Art appraiser, collector, gallery owner, Lee Clark lived and loved art, culture, music | News

“He demystified art. He demystified music,” said longtime San Francisco artist, watercolorist and friend Gary Bukovnik.

Clark could talk to anyone about art and win them over, Bukovnik said. And in doing so, he helped open the door in Bakersfield to art, culture, and the benefits that flow from those virtues.

A longtime art appraiser and local arts patron who was perhaps best known as the owner of the former CL Clark Galleries at 18th and V streets in Bakersfield, Clark died Aug. 1 after a long illness . He was 87 years old.

Claudia Gray, who worked with Clark for years and called him a “truly extraordinary man”, said her friend’s mind was “as sharp as ever until the last minute” but his body was giving out.

“I was still ordering cookbooks for her,” she said.

“He was interested in food culture. He never stopped learning and educating himself,” Gray said.

Born in Paulding, Ohio on April 11, 1935, Clark was bi-cultural by birth.

His grandfather was Cuban and owned a sugar plantation before the Castro revolution that ushered in communism in 1959. Clark spent summers there and learned to speak Spanish fluently.

There he met writers Ernest Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other famous figures.

And, since childhood, he began to collect folk works there.

His educational achievements are too long to list, but Clark worked as a lecturer and professor of anthropology and art at Ohio State University.

After a stint at Kent State, he began working at the University of the Americas in Mexico City.

“It didn’t take long for him to realize that there was a lot of dirty work in archaeology, so he switched to anthropology,” Gray said.

At some point, Cal State Bakersfield called and Clark answered, bringing him to Bakersfield.

Holding a master’s degree in Latin American history and a doctorate in philosophy in anthropology, Lee’s interest in art would lead him to become an accredited senior appraiser under the American Society of Appraisers.

But Clark’s passion for Mexican folk art would never subside, and he continued to collect for most of his life.

Longtime educator and art photographer Susan Reep first came to know Lee Clark through Clark’s relationship with her father, acclaimed painter Edward Reep. Over the years, Clark represented Edward Reep at his CL Clark Gallery.

“Lee knew the art community,” Susan Reep said in an email. “He exhibited his father’s works and sold many pieces.

“I don’t know if Lee’s gallery was the first gallery in town, but it was certainly the best,” she said. “Lee knew art. He knew how to appreciate art, and if something was in his gallery, it was worth buying.”

Don Martin, who owned Metro Galleries in downtown Bakersfield until it closed during the pandemic, worked at Clark’s gallery before it closed in 1999 or 2000.

“Even though it was before my time here, I think Lee was of gatekeeper in the late ’70s and early ’80s for the Bakersfield art scene,” Martin said. “By opening an art gallery that focused on emerging and mid-career artists from throughout California and the West, he brought ideas new and art that had not been expressed or seen here before.

“In my opinion, CL Clark Galleries was the best gallery between San Francisco and LA for many years. It was certainly the gallery that many artists wanted to show their work at.”

During one of Martin’s breaks from his television news career in the mid-1990s, Clark hired him as his gallery director. Martin still remembers the years spent in “that beautiful gallery which was then surrounded by a lovely private garden”.

Martin said Clark also helped humanize gay men in local culture, a big step forward for Bakersfield.

“He and his partner … were probably one of the first gay couples to be ‘out’ in Bakersfield and accepted by the elites in the 1980s and ’90s.”

There was no one like him, said Bukovnik.

“There will never be another like him in my life,” he said.