P.S. Around the Arts: Artists with ties to CSUS cover its walls
By Patricia Beach Smith -- Bee Arts Critic

Furnishing a building does not stop with desks and chairs. There are also walls to consider. When the College of Continuing Education at California State University, Sacramento, moved to its new 30,000-square-foot digs in the Dreyfuss & Blackford-designed Napa Hall on the south side of campus, there were plenty of bare walls that needed help.

Art consultant Beth Jones and her partner at Jay Jay Gallery, Lynda Jolley, were hired to make the walls interesting. It would also be a unique opportunity to pay tribute to the CSUS art department.

They proposed to the Continuing Ed administration that work created by artists who were either professors or alums of CSUS should be the focus of the collection.

"Both of us went to CSUS and so this was an exciting, big job for us," Jones said. Choosing art by 12 Sac State artists, commissioning a major piece for the lobby -- an untitled painting by CSUS art professor Tom Monteith -- and hanging the works unveiled in late September took about seven months, Jones said.

The artists represented include Monteith, Richard Feese, Janet Kahle, Susan Keizer, Laureen Landau, Michaele LeCompte, Joan Moment, Sergio Saenz, Peter Stegall, Roger Vail, Ellen Van Fleet and Mary Warner. The art, which includes paintings, photographs and mixed media works, is worth about $100,000, Jones said.

"It is unusual to be able to create a collection of art of this caliber," said Jones, who has been in the art business since 1984 and a consultant since 1991. "It is rare to be asked to fill this type of great architectural space with work that could potentially end up in museums, rather than with more decorative art, work that is typically put in hotels to fill spaces."