Editorial Account

Brightly painted and lovingly polished motorcycles. Orange and avocado trees in redwood planter boxes. “Smoke atmospheres” at the Quad, athletic fields and the then-standing bridge over Nutwood Avenue.

This is some of the widely- and wildly-varied art that Dextra Frankel, art professor and Cal State Fullerton gallery director from 1970 to 1991, brought to the campus.

Today, Frankel, who was born in 1924, lives in a modern artwork and art-book-filled condominium in Mar Vista, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles. Abstract paintings and prints cover the white walls.

There are prints and books of art by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Max Ernst and David Hockney, among others. A diminutive woman in her 80s who moves slowly after a stroke in 2006, Frankel nevertheless spoke animatedly as she recalled her career.

“The way I feel, I should be 45,” she said.

Frankel grew up in the Los Feliz and Hollywood areas of Los Angeles. She attended the Wolf School of Costume Design in downtown Los Angeles, pursuing her initial ambition of becoming a costume designer.

She found work at Saks Fifth Avenue designing children’s clothes and women’s sportswear. Saks was ready to let her design her own line of clothing when she walked away from the job.

Frankel became a part-time teacher and gallery director at CSUF in 1964 while becoming an artist. Art teachers at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys had encouraged her to pursue a career in art.

She entered an art competition at the La Jolla Museum of Art and won. The prize was an individual exhibit at the museum. Held in 1961, the exhibit featured a group of mosaics, prints and enamels.

Afterward, she began working on a group of sculptures for an exhibit that never happened.

“I kind of abandoned the sculpture because I found out Cal State Fullerton was my creative work,” she said. “I really enjoyed it. Every exhibit was different. The processes were different and the research was different, so it was like always learning. And I very much liked working with the students and enjoying their growth.”

After teaching part-time at the university for several years, Frankel became a full-time teacher and gallery director at CSUF in 1967. She developed a master’s and a graduate certificate program in Museum Studies, had the CSUF Main Art Gallery built and put on a succession of varied and eclectic exhibits.

“She put out some very impressive students over the years,” Professor Mike McGee, the current CSUF gallery director, said of Frankel. “That’s part of the legacy she left. Her former students are working at institutions all over the world.”

McGee named Patricia Watts, the associate director of the Sonoma County Museum of Art, as an example.

The CSUF Main Art Gallery was designed by Frankel, according to McGee. The strong and hard floor made of end-cut fir, the movable walls, the lamps arranged in a highly adjustable four-foot grid and the tall ceilings and doorways were all built according to her specifications. It cost $1.9 million, but the result was a versatile, durable and adaptable space to exhibit, under Frankel’s direction, almost any kind of art.

And in looking at the list of shows at the gallery curated by Frankel, it seems almost any kind of art was shown there. Everything from motorcycles to trees to neon lamps were displayed as art in the gallery.

“The wonderful thing about Dextra as a curator, she had such a wide-open range of projects she wanted to develop,” Samuelson said.

The “Paint by Molly” exhibit in January 1971 brought custom-painted choppers and race cars to the gallery. Artist Rollin Sanders, better known as a car and motorcycle painter, originated the yellow-and-black Yamaha and green Kawasaki motorcycle color motifs of the ’70s. Sanders also had paintings and sculptures on exhibit in addition to the vehicles.

“The people who owned them would stop by and polish them every few days. They were in love with their motorcycles,” said Jerry Samuelson, the chair of the CSUF Art Department, who began working with Frankel in the mid-’60s.

“Portable Orchard Survival Piece #5″ by environmental artist Newton Harrison, brought orange and avocado trees in redwood containers into the gallery in 1972. KNBC news filmed a “Citrus Feast” event at the preview opening, where fruits from the trees exhibited were served.

Some of the most unusual art brought to the campus by Frankel was the performance art of Judy Gerowitz (aka Judy Chicago) in 1970. “Three Atmospheres” created “smoke atmospheres” at the bridge that crossed Nutwood Avenue, on the Quad, and on an athletic field. In the Quad, assistants stationed on the tops of the surrounding buildings triggered smoke pots that nearly filled the quad with smoke, according to Samuelson.

“I don’t think we’d be allowed to do such things today,” Samuelson said with a laugh.

Whatever the exhibit was, Frankel’s talent for ideally arranging the gallery space to display the art always showed.

“The exhibits took on a very wide range of such very architecturally designed kinds of exhibit spaces,” Samuelson said. “It wasn’t just hanging art on four walls. It was designing spaces where the exhibits could live.”

As an example, Samuelson cited the “Santos” exhibit in 1974. Holy images from New Mexico, Mexico and South America were displayed in what Samuelson described as a “churchlike interior.” The gallery walls were covered in adobe-like plaster, and a Mexican architectural quality was given to the gallery.

Frankel retired from teaching in 1991 as a professor emeritus. She left CSUF to design and curate art exhibits at the Bradley Terminal at LAX. When that was finished, she continued to design, working mostly on museum and gallery spaces and exhibits.

Frankel was designing an exhibit called “Multiple Vantage Points: Southern California Women Artists 1980-2006,” which was displayed at Barnsdall Art Park in Hollywood in 2007, when she suffered a stroke. She was hospitalized for three and a half months. From the hospital, an assistant relayed her directions. Eleven days before the opening of the exhibit, the hospital released her.

“I continued working the minute I got out of the hospital. I went to Barnsdall and was directing traffic,” she said.

In 1972, Frankel had curated “Visible/Invisible,” another show of women artists at the Long Beach Museum of Art. She compared the status of women in the Southern California art scene then to that of today, saying there were “vast differences.”

“They have freedom, they have larger studios, they are included in prominent galleries,” Frankel said. “At the time I did the first exhibit, there were very few venues for women’s art. Now it’s open.”

Today Frankel continues to recover from the stroke, which paralyzed the left side of her body. After a lot of therapy, she has regained use of her left side and now lives unassisted.

She has recently been working on finding a venue for an exhibit of Betty Gold sculpture titled “From a Rectangle.” CSUF, which has two of Gold’s sculptures on campus, has been mentioned as a possible venue. In an e-mail sent in April from Mallorca, Spain, where she was directing sculpture installations, Gold said that she would be very pleased to have the exhibit at CSUF to let students see how she works.

Frankel’s “Weathervane,” a 14-foot-tall work of cast bronze, pipe and ball bearings, is on display in the Art Department’s courtyard. The bronze pieces, which weigh 2,000 pounds altogether, were lost-wax-cast at her studio in Laguna Canyon. It was completed in 1965, and installed at CSUF in 1997.

Frankel defined how she sees art in the foreword to a catalogue for “Neon Signs and Symbols,” a show that mixed the neon signs from manufacturers displaying beer and gasoline brands alongside the work of contemporary artists working with neon.

“Art is everything we see that affects us emotionally,” she wrote. “The art experience does not occur ‘out there’ but internally, like an underground explosion inside the perceiving mechanism, ourselves.” There is an awful lot of things out in the world that we can see that affect us emotionally. To Dextra Frankel, it all has the potential to be art, if only we can see the art in it all.