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John Spiak still climbs up and down the stairs of ASU Art Museum faster than his kid.
The museum’s former curator was in Phoenix in February to reconnect with friends and the local art scene, and when we caught up with him, he was greeted by most everyone he bumped into.
Spiak left his post as curator in August after 17 years to
cut his teeth as top dog at a major university art center. (The museum officially begins its search for a new curator this week.)
He’s now Director
and Chief Curator of Grand Central Art Center at Cal State-Fullerton in his hometown of Santa Ana.
Spiak says his new job is to start the process of helping Santa Ana discover its own artistic identity, and to do so, he’s bringing a lot of skills and goals (and artists) from ASU Art Museum to Grand Central: building community, crossing disciplines, making art assessable, and getting up-and-coming artists into the fray.
For example, Spiak plans to fly Paul Ramirez Jonas
in from New York to explore a residency program similar to Social Studies, an interactive artist residency and arts research
series that began during Spiak’s time at ASU. Artist Brent Green, a favorite from Spiak’s ASU Art Museum days, should have an
exhibition as well.
Santa Ana is a great place to execute this vision, he says,
given the supportive arts scene. “The thing that surprised me the most was […]
people came and were really spending time with the work,” Spiak says of his
first art opening at Grand Central. “It’s not just a cruising scene, you know?”
He continues that his new stomping grounds are like downtown
Phoenix in many ways — scattered, gentrified, but creative and promising — but
“whereas the arts scene is kind of on the fringe of downtown [Phoenix], in
Santa Ana it’s really in the center.”
“Everybody just seems really eager to work with you,” Spiak
says. “Unlike other downtowns, it just has this authenticity to it.”
But things aren’t all golden in Orange County. Spiak
describes downtown Santa Ana having a cultural “border” between the arts
district and a neighboring third-gen Latino shopping district.
“There was a lot of fear, a lot of conflict going on between
those two districts,” he says, “and I want to bring those two districts
together.”
Spiak says he noticed opportunity when hearing complaints in
the arts district about the dozens of Quinceañera shops in the Latino district.
Spiak asked how that was worse than the shopping plaza down the street.
“I don’t know the difference between the hundreds of
To do that, he’s bringing in Phoenix-based, Venezuelan artist Saskia Jorda to
attempt an outreach arts program similar to Gregory Sale‘s Social Studies project on Arizona prisons last year.
“It’s creating entry points for art that individuals are
more comfortable with,” Spiak explains. “We’re speaking the language of the
individual … through that, it educates everybody, and we can have a real
conversation.”
Spiak shoos away the idea that his game plan will face much
resistance in Santa Ana: “No! Now I’m the director, so I get to make the rules
and dictate the direction of the institution and get things rolling.” He says
that immediately, he found the Latino community, city council, and local
businesses eager and open to work with Grand Central’s new vision — even the cops are down.
It doesn’t hurt that Spiak is already a familiar face around
town. When Grand Central opened in 1999, Spiak had “hard hat tours” of the
three-level, 45,00 sq. ft. space and went on to guest-curate shows there. His annual Short Film &
Video Festival traveled there as well,
partly because Santa Ana is his hometown.
“[Grand Central] is five minutes from where I grew up, and
two minutes from where my grandparents lived,” Spiak says. “So it’s a downtown
I walked around as a kid.”
So, basically, there’s no reason for John Spiak to miss The
Valley of the Sun … right?
“Oh, no, I miss ASU a lot!” he counters. “I miss that camaraderie
we had [at the museum].”
If you could say one bad thing about Spiak, it’s that he
refuses to say anything bad about anything or anyone else. He’s even diplomatic when
discussing his departure from ASU.
“It’s just a different opportunity,” Spiak says of Santa Ana.
“I was just, in a sense, the low person on the totem pole here. It was
maybe time for me to grow up a little bit and take some more responsibility.”
After some cajoling, he goes on about the split:
“There was never a project I wanted to do that didn’t get
realized here, but there’s a difference between having full control of the
institution and not having full control of the institution–and seeing if you
can do it.”
Before he leaves to check out a multinational exhibition at
Step Gallery across the street, we ask Spiak how long he
plans to ride the gravy train at Cal State-Fullerton.
He laughs, then says hopefully a long time. “It’s a place
I’d like to retire from, if things go well. Maybe it’s a question of how long
they’ll have me.”
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