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After 36 Years, CSUN Art Gallery Director Packs Up Memories

(NORTHRIDGE, Calif., May 14, 2008) — Louise Lewis has been doing a lot of packing lately as she prepares to move out of the Cal State Northridge Art Galleries that have been her second home for 36 years.

But Lewis, who began as assistant director in 1972 and assumed the gallery directorship in 1980, has spent more time thinking outside the box than packing things into it.

"The Art of Fly-Tying" comes to mind, a show in spring 1989 centered on trout fly ties and staged in conjunction with an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s inventive machines, recreated by an Italian sculptor and brought to the gallery by the CSUN College of Engineering and Computer Science. To top it off, Lewis included an exhibition of art deco toasters organized by art professor Phil Morrison.

"People might think that’s all over the map, fly-ties and machines and toasters," said Lewis, "but in fact Leonardo would have loved the trout fly-ties because of their sense of illusion and verisimilitude. Toasters, mass produced, were art and design coming together in the 1920s.

"Function and art can be symbiotic, as they were in all three of these collections," she said.

In "Body Art Performance," presented in collaboration with the Kinesiology Department in fall 1982, body builders posed on pedestals in the gallery, while guests walked among the "live sculptures" in obvious fascination.

In staging more than 500 exhibitions in her years at CSUN, Lewis has tried not to let the gallery repeat itself, instead stretching its reach "to encompass a more international view of the arts." Haitian, Chinese, Mexican, Nigerian, Japanese, Thai, European, Polynesian, Native American, Brazilian, Central American and Australian Aboriginal arts have been featured at the CSUN galleries. "I believe our diverse student and greater San Fernando Valley constituencies appreciate knowing more about the range of visual expression all around us, everywhere."

For Lewis, that also has meant providing a platform for "underserved areas in art, including women and minorities in art, as well as media that might not have been part of the traditional European canon, such as folk art, photography, video, installations, graphic arts, quilt making."

Her outreach has extended to local high schools as well, with the Annual High School Student Art exhibition that began as a mural competition just after the crushing Northridge earthquake in 1994. "We needed a mural for the front of our trailer on Nordhoff," said Lewis. "Joe Lewis, then chair, suggested we do it every year, but not just with murals. It took off and became a great tradition."

The gallery has managed to thrive in spite of limited funding, Lewis said. "Fortunately, we’re in Los Angeles. So much of what we want to do—whether international or national—we can get here without spending a fortune."

Faculty president from 1992–94, Lewis taught courses on the history of graphic arts, modern and contemporary art, world art and art as political activism. After leaving CSUN at semester’s end, she will continue her work as board member with the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG). Lewis’ last exhibition, "Reclaiming the ‘F’ Word: Posters on International FeminismS," opens at the galleries on June 3.