“There was no art here. There was no fashion here, just all surfboards, and bikinis, wraps, and flip flops.” Homeira recalling her arrival in Manhattan Beach

by Elka Worner

Over the past two decades, art patron Homeira Goldstein has curated 35 shows at the Manhattan Beach Art Center featuring some of the country’s most prominent artists. 

But her upcoming exhibit promises to be her most personal, and possibly most significant. It will showcase art from her formidable private collection.

“Many of these pieces have never seen the light of day,” said the Manhattan Beach Cultural Arts Supervisor Eric Brinkman, who is curating the show with Homeira. “This is the only opportunity the public is ever going to have to see them. It’s significant for that reason.”

“Legacy: Honoring Homeira Goldstein’s History with the Manhattan Beach Art Center” opens with a reception Friday, October 27, that will recognize Homeira’s “instrumental role in shaping the Art Center” and her “profound impact on the art world.”

Manhattan Beach Mayor Richard Montgomery praised the long-time Manhattan Beach resident as a force of nature who helped bring art and culture to the city at a time when the town offered little in the way of the visual arts.

“Her contributions to Manhattan Beach have expanded our cultural landscape, bound us together through shared human identity, and helped elevate artists to extraordinary heights,” Montgomery said.

It wasn’t easy for the cultured, and well-connected Goldstein when she landed in Manhattan Beach in 1990 to join her husband, Shorewood Realtors founder Arnold Goldstein. Homeira, who worked in investment banking, had been living on the Westside. Throughout her career, she also cultivated contacts with artists, galleries, and museums. She sat on the boards of LACMA, Otis College of Art and Design, USC’s Iovine and Young Academy, among others.

Former Manhattan Beach City Councilman Jason Lane encouraged her to embrace her new community. He nominated her for the city’s Cultural Arts Commission, from where she surveyed the city’s art scene.

“There was no art here. There was no fashion here, just all surfboards, and bikinis, wraps and flip flops,” said the art doyen, known for her long, flowing black dresses, angular black bob and ruby red lips.

She still remembers her interview with the city council. “I was wearing a suit and a big hat,” she said. “I was so out of place.”

Instead of sitting on the sidelines, Homeira got to work. She advocated for the former Manhattan Heights County Library, which the city had purchased for $1.5 million, to be converted into an art center. Residents resisted, lobbying instead that the space become a bookstore, or be torn down to make room for basketball courts or a pool.

She started modestly. Her first exhibit, in 2001, the year the Manhattan Beach Art Center opened, was called “Art in the Circle.”  It featured 26 established, and emerging artists from the local, regional, and national art scene. Her priority was to make the art “visually approachable,” not too intimidating, but “more relatable,” she said.

“I didn’t want to alienate the community,” Homeira said of her first show. “I wanted to sow the seeds, and get people there.” At the same time, she didn’t want to “compromise the quality, the importance of the art that I was showing.” 

Works from contemporary artists, including Ed Moses, De Wain Valentine, and Tony Berlant, graced the small space, which lacked proper gallery style lighting and ceiling heights adequate to properly showcase their work. The show was well received, unlike a previous city exhibit at Polliwog Park that had residents up in arms, especially about one piece that featured a rock enveloped in cable.

“It was before my time, but people said ‘You call that art? I don’t want that here,’” Homeira said. One resident went so far as to say that art is dangerous and that it brings crime.

Her first show assuaged those fears, and Homeira continued her mission to expose the community to interesting works and to expand their cultural awareness.

“Everybody has a choice. Art is not something that is mandatory for everyone to like or to follow,” she said.

Art has always been her passion, a means of boundless expression and human potential.

“Just that idea of creativity and looking into other dimensions. I call it having romance with the artwork,” she said of the pieces she chose for her collection. Many of the pieces have an architectural aspect to them, which harkens back to the “magical” Persian architecture, and mosaic work she was exposed to as a child growing up in Tehran. 

Homeira built on the popularity of her first exhibits, which she funded and continues to fund through her non-profit Time4Art, with works one would see at LACMA, MOCA and other prestigious museums throughout the U.S.

“She really brought some of the most influential artists of our time into this space, which the city wouldn’t have had the means to do on its own,” Brinkman said.

Goldstein served on the boards of art organizations, attended art openings, visited private collections, museums, and even architectural sites to cultivate her connections. The art patron  brought a discerning eye, and a keen understanding of contemporary trends to her personal art collection. Unlike many collectors, Brinkman said, her choices are not monetarily driven, but emotionally driven. “She gravitates toward works she really loves and feels connected to.” Her collection is extremely diverse and varied. “She gets her hands on the most contemporary, cutting-edge work that’s available, usually from early and mid-career artists.”

“She’ll find these young artists who are pretty unknown at the time, and invest in them time and time again, until 20 years down the line, they’re these massive names in the art world,” Brinkman said.

For the “Legacy” exhibit, Brinkman and Homeira have selected about 20 pieces that “aesthetically work together.” In addition to works from her private collection, the exhibit will showcase new works from artists featured in earlier exhibits, among them Peter Shelton, Cosimo Cavallaro, Simon Ouwerkerk, and Ed Moses.

If there was one underlying theme to the exhibit, it would be that a lot of the works deal with mortality, Brinkman said.

Artist Ben Jackel, who served in the Navy, has works that recreate weaponry and objects from the battlefields.

“They become objects of inquiry that are both very beautiful in their forms,  and very refined, but they have this whole other heavy meaning of things that take lives,” Brinkman said.

A work by Timothy Tompkins called “Super Collider” will also be on display. Local artist Simon Ouwerkerk will showcase a stainless steel sculpture called “Bison.” The exhibit will also include a video installation by Italian artist Carla Viparelli of diatoms, unicellular algae.

As with all her exhibits, Homeira is very hands on. Over the years she has contributed countless hours to curating two shows a year, meeting with artists, selecting their works, even packing their art, gingerly placing them in her car, and personally delivering them to the Art Center. No job is too small. She said she’s often up at three in the morning worrying about the show’s mailing list, or working late into the night perfecting the lighting in the gallery space.

It’s unusual for art patrons to be involved in every step of the installation and planning process, but for Homeria it is second nature. She’s a perfectionist.

“I’m more like a puppeteer. I put things together,” she said.

After two decades of producing some of the area’s most intriguing exhibits, featuring some of the world’s most renowned artists, Homeira said she is ready to pass on the baton to someone else. She’s not retiring, she’s just making a transformation. Her black bob is now a softer, snow-white version with a few subtle waves. 

“If you’re in art, you don’t stay the same,” she said. “If you have boundaries put on you, it’s no longer art.” 

The opening reception for “Legacy: Honoring Homeira Goldstein’s History with the Manhattan Beach Art Center” is Friday, Oct. 27, 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. The exhibit will run through Dec. 31. For more information visit ManhattanBeach.gov. ER