Pleasures Along the Beach is a kaleidoscopic glass-tile mosaic featuring sailboats, seabirds, sunbathers, and a setting sun. The 40-by-16-foot work was installed at the Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University in Old Towne Orange earlier this year. Getting it there from its original location required cutting the work up into 547 sections with a chain saw.
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The idyllic piece was created in 1969 by the acclaimed Pomona-born artist, designer, and educator Millard Sheets (1907–1989) and hung on the façade of a Home Savings and Loan on Wilshire and 26th in Santa Monica. The reinstallation of Pleasures is a win for art lovers and preservationists, since many Sheets-designed mosaics have been removed or painted over in Pasadena, Long Beach, San Francisco, and Redwood City over the past three decades.
“We had to use a wet diamond-bladed chain saw to cut the mosaic into jigsaw puzzle–shaped pieces,” says Brian Worley, who led the effort to remove and reinstall the work at the Hilbert. It took almost two months to take the mural apart. It then sat in storage for several years before being reassembled and installed. “I couldn’t be happier with the result,” Worley says. “We proved that it could be done.”
Worley may have been the only person alive who could have done the job: he was part of the team who installed the original in 1969, when he served as Sheets’s intern. Now 72, Worley worked with the artist from 1969 to 1982 and installed close to 50 of his mosaics across California.
Sheets’s studio is credited with creating 175 stained glass pieces, mosaics, and murals for Home Savings, works commissioned by the bank’s owner, Howard F. Ahmanson Sr., who was called “one of the nation’s wealthiest men” when he died, in 1968.
Growing up with family in both Los Angeles and Orange Counties, I saw Sheets’s mosaics for decades before I knew the artist’s name. I still encounter his work in places like Anaheim, Arcadia, Buena Park, Burbank, Lakewood, Long Beach, and Montebello on the exteriors of buildings that were formerly a Home Savings, many of which are now Chase branches. There are even three Sheets panels honoring California history on the walls of the auditorium of my daughter’s high school, Mark Keppel in Alhambra. Sheets was arguably Southern California’s most prolific public artist ever.
Though best known for his Southern California work, Sheets also produced the mosaic in the foyer of the Scottish Rite Masonic Center in San Francisco and a mural outside the Van Ness branch of Home Savings that tells the history of San Francisco, which he made with Denis O’Connor and Susan L. Hertel. (Worley helped install the latter as well.)
Aside from his mosaics, Sheets was a prolific watercolor painter from the time he was a student at Chouinard Art Institute, a school that was later absorbed into CalArts. He also helped found the Otis Art Institute, led the Scripps College Art Department for almost 20 years, and directed the L.A. County Fair’s art exhibition program for 25 years. In 1994, the Fair’s Fine Arts Building was renamed the Millard Sheets Art Center.
Sheets’s restored Pleasures is now the central feature of the reopened Hilbert, which welcomed visitors at the end of February after a three-year expansion that grew the museum into a two-building, 22,000-plus-square-foot space with 26 exhibition rooms.
On the museum’s east façade, there’s Sea Runner’s, a sculpture of two dolphins and a child by John Edward Svenson. Through his work with Sheets’s studio, Svenson created more than 23 sculptures for Home Savings.
Opened in 2016, the museum has a large collection of California art, with 5,000 oil paintings, watercolors, illustrations, drawings, and selected movie-production art. The holdings lean heavily on California Scene paintings, described by Jean Stearn in a Hilbert catalog, Windows in Time, as “representational painting that depicts ordinary people engaged in the ordinary activities of life in the cities and farms of mid-twentieth-century California.” Works by Scene painters Rex Brandt, Phil Dike, Emil Kosa Jr., Dorothy Sklar, Henrietta Shore, Sueo Serisawa, and Ruth Peabody—depicting urban intersections, rural landscapes, California coastlines, train depots, and residential hotels—hang alongside the nearly 50 Sheets paintings at the Hilbert.
But it’s Pleasures Along the Beach that took my breath away most when I visited recently. Seeing its restored vibrancy, I was reminded that even though decades have passed since Sheets created it, some aspects of California life remain: the sea, the nature, the people, the energy. Sheets had captured it all in 1969. Thank goodness Worley and his team were able to reassemble it.•
Mike Sonksen, a third-generation Angeleno, is a poet, an essayist, and the author of Letters to My City.
