When Lee Clark came to Bakersfield in the 1970s, the city was not known as an arts and culture center.
Slowly but surely, Clark began working to change that perception.
“He unlocked the mysteries of art, he unlocked the mysteries of music,” said longtime San Francisco artist, watercolourist, and friend of Clark’s Gary Bukovnik.
According to Bukofnik, Clark could talk to anyone about art and convince them. In doing so, he helped open the door to Bakersfield’s art, culture, and the benefits that would accrue from those virtues.
Perhaps best known as the owner of the former CL Clark Gallery on 18th and V Streets in Bakersfield, Clark, a longtime senior art appraiser and local arts patron, died after a long illness. Died August 1st. he was 87 years old.
Claudia Gray, who worked with Clark for years and called him a “truly extraordinary man”, said that while Clark’s mind was “as sharp as ever until the last moment”, his body gave him strength. Said he was lost.
“I was still ordering cookbooks for him,” she said.
“He was interested in food culture. He never stopped learning and educating himself,” Gray said.
Born in Paulding, Ohio on April 11, 1935, Clark was by nature bicultural.
His grandfather was Cuban and had a sugar cane plantation before the Castro Revolution that led to the communist takeover in 1959. Clark spent the summer there learning to speak fluent Spanish.
There he met writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other notables.
I started collecting folk crafts when I was a child.
Too long to list his educational accomplishments, Clark worked as a lecturer and professor of anthropology and art at Ohio State University.
After stints at Kent State University, he began working at the Universidad de las Americas in Mexico City.
“It didn’t take long for him to realize that archeology had a lot of dirty work, so he switched to anthropology,” said Gray.
At one point Cal State Bakersfield called and Clark answered and took him to Bakersfield.
With a master’s degree in Latin American history and a doctorate in philosophy in anthropology, Lee’s interest in the arts led him to become a certified senior appraiser under the American Society of Appraisers.
But Clark’s passion for Mexican folk art never subsided, and he continued to collect it for most of his life.
Longtime educator and art photographer Susan Leap first got to know Lee Clark through her relationship with her father, the famous painter Edward Leap. Over the years, Clark represented Edward his Leap at his CL Clark Gallery.
“Lee knew the art community,” Susan Leap said in an email.
“I don’t know if Lee’s gallery was the first gallery in town, but it was definitely the best,” she said. I knew, if there was something in his gallery, it was worth buying.”
Don Martin, who owned Metro Gallery in downtown Bakersfield until the pandemic closed, worked at Clark’s Gallery until it closed in 1999 or 2000.
“Before I came here, I think Lee was. of A pioneer in the Bakersfield art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Martin says: previously expressed or seen here.
“CL Clark Gallery has been the best gallery between San Francisco and LA for many years, in my opinion, where many artists wanted to exhibit their work.”
When Martin took a break from his television news career in the mid-1990s, Clark hired him as gallery director. Martin still remembers the years spent in what was then “a lovely private gallery surrounded by his garden”.
According to Martin, Clark also helped humanize gay men in the local culture, which was a big step forward for Bakersfield.
“He and his partner were probably one of the first gay couples to ‘out’ in Bakersfield and were embraced by the elite in the 1980s and ’90s.
Bukovnik said there was no one like him.
“There will never be another like him in my lifetime,” he said.
Reporter Stephen Mayer can be reached at 661-395-7353. Follow him on Facebook and his Twitter (@semayerTBC).
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