You have one of the nicest locations of any art gallery in the area.
“Oh, I think I live in the most beautiful place on earth.”
Andrea Luse says this with a big smile and a laugh. She’s the owner of Ma Griffe Galerie, up the hill from Point Fermin and across from Angel’s Gate Park in San Pedro. The exhibition space is not large, but the building has character and charm, and is adjoined by a garden where tea parties and other special events are held. If we stretch the analogy a little bit, Ma Griffe is to San Pedro what the Huntington is to San Marino. Today, preparations are afoot for a new show that features Redondo Beach artist Charles Perera, and it opens Sunday afternoon.
Working class heroes
“I’m a native of San Pedro,” Luse says; “I was born here. I led an idyllic life in the Palisades where we explored all of Royal Palms and Point Fermin and Cabrillo Beach, and I just couldn’t have asked for a greater upbringing than the one I had.” She attended the elementary school at White’s Point, Dana Junior High, and graduated from San Pedro High School.
“San Pedro has a magnetism that’s hard to explain to people, except those who came here and stayed for a while and then moved on somewhere else, and in their communications say, ‘I miss San Pedro, and I wish I was there.’ We’re out here where the pavement meets the Pacific. You’re not going to drive through San Pedro to get anywhere else.”
San Pedro always seemed a bit dangerous to those who lived outside of the community.
Luse laughs at this remark. “Well, we certainly did have a reputation because of Beacon Street, which sadly was bulldozed by the community redevelopment agency at that time” – none of whose members, she says, could have been familiar with the city. “Of course Beacon Street was known the world over for places like Shanghai Red’s and the Bank Café. We had a reputation for being a tough town. But San Pedro is a working class town with strong organized union ties.
“My dad was a union man, and we grew up in a union household; that was our ethics. My dad impressed upon us that the kind of job that we did was a reflection on the kind of person that we were. If you want people to think you’re a jerk you do a screwed up job; and if you want people to think you’re a pretty cool guy or a pretty cool gal, then you always give 100 percent or more. That was how we grew up, and I think that was an underlying vibe for the entire town.”
You’d never know this from her appearance, or from a casual chat, but Andrea Luse worked as a longshoreman for 25 years. Her brother, who is two years older, ended up as a teacher. Luse remarks with a laugh that her father would have guessed it to be the other way around, with his son as a longshoreman and his daughter as a schoolteacher.
“My parents never restricted me in terms of not allowing me to do something because only boys do that. When we were kids – it seems I was the only girl in the neighborhood – [the boys] wouldn’t let me play because I was a girl. I complained to my dad and he told me, Well, I’m gonna make them let you play, but I don’t want to hear any whining. No whining, no crying. I don’t want to hear about it.
“And so I learned to play with the boys by their rules – which made it easy for me to be a longshoreman because I already had been through my apprenticeship. So I know how to win by their rules.”
Adventures in Wilmington
It’s a warm day, early in March, and we’re drinking cups of coffee and sitting on the porch that overlooks the garden.
I don’t assume you’ve lived right here your whole life?
“No,” Andrea Luse says with a laugh. “I’ve been back and forth between San Pedro and Wilmington. As you can see, I got a long ways away! I’ve lived in every neighborhood in San Pedro, I’m sure, and twice in my life I’ve lived for periods of time in Wilmington. I just think that I have salt water flowing through my veins, so I really have a hard time getting away from the ocean.”
And when she did, where did she go?
“East Texas, where my mother’s family is from. We would either spend Christmas or summer vacation in Texas, practically every year. When they weren’t out here we were back there.”
Summer doesn’t seem like the best time to be in Texas.
“No, it wasn’t,” Luse replies. “We ran around a lot in our underwear and ate watermelon.” She laughs again. “That was basically what we did in the summertime in Texas. Nobody ever went inside the house; everybody was out on the big, screened-in porch because they had fans going and it was cool out there. No, the summer times were brutal in Texas.”
