The First 30,000 Years
Millard Sheets Center for the Arts at Fairplex  2009

Making of Art

As the current exhibit director for MSCAF I am pleased to present a brief overview of this year’s fair-time exhibit about the making of art. I have been connected with the arts for my whole life and grew up spending my summers at the fair while my father was creating exhibits in what was then called the Fine Arts building. In the early 1900s the name was changed in his honor to the Millard Sheets Gallery. I have been on that board of directors for the past number of years, and became the exhibit director three years ago when we celebrated the 100 year anniversary of dad’s birth with an exhibit honoring his life as an artist, muralist and architectural designer. His great love for horses became the stimulus for the 2008 exhibit, Hoofprints.

This year we celebrate the arts in the first of two consecutive exhibits about the processes used for the making of art through the ages, starting when humans first began creating. My goal is to construct a setting in which visitors to the gallery can see and understand how people from past times and cultures shaped the raw materials from the earth into art forms. At first they used only their hands, but soon they were inventing the tools and methods to better create expressions from their own imaginations. This combination of hands and imagination is what sets humans apart from any other creatures on earth. While other living things may have high degrees of intelligence, none possess the uniqueness of imagination.

We end this year’s exhibit in the early 1700 at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, where we will pick it up next year and bring it to modern times. This exhibit will include the primary mediums and techniques used in the artistic expressions of ancient world civilizations, through the Middle Ages, and to the end of the Renaissance. I will continue to post updates on our web site and I encourage comments regarding the concept and development of this exhibit, and about exhibits of the last two years, or perhaps ideas for future fair shows.

Best and thanks, Tony Sheets

Millard Sheets was a driving force while he directed the art program here at the L.A. County Fair (1931-1956), always pushing for a better experience for visitors to the art exhibits that he organized; insisting that the average visitor see the best that was available without the exhibition becoming “high-hat.” This was one of the early lessons he learned from Theodore Modra, the first director of the fine art program.

Modra was instrumental in leading Sheets into a career in the arts. When Sheets was about 15 years old (1922) his uncle, L.E. Sheets, helped launch the first Los Angeles County Fair. Of course, his nephew was eager to participate in his first painting competition at the Fair. Millard entered a painting of Lake Kilarney in the “copy” division and he couldn’t believe it when he read in the newspaper that he had won first prize in landscape, a three dollar prize. So first thing the next day, there he was standing proudly in front of his winning masterpiece when a very firm voice sounded from behind him, “Did you paint that picture?” “Yessir,” said Millard. There stood Theodore Modra, the stereotype of an artist, with thick white hair and goatee and a flowing tie. Modra grabbed the frightened Millard by the collar and dragged him into his office that was then in a corner of the tent which housed the art exhibition. Sheets said Modra “harangued me for about twenty minutes” telling him that he should never “make another copy as long as you live…You go out and you paint, outdoors. You paint still life. You do anything but copy. And you have to draw.” Modra then asked the young Sheets to come to his house and bring his original paintings. For the next two years they critiqued his work and went on painting trips, first for the weekend and then for one or two weeks during the summer. Sheets said, “…he was a marvelous stimulus and a wonderful person to get somebody excited. Boy, I really got excited!”

Modra was the first to introduce Sheets to a wider world of art. A contemporary of George Bellows and Robert Henri, Modra told Millard about these other artists and taught him how to think about art in a way in which he had never been exposed before. A year later, at 16, Modra asked Millard to become his assistant for the Fair’s art program and when Modra suddenly died in 1930, Sheets was asked by the Fair Association to take his place. Modra’s legacy lived on in the work that Millard Sheets did to “bring art to the people” and in the work of one of America’s foremost artists.