SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. — Philip Guston’s “Cigar” (1969), now hanging in the McMeen Gallery of the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (SLOMA), presents a disconcerting image. One of 33 paintings first shown in Guston’s landmark 1970 New York exhibition, it depicts a pink-hooded, ham-handed klansman gripping a cigar that wafts a ragged swirl of grey impasto smoke. The late Canadian-American artist, a vocal antifascist, often explored difficult questions regarding racism and the social complicity that shrouded and enabled it in his darkly comical paintings of KKK members. Emma Saperstein, SLOMA’s chief curator, told Hyperallergic that she sees “Cigar,” in its personification of racism hidden in plain sight, as “a challenging piece that implicates both the viewer and the artist.”The painting, which will remain on view through October 2, is the first loan to SLOMA arranged through a project that aims to make notable American artworks available to regional institutions. The program is run by the Art Bridges Foundation, started in 2017 by philanthropist and Walmart heiress Alice Walton (who also founded the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas) with a mission to expand access to American art nationwide. Guston’s paintings typically hang in larger institutions, making the exhibit of “Cigar” an unusual opportunity for the regional museum. The painting is one of approximately 200 objects in the Art Bridges Collection, which it makes available for loan, free of cost. All the expenses of exhibiting the painting at SLOMA, from shipping to insurance, were paid for by Art Bridges, with additional eligibility for educational programming.The presence of a painting by Guston in San Luis Obispo, even if only for 10 weeks, has opened up several possibilities for discussion and education. SLOMA recently hosted a talk by art historian and curator Ellen Landau that explored Guston’s creative evolution from Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s to representation in the late ’60s. Last week, as part of an educational outreach program, students taking AP Art History at San Luis Obispo High School learned more about Guston, viewed “Cigar” at SLOMA, and shared notes and observations on Post-It notes. “The dots represent the sewing together of morality,” wrote one student, according to the museum, “like a makeshift, silly costume.” Ellen Landau’s talk on Guston and his creative evolution in July (photo John Seed/Hyperallergic)Their programming is part of an ongoing public dialogue about Guston’s work and his series depicting KKK imagery in particular. In 2020, Guston’s traveling retrospective, organized by the National Gallery of Art in DC, was postponed in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. At the time, the museum’s Director Kaywin Feldman told Hyperallergic that “in today’s America, because Guston appropriated images of Black trauma, the show needs to be about more than Guston.” Over 2,600 artists, curators, and writers condemned the move in an open letter claiming that “the people who run our great institutions do not want trouble” and accusing the museums hosting the exhibition of “fear[ing] controversy.” In recent years, artist Trenton Doyle Hancock has confronted and engaged with Guston’s caricatures of American racism through a Black American Lens, the subject of a 2024–25 exhibition at the Jewish Museum.At the museum’s front desk, directly across from the Guston, Visitor Services Manager Lena Rushing recently collected reactions to the painting from museum visitors.“Are the dotted lines neighborhood streets? Like [how] racism and hatred are interwoven everywhere,” commented one visitor named Melodee. “As a native Southern Californian, I know that although it’s not perceived as a hotbed of KKK activities, you can always find it lurking under the surface everywhere.”Another visitor, Stephanie B., said the painting is “as relevant today as ever, when so much extremism is being normalized and celebrated.”For students, educators, and museum visitors in San Luis Obispo, this loan offers a rare encounter with a prescient work that strongly resonates with current artistic and political censorship — and that may not have otherwise made its way to the regional museum. In a scathing review of the 1970 exhibition in which the painting made its debut, critic Hilton Kramer characterized Guston as being “out of touch with contemporary realities.” Now, the opposite seems true: Guston was ahead of his time.Art Bridges will also be lending pieces to support a group show at SLOMA next spring, including works by Robert Gober, Alex Katz, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The Guston loan, Saperstein told Hyperallergic, “is the first of many.”Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled (L.A.)” (1991), comprising green candies wrapped in cellophane, is among the works in the Art Bridges Foundation’s collection. (photo by Edward C. Robison III, courtesy Art Bridges)