Los Gatos Weekly-Times Campbell-bound: Bruni Old Town artist Bruni Sablan moves to Campbell in March She says clashes with landlords forced decision By Jeff Kearns Artist Bruni Sablan, a fixture at Old Town for nearly 20 years, says she's packing her oils and easels and moving her gallery to Campbell. She blames Old Town's new owners for the move, saying clashes with the landlords began in 1995, when Deke Hunter and Ed Storm bought the property. She says the problems worsened last year when Maryland-based Federal Realty Investment Trust partnered with Hunter and Storm to finish the renovation and expansion of the shopping center. But her beef with Old Town is also philosophical; by bringing in chain retailers, she insists, the charm of the place didn't survive the remodel. "Downtown Campbell is really coming up, and it has the feeling that downtown Los Gatos used to have," said the Brazilian-born Sablan, who is of Lebanese-Sicilian descent. With a handful of other artists, Sablan started the Old Town Gallery in the summer of 1980. She ran an informal apprenticeship program for young artists, who worked in the gallery in exchange for a chance to use a 1,600-square-foot basement studio beneath what's now California Cafe. Artists came and went over the years, but one, Mark Gray, hung around. Now, he's the gallery manager and a professional artist in his own right, who focuses primarily on paintings of athletes. Sablan's daughter Kristina, 24, also works and exhibits her sculpture in the gallery. Sablan charges that Federal's property manager ordered five of her sandwich board signs featuring her portraits of jazz artists taken down and told her she was not allowed to display signs with pictures outside her own space. This incensed Sablan, who says she depends on the signs to bring business down to her studio, which is tucked away below street level in the back of the complex. Sablan is also angry because she was moved out of the basement when construction began and relocated to a cramped 500-square-foot space previously used for storage below the Indian Store. She claims the new digs, which cost her $2,000 a month, caused upper-respiratory problems for her, Gray, and her daughter. Neither Ed Storm nor Federal Realty property manager Phyllis O'Shea returned requests left on their voice mails for comments on this story. Sablan's most famous work is her Jazz Masters series, which she began in 1980. Since then, she's produced more than 650 portraits of mostly jazz musicians, including more than 100 of Miles Davis alone, and dozens of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington. The new gallery, called Bruni Gallery, at 394 E. Campbell Ave., is set to open March 1. For more information, call 370-4700, or point browsers to www.brunijazzart.com. [ Back to Contents Page | Los Gatos Weekly-Times Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, February 10, 1999. ©1999 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.