Southwestern College began in the Fall of 1961 with one building on the shared campus of Chula Vista High School. A booming post-war economy fueled by military spending and contracts with local Aerospace companies, along with new opportunities in the field of higher education, brought many to the region.

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One such job seeker, Robert E. (Bob) Matheny (b.1929-2020), a modernist designer, educator, craftsman, hand printing enthusiast, and avant gardist, who worked as a graphic designer with Convair Astronautics before being hired as the first full time art faculty member of SWC, achieved an early goal, as he screwed white fiberboard panels to the lockers in the hallway of the school’s administration building, and created Southwestern College’s first Art Gallery.

 

The Art Gallery would open into a decade of great change in the world and society.  The Civil Rights, Environmental and Peace Movements would all emerge into an escalating war abroad and unrest in the streets and campuses at home, all the while under the looming Communist threat of nuclear annihilation.

 

The Art World too was on the brink of change, and Southern California was about to lead the way.  San Diego specifically played an often overlooked, but vital role in this shift, with its lack of rigid Art World structures (critics, galleries and museums), sunny weather and economic optimism, it  would liberate local artists, who began the decade with the romanticized more emotionally based Abstract Expressionist artworks (popularized in New York the previous decades) and would go on to create artworks that embraced humor, new technologies and freedom from past conventions.

 

Despite, never before programing a gallery, Matheny nevertheless embraced this new direction, guided only by his personal interests and friendships. The Gallery would develop its own aesthetic, not only through artists promoted in the shows, but also through the exhibition posters and cards Matheny and his students designed and printed. These now-historic objects document, through their design, both the evolution of the gallery program's content and the printing techniques of the era (from letterpress to photolithography).

 

Not everyone would welcome these new directions in art, nor the larger societal changes. Local artists formed close relationships to cope with the lack of opportunities to show their work, and the hostility that frequently ensued when they did. Controversy would begin with the very first exhibition at Southwestern and would continue for the next decade.