Birth is violent, people — no less so in art than in nature.
As Laguna Beach’s iconic Sawdust Art Festival opened Friday celebrating its 60th year, let’s travel back in time to when the righteously angry rejects of the serious, “stuffy,” juried Festival of the Arts fomented a revolution and created the Timothy Leary-esque thing now known as the Sawdust — and how a split among more radical rebels and tamer traditionalists birthed yet another festival, the juried Art-A-Fair, which is also turning 60 and, today, is sandwiched between the other two festivals on Laguna Canyon Road.
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There’s nothing quite like the Sawdust, though. Streakers once bared behinds (and everything else) on its meandering paths. Visitors once smoked contraband in the bushes. Artists once created towering structures merging fairyland castles with Tim Burton movies, making city planners apoplectic.
Before there were professional entertainers, artists launched jam sessions in the aisles. Before there was up-to-code infrastructure, visitors could smell the electrical boxes smoldering.
— the year the then-itinerant festival found its forever home, in Laguna Canyon — show how the town’s Very Proper Art Posse was aghast at the invasion of counter culture freaks. In the letters, the old guard warned Laguna Beach city fathers of impending doom and social collapse, and even begged for hippie “extermination.”
Filthy, smelly, undignified, etc.
“The unwashed, long-haired, dirty, barefooted, pot-smoking, drug-taking hippies are RUINING this wonderful town,” said a letter to the city from “(Mrs.) Catherine P. Regan” dated June 6, 1968, protesting the Sawdust’s proposal for a tent featuring music and performance.
“If your council were to pass this ridiculous proposal… what is to stop this group from showing at a later date some revolting underground Andy Warhol movies, immoral dances, disgusting sounds, etc. In other words, something completely revolting and undignified??????…Gone now is original concept to my understanding, that the hippie believed in a sacred brother-love. It’s disintegrated into just plain sensual living. I think I could safely wager a bet that very few of these young people know or understand how wonderful and soul-filling a deep, sincere and wonderfully prepared marriage is. I beg of you before God, let’s do something about the whole picture.”
There’s a delightfully entertaining collection of similar missives, though the specific complaints vary slightly:
“They outnumbered the rest of us,” wrote Jeanne Harlin Hunt, a more mainstream artist, referencing the “hippies” who favored the tent idea. “As a result, they voted favorably for the show including some kind of modern dancing, electronic music, films ect (sic). … We were amazed and greatly distressed. This type of thing does not harmonize with the art we exhibit. Our art is mostly traditional. Last year we had a few hippies and they distracted us and were criticized. … One of them displayed a vulgar, huge picture of a nude outside his booth. … Some of them rattled tambourines and sat around on the ground playing their horrible, monotonous tunes consisting of about four notes repeated over and over, which kept people from coming into our booths and we consequently lost sales.
“People from out of town come in to my gallery every week and they comment unfavorably on the fact that Laguna seems to have been taken over by hippies,” she continued. “They do nothing but prowl around and congregate in groups and loiter. They all seem to possess dogs and they are not on leashes. … Laguna is too small a town to have a hippie community. They attract hoards of hitchhikers….They harbor run away children. Parents from out of town come here looking for their children whom the hippies have gotten on drugs, etc.
“I do not want to be associated with an element like this. … I cannot imagine trying to sell traditional art with loud electronic music as a background. I cannot stand that kind of so-called music. … I hope something is done to exterminate the growing hippie community in Laguna.”
Yikes! The sentiment was rather widely shared, however.
Us. v. Not us
“As a member of the Laguna Beach Artists & Gallery Owners Assn. and a gallery owner in business of our fair city … no on having a hippie exhibit at our Sawdust Festival,” said the missive from (as best we can tell from the handwriting) Richard and Jo Marcelle. “They are the something-for-nothing crowd, which are destroying our country. Irresponsible, dirty, low-moraled, lazy lot that will only attract their own kind. …
“If this clientele is allowed favors and grants and encouraged to stay, then we can expect the slow dying off of our Laguna Beach businesses and artists. Like the parasites they are, they have nothing to lose and as soon as they kill off the fruits of one place … they will move on, like the plague or locusts, to the next beautiful, healthy business community to destroy it and its beauty. Nothing is so distasteful to decent, progressive, responsible people than dirty filthy lazy something-for-nothing people … with dirty bare feet and tangled long uncombed hair…”
Another, from the “People of Laguna” (composed by Olivia Marin) reads thusly:
“I wish to appeal to the rebirth of dignity in humanity. In order to regain this quality we must place the focus on culture. … I come to you, not as an aspiring artist, but as an individual striving to cling to a proper and moral way of life. … In order to return our society to the platform it once majestically governed from, we must carve out undesirable elements and replace or smother them with refined culture. … What will become of us? All of us?”
