Enthusiasts of California history may be familiar with Los Angeles’s past as an art colony, but there’s one name they probably don’t know—and should: Idah Meacham Strobridge.
The UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art has showcased Strobridge’s contributions to the early California artists’ movement in the exhibition Bohemian of the Arroyo Seco.
Hanson Duvall Puthuff (1875-1972), Transient Shadows, ca. 1926, oil on canvas, 26 x 30”. The Buck Collection at UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art.
Strobridge was raised in the remote Nevada desert and anticipated she would live out her life there, until tragedy struck. “She lost her husband and children and she needed to reinvent herself, so she started to teach herself bookbinding,” says Susan Anderson, who guest curated the exhibition. “She started writing and sending things out to newspapers and journals and actually getting published, and she got to a point where she realized she needed to move on from Nevada.”
Carl Oscar Borg (1879-1947), In Walpi, Arizona, ca. 1934, oil on canvas, 26 x 30”. The Buck Collection at UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art.
In 1901, Strobridge relocated to Los Angeles and found that she fit right into the burgeoning arts and crafts community that was forming there. At the time, California was still relatively unexplored land for the Western settlers, and many of the artists explored the state by painting en plein air. In 1905, Strobridge opened one of the first art galleries in the area in order to feature local, plein air landscape painters.
The Langson IMCA exhibition will feature works by many of the painters that Strobridge featured in her gallery, including Carl Oscar Borg, Fernand Lungren, and Elizabeth Jaynes Borglum. Many of the paintings are drawn from Langson IMCA’s permanent collection, with loans from the Laguna Art Museum and the Hilbert Museum of California Art.
“Fernand Lungren was her neighbor for a few years, and she frequently exhibited him in her gallery,” Anderson says. His painting Bastions of the Painted Desertfeatures the landscape of northern Arizona done in a colorful, and modernistic style, and was completed around the same time he was exhibiting in Strobridge’s gallery.
Fernand Lungren (1857-1932), Bastions of the Painted Desert, ca. 1910, oil on canvas, 20 x 40”. Laguna Art Museum Collection, 2010.002.001. Gift of Nancy Dustin Wall Moure.
Borg’s In Walpi, Arizona features a man on horseback entering a Hopi settlement. “Strobridge was one of the first people to really show Carl Oscar Borg’s work, to the extent that he started getting attention in the press,” Anderson points out. “She really helped to jump start his career.”
Also on view is a watercolor on paper by Maynard Dixon that was completed prior to the 1906 fire and earthquake that destroyed much of his early work.
The show will additionally feature items that demonstrate Strobridge’s achievement outside of being a gallerist, including photos of her bookbinding shop, the Artemisia Bindery, as well as the books she wrote and published.
Marion Kavanagh Wachtel (1873-1954), Long Lake, Sierra Nevada, ca. 1929, oil on canvas, 20 x 26”. UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art, Gift of the Irvine Museum.
“Idah Strobridge not only contributed to the arts and crafts community in California, but also to the plein air painting movement that was coming up. She helped a circle of women, writers, artists, even bookbinders to develop their own art,” Anderson says. “And not only did she help artists sustain themselves, I think she helps them see the movement that was happening among themselves.”
Bohemian of the Arroyo Seco: Idah Meacham Strobridge is on view at Langson IMCA through January 13, 2024. —
Bohemian of the Arroyo Seco: Idah Meacham Strobridge
Through January 13, 2024
Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art
18881 Von Karman Avenue, Suite 100, Irvine, CA 92612
(949) 476-0003, imca.uci.edu
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