By Ed Goldman
40 OVER 40? ARCHIVAL GALLERY’S FOUR-DECADE MILESTONE, “TOP 40,” RUNS AUGUST 3-26
If you want to stroll through a capsule history of Sacramento’s Second Saturday—and the artists and gallery owner who help continue to make it happen year after year—pop on over to Archival Gallery this month for its 40-year anniversary.
The show, aptly called “Top 40,” runs from August 3 through 26. And don’t miss the Second Saturday Public Celebration from 5-8 p.m. on August 12. Archival is at 3223 Folsom Blvd. in East Sacramento.
“This is a celebration featuring 40 artists who’ve been an important part of our growth—and who have, in many cases, started their own fine-art careers through the Gallery,” says owner-founder D Oldham Neath, who’s also known for her CBS-TV gigs as Sacramento’s Art Lady, this website’s tsar and her many years of hosting the KVIE-TV on-air art auction.
Archival Gallery began life as Archival Framing, an in-house service of the Michael Himovitz Gallery in downtown Sacramento. Oldham worked closely with Himovitz over the years, helping him and a handful of fellow gallery owners start the capital’s now-iconic Second Saturday. It was, for a long time, a glorious monthly event with a triple purpose: to give the region’s artists respectable venues to display their work, to provide collectors with safe, creative spaces to view new and often provocative art and to cultivate buyers in a social, no-pressure setting.
But things changed. Before long, non-gallery businesses, noting the sheer mass of attendees on Second Saturday, began to display and sell work off their walls that rarely qualified as fine art, much less art at all. As I wrote in my daily Sacramento Business Journal column in March of 2017, “In the past few years, it’s evolved, if that’s the right word, into a street party and/or pub-crawl, depending on your sensibilities. In many cases, the art’s become secondary.”
But then I relaxed into it, coming to understand that this once-staid city now had an additional, regular “happening”—its own destination event that was largely social and, thank God, apolitical.
I have no idea how my own work managed to squeak in with the featured artists of Archival’s Top 40 event, but admit to being more than a little thrilled to have one of my paintings included with the works and likes of the following:
Al Farrow, the late Arthur Sordillo, Carol Mott-Binkley, Carrie Cottini, Cindy Wilson, Corey Okada, Cynthia Hipkiss, Dawn Pedersen, Davy Fiveash, DL Thomas, the late Eric Dahlin, Eric Wyss, Fred Gordon, Galelynn Williams, Gary Dinnen, Hilary Von Joo, John Stuart Berger, Kiny McCarrick, the late Laureen Landau, Lee Kavaljian, Leslie McCarron, Maria Winkler, Marie Therese-Brown, Mariellen Layne (as artist and guest Curator), Maureen Hood, the late Mel Ramos, Melinda Johnson, Michael Stevens, Miles Hermann, Patricia Altschul, Peter Stegall, Phyllis Cottrell, the late Richard Feese , Robert Bowen, Russell Reich, Sean Royal, Suzanne Adan, Terry Baxter, William Ishmael, and William Peterson.
Hope to see you there. History has rarely been this stunning.
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