Mrs. Regan summed it all up: “Please I beg of you, stop the proposed Sawdust Festival Tent Show!!! The long-haired, oddly dressed and frequently smelly, barefooted group are not the serious buyers at these festivals.”
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They were wrong
Who could ever have imagined that these ragtag rebels would grow into a $3.1 million a year enterprise? Which owns its own eucalyptus grove? And has professional staff? And permanent buildings? And art classes open to all?
Who could have fathomed that gate admissions alone would raise $1.75 million in a single year (that year being 2024, according to the nonprofit Sawdust’s most recent tax filing)? Or that, each summer, hundreds of thousands of people would stroll its woodchipped lanes?
It’s a long way from that first “alternative event” on a vacant lot near the beach 60 years ago, when macramé and tie-dye were on sale and sawdust was strewn over the dirt to protect merchandise from dust (the rest, as they say, is history). Oh, sure, some old-timers have lamented the Sawdust’s growing professionalism and structure. And we’ve heard about some pretty heated board meetings, like the year that whale-centric artist Robert Wyland was suspended from exhibiting at the Sawdust because, and we quote old press clippings here, there were problems with him proving that he had actually made the gold whale- and dolphin-shaped jewelry sold at his booth.
Wyland insisted it was all original. But, alas, he joined a New Age-y startup festival called Starfair in the ’80s, which billed itself as a “visionary arts expo” featuring plasmaballs, laser light shows, new-age music, psychic readings and, of course, crystals. Press accounts at the time touted the “synchroenergizer,” a right brain/left brain integrator aiming to induce states of profound tranquility, and the Star Chamber, which offered a glimpse of “the beyond.” Spiritual snapshots, meanwhile, promised to capture one’s aura on film.
The Starfair didn’t last long.
But the Sawdust has
“In the mid 1960’s, the culture in America changed dramatically,” the Sawdust’s official history states. “Personal freedom of expression broke out among the nation’s youth, including a vibrant arts and crafts movement. Here in Laguna Beach, that creative energy brought together an influx of young artists. Fueled by a passionate desire for artistic independence and wanting something fresh and exciting, the Sawdust Festival was born.”
In 1968, the Funk family leased a 3-acre eucalyptus grove in the canyon to these upstarts, about three-quarters of a mile from the beach. “(W)e formed an annual small town/gypsy camp of artists,” it says. “The Sawdust Culture was about creating an environment for the public to view, within a concentrated time and space, a dazzling variety of artistic forms and expressions in an emotional environment where the art is actually produced.”
For all its growing up, for all Laguna’s lamentable costliness, the Sawdust retains that gypsy spirit. We’ve been annual pass holders for many years. We love popping over when the twinkly lights go on, grabbing a bite to eat and a glass of wine and listening to the bands. The upper-level stage almost always features the kind of kelp-in-the-water-arm-waving dancing that we witnessed at Grateful Dead concerts a thousand years ago.
“We still have the vibe,” said office and HR manager Danielle Rowe. “We still have the funk. We’re still a bunch of hippies hanging out in the canyon.”
Once through the gates this year, you’ll face a towering 60th anniversary windmill installation, paying homage to a structure that graced the grounds back when the Summer of Love was in full swing. Its iridescent plexiglass blades spin, and inside is a collection of historical photographs and old Sawdust posters, including one that says, “Hippies use back door. No exceptions.”
The rebel spirit lives on. Beneath the sign “immigrant made, no tariffs,” Nilolai Erngren’s wildly colorful cats and clocks and fish and birds are ready to spring from their spots and take flight. He’s a whiz with a scroll saw — the wood seems to bend and twist and curl, almost alive — and has been here, doing this, for more than 20 years (originally from Sweden, met a Laguna girl in Provence, never looked back). He’s nurtured a batch of collectors who’ve amassed more than 40 pieces each, and this year, by special request, created a “spectacular” (the requester’s word) 10-inch mezuzah for one of them. The large furniture pieces? He’s still working on those, so be patient!
“I work more than most people,” he said. “But it cannot possibly be considered a job.”
The Sawdust, in all its funky, ceramic, glass-blowing glory, runs daily from June 26 to Sept. 6. It’s open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays, and from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Nearby, the fine arts Art-A-Fair also runs June 26 to Sept. 6, and the fine arts Festival of the Arts runs July 7 to Sept. 3.
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What, folks wonder, might the next 60 years bring?