A collaboration between a curator, hotelier and art advisor is creating a new vision of what a hotel artist residency can be.
Normally, a hotel residence means simply that an artist creates something to be displayed in the hotel. With finding studio space a top challenge for San Diego artists, a residency can provide new opportunities to showcase works and a deeper connection to the area.
But interdisciplinary sculptor Max Hooper Schneider, who has a background in marine biology and landscape architecture, is living out of the Granger Hotel in downtown San Diego — all while conducting intensive research about the city and its ecosystem for a major installation at the University of California, San Diego’s campus.
“(A residency) really builds on a consistent kind of relationship between the artist and the site and the community within it,” said Alessandra Monteczuma, a fine arts professor who sits on the city of San Diego’s Commission for Arts and Culture.
According to the leaders who envisioned the residency, this gets Los Angeles-based Hooper Schneider out of a college campus silo and into the urban heart of San Diego.
“This is a new kind of way of thinking about artists being, ‘in residence,’ because the art is not being made for the hotel. The art is being made for the community, the larger community,” said Jennifer Findley, who spearheads the residency program.
“UCSD can be — although such a place of fomenting ideas — still very idealized,” Findley added. “San Diego’s downtown is a little more raw and real, what a lot of San Diegans are experiencing in their everyday lives, too.”
For artist Hooper Schneider, the interior of the historic hotel, dynamic location and art events have broken him out of ritualistic workdays and exposed him to the city’s rhythms and character.
“I used to think San Diego meant ‘La Jolla,’ but living in downtown San Diego has expanded my naive imaginary into something rougher and more kaleidoscopic,” said Hooper Schneider. “There is a juxtaposition of grit, border commerce, edenic surf culture, and world-renowned academic cul-de-sacs that I find thrilling… This type of urban education has energized my artistic process.”
Although he is creating art for UCSD’s campus, being embedded in San Diego culture means the piece will speak to more than the bubble of academics and students on the campus.
“(Artists in residence) get the opportunity to be fully immersed in San Diego, and so that will, ultimately, come through in some of the works and connect to people here, instead of — as it has happened with a lot of public art — being sort of this foreign object that comes and lands somewhere and it doesn’t really relate to the context or the people there,” said Jessica Berlanga Taylor, who heads UCSD’s Stuart Collection.
Since its founding in 1981, the Stuart Collection has commissioned 22 major sculptures for UCSD’s campus. It includes the teetering house atop the engineering building (“Falling Star“) and a bird sculpture that inspired the annual Sun God festival, named, appropriately, “Sun God.”
Hooper Schneider is part of Taylor’s new Emerging Artists Program, helping less-established artists create their first permanent public art installation. His Granger Hotel residency will be followed by Mexico City-based artist collective RojoNegro and fashion designer Carla Fernández.
“It’s these collaborations with the local context that make the work we do more meaningful for everyone who’s able to enjoy it,” Taylor said. “The fact that he can come and go and stay at the Granger makes the whole project more endemic to San Diego.”
Granger Hotel owner Kevin Mansour believes his may be the only hotel in the region with dedicated art studio space.
“I’m not aware of a hotel in San Diego or anywhere that has space that actually artists can work and build sculpture,” he said. “We actually have space in the hotel for Max and for other artists to be able to play and create and have fun.”
Findley curated art for the Granger Hotel, including a piece from Hooper Schneider, for communal spaces at the guest-only hotel. She believes having pieces from artists as high-profile as Hooper Schneider in a setting where people are drinking coffee, having video conferences, or taking meetings is a necessary rebuke to the “white cube” aesthetic that exists in many art galleries and museums.
“(Art) isn’t something so rarefied that it can’t exist with you in your everyday life,” Findley said.
To both Mansour and Taylor, the collaboration with Findley means that their institutions, whether a hotel or college campus, can grow as arts and culture destinations for San Diegans.
The fact that San Diego is less established as an art city, like Los Angeles or New York City, actually gives them more freedom to try new things since there is not a well-trodden path that keeps artists confined by tradition.
“We can invent and come up with these new models of collaboration and new ways of doing things and of thinking about community and art and what that means for future generations,” Taylor said.
Without the strong art markets of Los Angeles, Alessandra Moctezuma noted that much of San Diego’s support for the arts comes from public funding and, more recently, philanthropy.
“The more that we make people realize that art is an integral part of our society, the more that you will have different institutions, whether it be private or public institutions, be willing to support artists,” Moctezuma said.
Mansour thinks bringing together the hospitality industry, academia, and art will offer long-lasting benefits for the region.
“We think this is going to put San Diego on the global stage as it deserves to be. This is a maturity. It’s going to take many years to build,” Mansour said. “We’re planting seeds now that we hope will inspire others.”
For now, hotel guests and coffee pop-up Solana Coffee Co. customers can see the Everything Touches art show at the Granger Hotel alongside aspects of Hooper Schneider’s creation process.
