James Hubbell: Between Heaven and Earth (Gerdes Creative, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, March 19) I went to the San Diego Public Library for a screening of a quite compelling documentary on artist James Hubbell called James Hubbell: Between Heaven and Earth. It was written and directed by Marianne Gerdes and photographed by her husband, Michael Gerdes, and it tells an interesting story of an artist I’d never heard of until two days ago but whose life and art have been extraordinary and worthwhile. My husband Charles and I stumbled on him quite literally when we arrived at the library early in the evening on Monday, March 18 for an unrelated program of Jim Miller and his wife Kelly Mayhew jointly reading from Miller’s Drift, a novel about historical San Diego. Since we got to the ninth and top floor of the building before the auditorium doors were opened, we stepped in to the James Hubbell exhibit, Architecture of Jubilation (on display until August 3, so if you want to see his stuff, it’s readily available until then) and were mightily impressed. We also realized that though we might not have heard of James Hubbell before, we’d certainly seen some of his work: among his local installations were the fountains in Embarcadero Park along the downtown waterfront and some of the outdoor sculptures at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in Hillcrest. James Hubbell was born into a relatively privileged background in Mineola, New York on October 23, 1931. (That’s what it said on his Wikipedia page; in the film the narrator said he was born in Connecticut.) He was so painfully shy he literally couldn’t speak to his father and he began communicating with the old man by drawing pictures. The Hubbells were pretty nomadic, especially for the time; before he finished what was then called junior high school and now goes by the horrible appellation “middle school,” he’d been to 13 different schools in 12 years.

James Hubbell was influenced to become an artist when someone in his family married into the Findlays, who owned a gallery in Kansas and two in New York City that specialized in Western-themed art. Hubbell started drawing and painting horses – the art exhibit includes a copy of the novel My Friend Flicka that was apparently in his collection from boyhood. In 1951 he started art classes at the Whitney school in New Haven, but his studies were interrupted by the Korean War. In 1952 he was drafted and sent there, and he responded by taking the drab, utilitarian buildings the U.S. Army used to run the Korean occupation and turning them into artworks by painting murals on the drab wall interiors. Once he got out of the military he enrolled in the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, and since there were no slots open in the painting program he enrolled to learn sculpture instead, though he didn’t graduate. In 1958 Hubbell married Anne Stewart and the couple bought 10 acres of mountain land in Wynola near Julian, California. The two took over and literally built their home from scratch, using local materials they found on the land. Though Hubbell was not a trained architect – in the documentary he admits that he always had to have architectural consultants draw and design the actual plans for the buildings he conceived – his works took on a distinctive style. Like Frank Lloyd Wright, Hubbell believed that buildings ought to take their form from the natural settings in which they exist and look as much as possible like features of the natural landscape. It’s not surprising that one of his most successful long-term collaborations was with architect Sim Bruce Richards, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. (In the San Diego Public Library’s exhibit paying tribute to James Hubbell, there’s a reproduction of his work space with a few books mounted on shelves behind his desk. One of them is a 2007 novel called Loving Frank by Nancy Horan, a biographical novel about Wright’s scandalous love affair with Marnah Borthwick, the wife of one of his clients, from 1907 to 1914.)

Hubbell’s trademarks include elaborate windows of stained glass – most of which he made himself at a foundry he built on the Wynola property – along with mosaic tiles and curvilinear forms that have led his buildings to be nicknamed “Hobbit Houses.” One audience member during a brief question-and-answer section after the Public Library film screening asked about the construction challenges involved in building these curved forms. On one of Hubbell’s most famous buildings, the nondenominational chapel at Sea Ranch, an architectural community in northern California, he took advantage of the contractors’ previous experience in building boats and designed a building that would be shaped like a boat. Hubbell’s most elaborate commission was to design and create 18 doors with stained-glass windows for the palace of a sheikh in Abu Dhabi. He and over a dozen collaborators spent a year on this, six months to design the doors and six months actually to build them. Fortunately, a long-time friend of Hubbell’s named Otto B. Rigan was on hand to photograph the doors, document their construction and publish a book about them before they were shipped off to Abu Dhabi, never again to be seen by the hands that had made them. In the documentary Hubbell was asked how he felt about putting that much of his time and energy into works that he would never be able to look at again, and he said he’d got used to that after the buildings he had painted with his murals during the Korean War were destroyed by a bombing raid. In 1983 the Hubbells – James, Anne and their four sons – formed the Ilan-Lael Foundation to support their own and similar artistic projects. The name “Ilan-Lael” had previously been given to the Hubbells’ mountain estate and it’s from a Hebrew phrase meaning “the tree that reaches to God.”

