New show Art Spectrum opens door for San Diego’s LGBTQ+ artists in Balboa Park 

Follow the rainbow — tiles, that is.

Throughout the month of May, they will lead you into Balboa Park’s Village to Gallery 21 to see the work of a dozen professional San Diego LGBTQ+ artists. For the producer, curator and artists included in the showing, it’s a significant moment affirming LGBTQ+ people’s place in San Diego. 

“It’s really incredible that we have this opportunity to exhibit in Balboa Park, which I consider as the cultural jewel of San Diego,” said Patric Stillman, Art Spectrum’s producer and one of the featured artists. “To see that these twelve artists are being exhibited there just connects the LGBTQ community that much deeper into the richness of San Diego’s artistic practice.”

Art Spectrum is a groundbreaking show for the artistic hub now known as the Village. 

The Village Arts and Education Foundation wanted to hold its first ever LGBTQ+ show this year, but didn’t have the community connections to make it happen, according to Art Spectrum curator RD Riccoboni.

The painter is one of the artists who operates a studio in the Village, so leaders approached Riccoboni for help putting together the show. 

Naturally, Riccoboni turned to Stillman, who is connected to many of San Diego’s visual artists through his Hillcrest gallery, Studio Door.

“(Stillman) has a stable of LGBTQ artists that are really high, professional quality,” Riccoboni said. “I thought this would give them an opportunity to show in a place that truly is international, where the whole world comes to visit.” 

The pair came up with the idea for Art Spectrum. Instead of focusing on emerging artists who have more opportunities to enter open call art shows, they wanted to make sure San Diego and the world knows mature local artists who have dedicated years and sometimes decades to their artistic practice. 

They selected ten San Diego county artists whose craft they had seen deepen and mature over time, yet who still pushed their boundaries to try new things.

The show includes geometric painter Carole Kuck, stylized portrait artist Miguel Camacho-Padilla and expressionist black-and-white painter Stefan Talian. The mediums vary, with pottery and stained glass included. 

“It’s flattering. I’m not emerging anymore,” said Stefan Talian, one of the featured artists. 

He has shown at ICA and painted murals at the House of Czech and Slovak Republics in Balboa Park, so this is a “nice return.” 

“I just love Balboa Park. It was very exciting to hear that we’re gonna show there,” Talian said. He also thinks it’s significant for LGBTQ+ artists to show outside of Hillcrest. 

While Balboa Park is not far from Hillcrest, the audience that visits the park is much wider than what some of the artists have experienced before. For others, like nationally-known Talian, it raises his profile locally where not everyone knows his significance. 

“I felt it gave the artists a platform that we haven’t seen in a very long time,” Stillman said. 

During the pandemic, the San Diego Museum of Art created a video that was a virtual tour of LGBTQ+ art in its permanent collection, called “Proud Identities.” 

The last full show with multiple LGBTQ+ artists in Balboa Park was back in 2019. The San Diego Art Institute, now part of ICA San Diego, hosted ‘Forging Territories,’ a show for underrepresented Black and Latine LGBTQ+ artists.  

Before that, the San Diego History Center had a two-year installation of LGBTQ+ history called “LGBTQ+ San Diego: Stories of Struggles and Triumphs” in the region that included a community quilt for AIDS victims and highlighted some artists like Riccoboni. 

But Art Spectrum is the first time LGBTQ+ artists will show in the municipal gallery and not a museum. 

To Stillman, this is significant because of the barriers these artists face finding gallery representation. 

“Galleries don’t want to show our work because they feel it’s controversial, even if it’s mundane. They still feel just having the label LGBTQ, that maybe there’s something there that someone’s going to get angry about or whatever,” Stillman said. “So the doors aren’t open.” 

For his part, Riccoboni said the opportunities for a queer artist to show in a gallery when he started 30 years ago was practically nonexistent.

Now, a door at Balboa Park has opened. 

“It’s San Diego and Balboa Park, and this is where the whole world comes to visit, and you get a showcase for your work, which is pretty wonderful,” Riccoboni said. “It’ll give these artists a chance to have a bigger audience. It’ll also give the world a chance to see that we have an LGBTQ community here.”

Stillman and Riccoboni hope Art Spectrum becomes an annual tradition. 

Art Spectrum will show at Gallery 21 in the Village at Balboa Park from May 5 to June 1 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily.