Gallery Opens at Scripps

Scripps College in Claremont has opened the Millard Sheets Art Center, a new fine-arts complex that boasts a museum-quality gallery and state-of-the-art studios for photography, computer art and the traditional disciplines.

The facility’s public centerpiece is the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, a 4,000-square-foot exhibition space directed by Mary MacNaughton.

The exhibition program will focus on the college’s art holdings, MacNaughton says. “Like any university gallery, our collections are eclectic rather than comprehensive, so we will look at them thematically.”

The opening event, “Earthly Delights,” through Oct. 9, examines landscapes in terms of settings and seasons. MacNaughton has selected late 19th- and early 20th-Century American paintings, including cityscapes by Reginald Marsh and Maurice Prendergast and rural scenes by Childe Hassam, George Inness and Millard Sheets, who in the 1930s and 1940s led the college’s art department. Concurrently, co-curator Bruce Coats has chosen Japanese prints and Chinese scrolls by artists whose landscapes were influenced by Western art.

Gallery hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 1-5 p.m. Information: (909) 621-8000, Ext. 3397.

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VALLEY BOY: When artist Jeffrey Vallance leaves the San Fernando Valley and travels to the South Pacific or sets out in search of Bigfoot, “he crosses no evolutionary fault lines between advanced and primitive cultures,” writes critic Dave Hickey in the introduction to a new paperback book of Vallance’s writings.

“When he delves into history, he traverses no barrier between the enlightened present and the superstitious past. These distinctions do not exist in the world of Jeffrey Vallance; for him, it is the Valley all the way around, and he is its Herodotus, its Schliemann, its Candide, and its Von Helsing.”

“The World of Jeffrey Vallance: Collected Writings 1978-1994” is the second book to be published by Art issues. Press. The text recounts everything from Vallance’s burial of a frozen chicken purchased at Ralphs to the artist’s improbable meetings with the king of Tonga, the president of Iceland and Monsignor Sepe of the Vatican--all in a style that merges childlike innocence with deadpan humor and journalistic objectivity.

“We publish books of writings that explore art in relationship to cultural power,” says Gary Kornblau, editor of the Hollywood-based press. “Also we maintain a strong perspective from Los Angeles. We look for people tied to the L.A. area, but we want them to have a cosmopolitan and international flavor to their work. Jeffrey Vallance’s writing does both of those things.”

Information: (213) 876-4508.

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FAMILY TIES: Joachim Pissarro, a great-grandson of Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro and former director of the Museum of the Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne, Switzerland, has been named chief curator of the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth.

Pissarro, a 35-year-old graduate of Paris’ Sorbonne and London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, is a scholar of French Impressionism and modern art. Among his exhibition credits is “Cezanne and Pissarro: An Impressionist Collaboration,” which is scheduled to appear in 1995 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.