Santa Rosa, California
Santa Rosa is not a very well kept secret of 60,000 smug souls 60 miles north of San Francisco. But it's a very well kept town. Even Big Mac had to pull in his golden arches before the basilisk eyes of its planning board. One of my finest times was helping dedicate a new Texaco gas station with a wine and cheese party plus jazz combo.
It's all a civilized conspiracy to live up to the green thumb of Luther Burbank, a New Englander who sought his fortune there in 1875. The local community college (1918) is surpassed in age only by Fresno's. And its small but superb gallery outshines even the closest four-year college, Sonoma State.
Its secret is a shrewd management of local resources--baskets from local Indians or African masks from a friendly San Francisco gallery, benign ballyhooing through the college's art and lit teachers (who tease their sometimes reluctant scholars into looking at something different just for the hell of it), and the community services department which will leave no medium unturned when touting the gallery's joys.
Not surprisingly, the college's art department has one of the best poster-designing traditions in the country. If you visit Santa Rosa's museum during the school year, step twenty paces to the northeast, knock on the art department's door and ask for Max. Tell them Patrick sent you.
The ten years of posters lining his atelier's walls make that tacky-looking (from the outside) "temporary" structure a veritable museum annex. I don't say this lightly; I warn against hyperbole: the California junior college at its best, as represented here, is the least wasteful, most vigorous sector of American education, full of the most promise for the quickened demotic sensibility.
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