SAN DIEGO, February 28, 2015 - Art of the Park: 100 Years of Art in Balboa Park (1915-2015), an exhibition of paintings of Balboa Park dating from the 1915 Panama-California Exposition to the present, will be on display at the 1905 Marston House Museum & Gardens in Balboa Park April 17-September 21, 2015. Ten rooms of the Arts and Crafts-style home in Balboa Park's northwest corner will showcase dozens of paintings, watercolors, and pastels depicting only the park, its buildings, gardens and landscapes.

This major exhibition is part of Save Our Heritage Organisation's year-long celebration of the Centennial of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, which was held in a transformed Balboa Park for this international event. SOHO is the region's largest and most active historic preservation group and operator of the Marston House Museum & Gardens, a National Historic Landmark at 3525 Seventh Avenue.

Paintings of the park's century-old Spanish Colonial-style architecture, courtyards, fountains, thematic gardens and groves of trees created by early 20th-century artists such as Alfred Mitchell, Martha Bintliff, D.A. Lovell, and Maude Rice will hang in this intimate setting, as will pieces by mid-century artists Richard Gabriel Chase and Robert Kinyon. Recent Balboa Park paintings by two dozen plein air artists will hang amongst the historic paintings. A seven-member professional art jury selected contemporary works by San Diego area artists such as Ken Goldman, Dot Renshaw, Marjorie Taylor, Elizabeth Weems, Toni Williams, and Jeff Yeomans, and, from Tijuana, Armando Elizarraras.

Most of the art selected for this exhibition was painted outdoors in the park in the plein-air style, a technique pioneered by the French Impressionists to capture nature in fleeting light and atmosphere, in contrast to working in a studio.