Cannery Row Studios – Cannery Row Studios has long been known as the last bastion of bohemianism in the South Bay, but in truth, it is far more. The ramshackle old building behind the AES power plant in Redondo Beach has had lives as a railroad lumberyard and a fish storage warehouse, but for the last two decades it has lived up to its John Steinbeck-inspired name as home to a knight’s roundtable of scruffily defiant artists intent on creating beauty against all odds.
Founder Richard Stephens is one of the beach cities’ true artistic heroes. Stephens is a talented painter in his own right – with work ranging from jangling abstraction to portraiture, landscape, and murals – yet he possesses an even rarer gift: he nurtures fellow artists, and in so doing has built an ever-expanding, thriving creative community.
And this is exactly why Cannery Row is more than a last bastion of bohemianism. It’s not some nostalgic relic of a bygone time but rather an ongoing and audacious enterprise. Last year, in a three month span, Cannery Row featured shows by two of the true lions of local arts, Robi Hutas and Wilfred Sarr, who are both in-house artists at the studio. In between the two shows was a show unlike anything the South Bay has seen: Wa, an all-Japanese show co-curated by two more of Cannery Row’s in-house artists, Emiko Wake and John Cantu.
Art at its best can deliver revelation through the unexpected. You don’t expect to walk into a former fish warehouse tucked in between a dirt quarry and a power plant to find some of the most vibrant, cutting-edge art from Tokyo to Torrance. But such was Wa. Wake, a former marketing star from Tokyo who left corporate life to become an artist in America, used many of her former contacts to attract an astonishing array of Japanese artists (Wake herself painted a series of masks that somehow fused traditional and modern Japanese art and were executed with a Matisse-like sense of color and play).
On slate for this year is the much-anticipated first solo show by Cantu (which opens April 16), a talented painter capable both of painting both with an exacting yet somehow haunting realism reminiscent of masters from a century ago and creating wise-guy graphics that are more cutting than anything coming out of West L.A. Shows by Stephens, Hutas, and Sarr are also on tap this year, possibly as well as another iteration of Wa.
As Sarr says, “Far freaking out!” Long live Cannery Row.
Cannery Row, 604 N. Francisca Avenue, Redondo Beach, canneryrowstudios.com
