talk to gallery director Jack Bentley about rumors that have been flying around recently regarding the gallery’s future.

Humboldt State University did something unique nine years ago when it opened an art gallery in Eureka, eight miles south of the school’s main campus. HSU has several other galleries on campus, but the First Street Gallery’s location, in Old Town, provides a different dynamic. Far removed from the comfort of the campus’ ivory towers and cast adrift on the ocean of the public sphere, the gallery serves different functions. It gets academic art shows out to people who would not get onto the campus to see them, and it forces the gallery and its staff to think like vital participants of the community as a whole, and in the process to bridge something Bentley describes as a “perceptual town/gown divide.”

First Street Gallery student assistants Camille Zazou and Erica Botkin work with gallery director Jack Bentley hanging a oil painting by Tom Harley titled, “Post Beauty” for the Young Alumni 2007 show opening this weekend.

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A number of community members who frequent the gallery and make it a destination point on Arts Alive! Saturdays have come to depend on it as a link to the greater world of contemporary art. As a part of an academic institution it has a unique capacity to “provide a publicly accessible venue for art made by regional, national and international artists as well as the faculty, staff, students and alumni of Humboldt State University,” as declared in the gallery mission statement.

There seems to be consensus that that mission is being fulfilled, which makes the rumor that the budget crisis at HSU could result in the loss of funding for the gallery all the more concerning. So where did this rumor that the gallery might be going away come from?

“There were two events,” said Bentley. One was a statement in a report presented by Dr. Manuel Esteban, a former HSU provost brought in as a consultant to examine and make suggestions regarding the school’s budget woes. He noted that “HSU spends more than most campuses in the CSU on museums and galleries.”

“That raised a red flag,” said Bentley, who argues that the statement is misleading because many CSU colleges only have galleries that are funded within their academic budget.

Then there was a report from the University Budget Committee, a group of faculty, staff and students who compiled a report ranking the importance of various university departments and programs. The committee was unanimous in placing First Street Gallery and the campus radio station KHSU dead last in importance to the school’s central mission.

The committee’s recommendation was that the gallery, along with KHSU and the off-campus Natural History Museum, be defunded over a period of three years. The recommendations of the UBC were not binding, but be that as it may, the press duly reported them, and the rumor that the three institutions were doomed took on a life of its own.

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