Spanish Village Art Center

This guide to the Spanish Village Art Center in San Diego opens in nineteen thirty-six with painter Sherman Trease facing a demolition notice for a fair-era Spanish town that had only ever been a movie set, plywood and plaster meant to charm one season's crowds. It follows the pitch he made instead, alongside Mina Schultz Pulsifer and Henry Long, to hand the empty rooms to working artists rather than tear them down, and the colony that opened in nineteen thirty-seven. You'll hear what happened to the buildings when the army took over the complex during the Second World War. Look closely at the mosaic tiles underfoot as you walk between the studios.