Until recently, you could drive by the Bonita Museum & Cultural Center on busy Bonita Road and not notice its sandy-colored stone walls. A few years ago, a member of the museum board reached out to Chula Vista metal artist Michael Leaf asking what could be done to make the place stand out.
“I'm an avid cyclist, so I ride through here all the time,” said Leaf. “And as I was coming down Bonita Road, I just saw it. And that's actually what I call this pattern, is the ‘it’ pattern. I just saw it. And I knew that was the answer.”
The “it” pattern is a series of panels painted a glossy blue and purple, with little shapes cut into the panels and pulled outward. It was installed in April. Now, thanks to the vivid color, the museum is hard to miss.
Leaf said part of his goal was having the outside of the museum reflect what’s going on inside.
“This is how we let not only the community know, but the world know, ‘Hey, there's a museum over here,’” he said.
What’s on the inside is a history of not only Bonita, but the Sweetwater Valley in general.
“People don’t know about Bonita, maybe about South Bay, so they’ll get a little history about the Sweetwater Valley, a little bit about the first people here, the Kumeyaay, as well as moving into the early days of water with the Sweetwater Dam, and then going into the agriculture, some of the citrus that was in the region,” said museum executive director Wendy Wilson.
The museum has just two rooms. In one, you’ll find the history. The other is where you find the cultural side of things. Various exhibitions come and go through the year, including works by Michael Leaf.
Opening on June 6 is "Beyond the Border, Plein Air.” It features artists from around the region who paint outdoor scenes across the county capturing the bright light, coastal vistas and urban scenery in real-time.
In Leaf’s Chula Vista studio a few miles away, you'll find various works of art wrought out of metal in various stages of completion. Much of it will eventually end up in the Bonita Museum.
One piece that will eventually be on public display is what you might call Leaf’s magnum opus. It is so large it has its own room in his studio.
“This is the second to-scale Last Supper on planet Earth. I just felt like making it, and when I learned the scale and size of the painting, I couldn’t believe the numbers. It was 29 feet by 15 feet,” Leaf said. “I thought I misread the paper because I’ve not seen the painting in real life.”
Leaf said at this point, he can’t reveal where the piece will end up.
Back at the museum, the metal artist is finishing up work on what will be the first piece in what Wendy Wilson said will become a “grand outdoor sculpture garden.”
Leaf calls it the piece Inner Strength. It’s a metal figure of a human holding two diverging steel bars in place. Leaf said it’s a metaphor of just how strong we as a people are, both externally and internally; a beacon of resilience.
You could also say an example of a homegrown native of the South Bay sharing his artistic gift to make his corner of our region a more beautiful, inviting place.
