QuintGallery.com

Quint Contemporary Art has had several addresses in the past 30 years, but wherever it has been — downtown, Mission Hills, the Miramar area or La Jolla — the gallery has been a space you just had to visit. My history of seeing shows there spans 24 years; and from the first, I sensed that Mark Quint was the real thing, with his enormous passion for art and artists.

Happily, that intuition proved correct. But who knew that he was going to be able to sustain his space(s) for so long, in a town where collectors of serious contemporary art aren’t exactly plentiful?

It isn’t easy to pinpoint how he has accomplished this. But there are certain qualities that have worked in his favor: a keen eye for artists of vision and substance; the desire to stick with them; a curiosity about new artists; and a personality that appeals to museum professionals, collectors and, yes, critics, too. He was also willing to bring artists from afar for residencies (in partnership with Michael Krichman), which yielded a string of memorable shows.

Fifty seems like a reasonable number of artists for an exhibition meant to offer a mini-panorama of the San Diego art scene. It should be said that this show at Quint Contemporary Art is not a look at the wider regional scene that would encompass Tijuana; its title, “Homing In: An Exhibition of 50 San Diego Artists,” can be taken literally, for the most part.

One of the artists – and a very good one – does live in Tijuana: Iana Quesnell. But she emerged and went to grad school in San Diego, so the name of the exhibition doesn’t mislead much.

There’s a single work by each artist on view at Quint, and one might suspect that the show would be weighted toward the local ones that usually show there. You’d be correct in this line of thinking.

Nonetheless, Quint has long shown at least some of the best local artists, such as Jean Lowe, Kim MacConnel, Patricia Patterson and Jay Johnson. Happily, many of the picks from outside its stable in “Homing In” are also good ones.

The work of San Diego’s top tier contemporary artists hasn’t been seen in the same place at the same time since 1985, when the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art presented  “A San Diego Exhibition: Forty-Two Emerging Artists.”  

Quint Contemporary Art brings this long drought to an end with HOMING IN: An Exhibition of 50 San Diego Artists. The show presents paintings, photographs, video and sculpture; features abstraction and representation; and offers moods ranging from hot to cool – all in formats less than 24” wide due to the limited space available.  

Some of the exhibition’s artists are in their fifties, sixties and older; and were part of the La Jolla Museum’s survey nearly a quarter century ago.  The exhibition’s younger artists, those in their twenties, thirties, and forties may have no recollection whatsoever of that earlier survey.   

This exhibition is organized by gallery director Ben Strauss-Malcolm and in a move that’s unusual in the competitive world of contemporary art galleries he invited many artists affiliated with other local galleries to participate in order to make the exhibition more reflective of the full gamut of work coming out of studios in the San Diego region.