Other projects James Hubbell worked on included a school called the Colegio la Esperanza in Tijuana, built for a technically illegal community on the outskirts of the city and sponsored by the Soroptimists of Poway, whose Web site explains that since the 1990’s, when the first school at the site – a kindergarten called Jardin de Niños La Esperanza – was built, the complex has been expanded to cover more grades, including the Colegio La Esperanza Elementary and Arts School, and the Universidad Marucana. Hubbell worked on the project with American educator Christine Brady-Kosko, who launched it as part of a cross-border campaign called the Americas Foundation. According to Ilan-Lael’s Web site (https://ilanlaelfoundation.org/work/colegio-la-esperanza-school/), “The Colonia was hardly more than a shanty town outside Tijuana when Christine Brady first visited Colonia Esperanza. Though its inhabitants number over 2,000, there were no public utilities available for the poor families who resided there. No running water, no electricity, and no childcare. Often the children were left alone to wander the streets while their parents sought work. It was after seeing this level of destitution and hardship, that Christine Brady-Kosko was inspired to form The Americas Foundation and began construction of a school in the area. For this she sought the help of artist James Hubbell in an attempt to call attention to her school and to education. What resulted was a place that brought beauty and inspiration to the children’s lives.”

This would not be the only instance in which Hubbell would seek to work across international borders to use his art to build understanding between different countries and peoples. In 1994 he started a series of projects called Pacific Rim Parks (https://pacificrimpark.org/park-sites/) in various cities on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. The first park, in Vladivostok, Russia, was created in 1994 and, like the subsequent ones, was largely made by local architecture students working under Hubbell’s overall artistic direction. Later parks were created in San Diego (on Shelter Island, 1998); Yantai, China (2001 and again in 2018; footage of the construction of the 2018 version is included in Between Heaven and Earth); Tijuana (2004); Puerto Princesa, Philippines (2009); Jeju, South Korea (2010); and Kaohsiung, Taiwan (2013). Alas, the Vladivostok park was deliberately destroyed in 2021 when the Far Eastern State University, which had sponsored its construction, was relocated and the site slated for complete redevelopment. An open letter by Hubbell and associate Kyle Bergman, available online at https://pacificrimpark.org/stories/farewell-to-soil-and-soul-park/, said, “We are sad that the park is no longer standing, but also grateful for all of the doors that making the park opened. It was a great adventure to build that park. The stories and lore are epic, and the process of creating it formed the very DNA of the Pacific Rim Park project.”

Watching Between Heaven and Earth in America’s current political context made James Hubbell seem in a weird way a sort of anti-Donald Trump. Where Trump uses his wealth and power to create division and sow chaos, Hubbell uses his art to bring people together. Where Trump preaches hatred of “the other,” immigrants in particular, Hubbell celebrates our common humanity and works to bring people together instead of tearing them apart. The contrast between them also is exemplified in the quite different styles of the buildings they create. Trump’s are monumental, aimed at creating fear and intimidation in the people who visit them; Hubbell’s are small-scale and offer an open hand of welcome. Trump infamously slaps his name on everything; Hubbell fades into the background and lets both the buildings themselves and the teams of collaborators he has assembled to create them stand on their own. Between Heaven and Earth also includes coverage of the Cedar fire of 2003, which swept through the Hubbells’ mountaintop home and destroyed the wood and glass parts of their buildings – though James Hubbell notes with pride that the basic frameworks still stood and made rebuilding practical, while their neighbors in conventionally built homes literally lost everything but the bare slabs of the foundations. The final parts of the Hubbell documentary are sad, as old age and Parkinson’s disease both literally and figuratively slow Hubbell down. (Fortunately Marianne and Michael Gerdes had worked on a previous documentary on James Hubbell from 1999 that included footage they recycled for Between Heaven and Earth to show what Ilan-Lael looked like pre-fire.)

In 2021 James and Anne were forced to move from their beloved Ilan-Lael compound into Frederika Manor, one of the ghastly-sounding “Front Porch retirement communities” advertised to death on KPBS (which helped the Gerdeses produce and finance the film), much as my father was forced in the last years of his life to give up the beautiful home he’d made on the hillside of Belvedere, California because he could no longer negotiate the long stairs leading up to it and back. James Hubbell was particularly hit by the Parkinson’s-induced tremors that made it difficult for him to draw – remember that drawing had always been his fallback means of communication when words failed him, as they often did – though he’s adapted and now works in a simpler, more stylized manner. Between Heaven and Earth is a profoundly moving film about a quite remarkable person and artist whom you deserve to know a lot better than you do. The film is available on the KPBS Web site at https://www.kpbs.org/news/arts-culture/2019/10/18/james-hubbell-between-heaven-and-earth.