We read with interest your San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (SLOMA) into the future article (“SLOMA is raising funds for an audacious expansion,” Dec. 18). As you noted, the museum has a long and complex origin story. However, an important part of that history was overlooked.
Before the changes made in 2011, many local artists and art groups regularly met at the SLO Art Center and used its facilities for exhibitions, presentations, critiques, and community gatherings. When the center transitioned into a museum, it no longer served as a hub that provided the community with access to local artists and adult art education. No alternative venue emerged to fill that role, and the resulting sense of loss continues to be felt today.
With the plans as currently presented, it appears that local art and artists may once again be excluded. While K-12 students will have opportunities, the artists and art groups that were instrumental in the center’s inception seem absent from the vision for the future.
As artists who live and work in this community, we welcome efforts to enrich and expand the arts in San Luis Obispo. We believe a more vibrant, diverse, and engaging arts scene could be achieved by including local artists and arts organizations in SLOMA’s expansion plans. We hope the museum’s leadership shares this view. This moment offers an opportunity to begin a new chapter—one that reintegrates the community’s artists for the benefit of all.
We urge SLOMA’s leadership to recognize this moment as a chance to rebuild trust, restore connection, and honor the artists who helped shape the institution’s earliest identity. By embracing local creators as partners in its future, the museum can cultivate a richer, more inclusive cultural landscape—one that truly reflects the community it serves.
Carl Berney, Joan Brown, Kay Burnett, Charlotte D’Aigle, Anna Easter, Bruce Everett, Jan French, Larry Kappen, Blaire Kilbey, Tracy Paz, Tom Peck, Dianne Ravin, Colleen Ray, Denise Schryver, and Randy and Lisa Stromsoe
San Luis Obispo County artists
This article appears in 2025 Year in Review.
SLOMA is just another grift by the SLO City Council, similar to its stupid THREE empty downtown parking structures.
SLOMA, three empty multimillion dollar, downtown parking structures whose cost will be paid for for decades through tax hikes are nothing more than municipal pork barrel, white elephant projects whose cost could have been used to provide lower cost or free fares for bus rides, could have been used to buy and develope community gardens and reduce increasing food insecurity, could have been used to build public housing for seniors, students, andow income workers. Instead, these projects will sit, decades down the road, as testaments to an era when profligate public spending didn’t have consequences. Our children and grandchildren will live in an America characterized by mass poverty, austerity, reduced living standards, downward mobility, high taxes, and crumbling infrastructure. What kind of insane vision possessed SLO city leaders and voters to approve the three empty downtown parking structures? Did anyone seriously ever bother to look at the global landscape? This, after the 2000, 2008, 2018, and 2020 self induced economic crashes.
The future belongs to Asia. The BRI, digital yuan, mBridge, Asian Development, cross border trade settled in local currencies, and the expiration of the petrodollar spells our doom and can already be felt when visiting the grocery store, paying for mortgages and home insurance. Regional banks will collapse this year and may induce a cascade of bank failures as borrowers who owe hundreds of billions of dollars of CRE just turn in the keys on the empty buildings they owned, unable able to roll over their commercial loans due this year at the low interest they initially borrowed at. It’s all due this year, lol. We’re being lied to by banking officials and the Fed is hiding the numbers as banks extend the dates on their loans (extend and pretend). This will collapse housing prices too as unemployment rises to 6%, it’s 2008 all over again, lol.
Get out of the dollar, ladies and gentlemen. It’s going to ZERO.