Tile Walk Virtual Program Appendix
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The Granada Time Warner Theater
The Granada Theater doesn't show movies any more, but when the theater first opened in the 1920s, it was owned by Time Warner and showed Time Warner Studios pictures. Fox Studios opened the Fox Arlington Theater nearly across the street to compete with Time Warner and show its own pictures. This is not the only piece of movie history in Santa Barbara: in fact, before Hollywood became the undisputed center of the American film industry, Santa Barbara was the site of Flying A Studios, a major producer of silent films.
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The 1925 Santa Barbara Earthquake
In 1925, a massive earthquake leveled or severely damaged almost all the major structures in downtown Santa Barbara. The famous Santa Barbara Courthouse that stands now was built to replace the former courthouse building, which the quake had damaged beyond repair. In addition to the Courthouse, buildings like the Fox Arlington Theater and others around town were constructed or renovated in the aftermath of the 1925 disaster.
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The "Paseo" at Fox's Grauman's Chinese Theater
The Arlington Theater boasts an architectural feature also seen at the world-famous Grauman's Chinese and Egyptian Theaters in Los Angeles, also constructed for Fox Studios. The "paseo", or open-air passageway, in the center of the courtyard provided an excellent space to display tiles from Malibu Tiles and other prominent Southern California tile manufacturers.
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İznik Tiles with Signature White, Blues, and Reds
Although humans had been firing and decorating clay for thousands of years beforehand, in the 16th century, tile artisans in the Ottoman Turkish town of İznik perfected techniques to achieve bright, clear white backgrounds and red and turquoise accent glazes on tiles that did not crack when fired. İznik tiles circulated throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and traveled as trade goods along the Silk Road as far as China.
(See The Tile Book, Elizabeth Hilliard, p. 15-23)
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Tile Showrooms at Topkapi Palace
Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, the former residence of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, is arguably the most famous surviving installation of İznik tiles in the world. All of the Palace's many rooms feature intricate tile detailing on every conceivable surface. Topkapi Palace resembles other sites in North Africa and the former Persian empire (e.g., Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan) that use glazed tile as a primary architectural feature.
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Geometry and Islamic Tile
Geometric designs are very common in architecture from the Islamic world, and especially in tile work. Geometric tile patterns like the patterns in this picture can be found in mosques and other structures across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Especially in the Arabic-speaking Muslim world, Muslim artisans historically avoided portraying animals or human figures in graphic art to demonstrate their respect for God's role as the only true creator of life in the universe. As a result, Muslim designers became masters in colorful, quasi-mathematical geometric patterns, which showed the underlying beauty and order of God's creation without aspiring to replace it.
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Talavera de la Reina Pottery
The Mexican talavera pottery tradition takes its name from its ancestor tradition, a style of painted glazed pottery centered in the Spanish town of Talavera de la Reina. Similar traditions of faience (i.e., ceramics with white glaze backgrounds) pottery, including tile work, emerged in Italy, France, and the Netherlands in the centuries between the Renaissance and the 19th century.
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Talavera Tiles in Puebla, Mexico
Most of the tile patterns found around Southern California originate in the talavera ceramic tradition centered in the northern Mexican state and city of Puebla. The city of Puebla remains a major center of talavera tile production, and almost all talavera tiles made today are still glazed by hand.
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Malibu Tiles and the Southern California Tile Explosion
In the 1920s and 1930s, a number of ceramics studios cropped up across California and began producing large numbers of tiles and tile designs. Malibu Tile Works is one the most famous of these studios. Malibu Tile Works's exhibition space at Adamson House in Malibu displays a wealth of original Malibu tile designs in a variety of indoor and outdoor applications. Other important California-based tile producers include Catalina Tile Company, Kraftile, and tile designer Ernest A. Batchelder.
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New Deal Art and American Industrial Murals
In the 1930s, the so-called Section of Painting and Sculpture, a Treasury Department Program funded by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, commissioned murals for government-owned spaces across the country, such as post offices and courthouses. Many of these murals built on the techniques of Mexican mural painting tradition to depict chronologies of regional histories across the country. These murals often depicted local landmarks, geographic features, and (often caricatured) native peoples, as well as signs of the burgeoning industrial might of the United States. This mural, found in a post office in the Abbot Kinney neighborhood of Santa Monica, displays many key features of this style.
