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

Aug. 18—When Lee Clark came to Bakersfield in the 1970s, the city wasn't exactly known as a center of art and culture.

Slowly but surely, Clark began working to change that perception.

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

Clark could talk to anybody 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 spring from those virtues.

A longtime senior art appraiser and local patron of the arts who was probably best known as the owner of the former C.L. Clark Galleries on 18th and V streets in Bakersfield, Clark died Aug. 1 after a long illness. He was 87.

Claudia Gray, who worked with Clark for years and called him a "truly exceptional man," said her friend's mind was "sharp as ever up to the last minute," but his body was giving out.

"I was still ordering cookbooks for him," she said.

"He was interested in the culture of food. He never stopped learning and educating himself," Gray said.

Born in Paulding, Ohio on April 11, 1935, Clark was bicultural by birth.

His grandfather was Cuban and had a sugar plantation before the Castro revolution, which brought about the Communist takeover in 1959. Clark spent summers there, and learned to speak Spanish fluently.

It was there he met writers Ernest Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other luminaries.

And, even as a child, he began collecting folk art there.

His educational accomplishments 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 Universidad de las Americas in Mexico City.

"It didn't take him too long to realize there was a lot of dirty work in archaeology, so he made the switch 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 doctor of philosophy degree 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 cool, and he continued collecting for most of his life.

Longtime educator, and art photographer Susan Reep first knew Lee Clark through Clark's relationship with her father, the well-known painter Edward Reep. Over the years Clark represented Edward Reep at his C.L. Clark Galleries.

"Lee knew the art community," Susan Reep said in an email. "He exhibited dad's work and sold many pieces.

"I don't know if Lee's gallery was the first gallery in town, but it was surely the best," she said. "Lee knew art. He knew how to evaluate art and if something was in his gallery, it was worth purchasing."

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.

"Though it was before my time here, I think Lee was the trailblazer in the late '70s and early 1980s 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 new ideas and art that had not been expressed or seen here before.

"In my opinion, C.L. Clark Galleries was the best gallery between San Francisco and L.A. for a lot of years. It was certainly the gallery in which many artists wanted to show their work."

During one of Martin's breaks from his TV news career in the mid-1990s, Clark hired him as his gallery director. Martin still remembers the years spent at "that beautiful gallery that was surrounded at the time 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, Bukovnik said.

"There will never be another like him in my lifetime," he said.

Reporter Steven Mayer can be reached at 661-395-7353. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter: @semayerTBC.