Kirby Scudder

Watsonville, California is known all over the world as a center for agriculture, especially berries. Watsonville is in the heart of the Californian vegetable and fruit growing area within the fertile Salinas Valley and Pajaro Valley. Apples, strawberries, artichokes, and many other crops thrive in its temperate climate. Along with agriculture Watsonville has a strong cultural community each year celebrating events such as the Watsonville Fly-In and the Watsonville Strawberry Festival at Monterey Bay and attractions like Watsonville Plaza, the Henry J. Mello Center, Agricultural History Museum, Watsonville Fairgrounds, Pajaro Valley Arts Gallery, and the Pajaro Valley Historical Museum.

Palo Alto, California has to be considered among one of this country’s great cities. It is a city that strives for and lives by a standard of excellence. What Palo Alto has become is the result of the contributions of many individuals along with the commitment that Leland Stanford brought to this northern California community in the 19th century. Today, Palo Alto is a world leader influencing global standards of excellence in technology, education, design and beyond. Influencing the way the world thinks.

The city has always been a hub of river transportation and is a major deep-water port connected to the Pacific Ocean. Sacramento's economy is highly diversified and, along with state government and military installations, its industries include aerospace, high technology, furniture, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, meat packing, and food processing of crops from the Central Valley.

The original settlement now known as Capitola grew out of what was then called Soquel Landing. Soquel Landing got its name from a wharf located at the mouth of Soquel Creek. This wharf, which dates back to the 1850s, served as an outlet for the produce and lumber grown in the interior. In 1865, Captain John Pope Davenport, a whaleman at Monterey, moved his operations to be near the wharf. Unable to capture any whales, he moved his operations the following year to Point Año Nuevo

Coastal bluffs and snowy peaks were created over a millennia of tectonic upheavals. After 19th-century mining, logging and oil-drilling threatened to undermine the state’s natural splendors, California’s pioneering environmentalists – including John Muir and the Sierra Club – rescued old-growth trees and spurred the creation of national and state parks that still astound visitors today. Today, Hollywood still makes most of the world’s movies and TV shows, fed by a vibrant performing arts scene on stages across the state. California has long been a subject of interest in the public mind and has often been promoted by its promoters as a kind of paradise. In the early 20th century, fueled by the efforts of state and local promoters, many Americans saw the Golden State as an ideal resort destination, sunny and dry all year round with easy access to the ocean and mountains. With its natural beauty, people and diversity, there is no place on Earth like California.

Cow sculpture, commissioned by Rebecca's Cafe in 'Interior Design Magazine' Summer edition. In the summer of 2012 Interior Design Magazine hired renowned Architectural photographer Art Gray to spend 3 days documenting the newly renovated Tannery Arts Center for the summer edition. Here is my interview with Art Gray. Art shot a picture of my recently installed cow head sculpture at the Tannery cafe.

Artist, collaborator, salesman, curator, idea man, hustler, fixer, midwife to the very scene that inspires all those Keep Santa Cruz Weird’ bumper stickers: You can call Kirby Scudder all those things and more. A refugee of the 1990s dot-com bust, Kirby has lived a dozen lifetimes since moving to Santa Cruz in 2003. He was the artist who created the enormous papier-mache cows in the early days of the Salz Tannery art project, at the same time, opening art galleries in several downtown spaces in an effort to create a welcoming environment for edgy visual arts. He set up spotlights along West Cliff Drive as a commemoration to the ideal of world peace. He established the First Friday Art Tour, a prominent event on the local arts calendar, and curated shows at the Attic, the Mill Gallery and the Dead Cow Gallery. As the resident visionary at the Dead Cow and the director of the Santa Cruz Institute of Contemporary Art, Kirby has also become the symbol of the emerging Tannery Arts Center and worked closely with the city to create a vibrant Santa Cruz scene, one crazy project at a time. Wallace Baine, Santa Cruz Sentinel