As to how she ended up on this hillside across from Angel’s Gate…
“My late husband and I had purchased a home in Wilmington,” Luse says, “and over the course of a number of years our neighbors had refinanced their homes and moved to other places. And those homes that they had lived in became rentals, and some of the renters were not really conducive to happy relationships in the neighborhood. Then my husband passed away unexpectedly, and I had an incident [in which one of the nearby renters] broken into my home while I was at work.” The police came out, and the intruder was arrested for outstanding warrants. “But from that point forward I never felt comfortable in my own home, so I decided to sell my home in Wilmington and move back to San Pedro because my dad was getting on in years.
“I had come with a real estate agent to look at a different property down the street here. I was kind of annoyed with the agent because we had talked at length about what I was looking for, and this was nothing close. We were coming up the hill on Gaffey, traveling north, and there was a Coldwell Banker real estate sign out in front of this building. And I said, ‘That’s more of what I’m talking about, right here.’ So she pulled to the curb, calls Coldwell Banker, and their agent was down here from Malaga Cove in record time. When we went up to the top of the stairs and walked in… the dining room was just like my grandmother’s house, with a built-in buffet. And that was it. Something just spoke to me at that point: This is it, look no farther.
“I purchased the property in 1999, and I moved in during the first part of 2000.” Later, the tenant who was living in the downstairs area moved out and Luse approached her good friend Lynnè Wewer. “I asked her if she wanted to move in here and use the downstairs studio and this gallery space for her artwork. So that’s how Ma Griffe got started.”
A place to be seen
When did you begin to show other people’s art?
“On Bastille Day, July 14, 2001.” Luse pauses. “We set ourselves free, so to speak.”
These days, Andrea Luse works closely with her creative director, Eva Marie Vargo, who also produces all of the ads, brochures, and promotional designs for Ma Griffe Galerie.
“We started out trying to do one [show] a month,” Luse replies, “and that was too much. I felt like, God, I just got this up; now I’m taking it down. I said, Let’s do quarterly, every three months. But then we noticed right away that people would come in and say, ‘Oh, I saw this; this has been up for a while.’ You don’t want to do that, you don’t want it to get stale. So we decided, well, every two months is good. And it works out okay. Sometimes I find myself rushing a little bit, because I don’t plan too well. [I’m] the world’s greatest procrastinator.”
How do you find your artists?
“I have in the past contacted an artist that someone thought would be a good fit here. And then, of course, I have artists that have referred other artists.” Lastly, Luse says, sometimes local artists, who may have lost their studio or gallery in downtown San Pedro due to the gentrification of the area, “drive by and see me and stop and come in, and ask about hanging their work.”
Tell me about the idea of having tea parties in the garden.
“That evolved out of necessity to try and produce working capital,” Luse says. “We had started to do the teas as a promotional event to bring people into the gallery. And the teas took on a life of their own to the point where most of our income is generated from the special events that we host in the garden to keep the gallery afloat.”
Luse plans to keep Ma Griffe running for as long as possible, but confides that they’re struggling. She doesn’t stop there, however, but goes straight for the jugular of our politicians in Washington, and citing why the economic situation in this country is unlikely to turn around anytime soon. Her visitor applauds the fiery spirit and the ‘60s idealism that she expresses. “We’d take to the streets pretty quick,” she says with a laugh.
There have been some eye-catching shows in her gallery and so how did Luse, who we now know put in quite a stint as a longshoreman, wound up so heavily involved in the arts?
“I come from very creative stock,” she says. “My dad, had the situation been different, probably would have pursued an acting career. He was in a lot of amateur productions prior to World War Two. My mother was an incredible seamstress. She sewed all my clothes and designed most of them.
“I guess my genes were along the creative side more than the practical side. I took art in school and developed a great appreciation for someone who could translate the vision that they had in their mind’s eye to canvas or paper, or into a piece of sculpture. I mean, I have a lot of really cool ideas – or I think they’re really cool ideas – but I haven’t figured out how to get them out of my head and into reality.”
Luse laughs, and continues. “The translation loses a bit when I make the attempt. So, for the most part, I’ve tried to pursue friendships with people who are able to do that.”
On Sunday afternoon from 12 noon to 4 p.m., Andrea Luse and Eva Marie Vargo will be presenting the opening reception for Charles Perera, whose “The Third Eye” (a group of recent paintings) will be on view through April 24 at Ma Griffe Galerie, 3624 S. Gaffey Street, San Pedro. (310) 547-2154 or go to magriffegalerie.com. ER
