Sunset Stories

My connections to Sunset Center are many. My family moved to the Peninsula in 1946, when I was nine months old. My first experience at Sunset was on stage in a dance recital put on by my ballet teacher, Joanne Nix, sometime in the 1950s. If I remember correctly, it was a dance from the Nutcracker Suite. As a teenager I ushered for the Carmel Bach Festival under conductor Sandor Salgo. Ushers were encouraged to wear evening gowns for nighttime performances, and with concertgoers arriving in elegant attire, I felt like a princess at a ball.

In the 1960s, the Friends of Photography established their presence at the Center. My father, Wynn Bullock, was a founding member along with Ansel Adams, Cole and Brett Weston and others, and he served on the board as the Friends' first exhibition chair. My fondest memory from that time is that the board named the gallery the Wynn Bullock Gallery at Ansel's urging. While the gallery no longer bears my father's name, I was given the original sign several years ago and treasure it as a memento of that significant era in the Center's history.

A year after my father died in 1975, my mother, Edna Bullock, took up the camera herself and enjoyed a 20-year career as a fine art photographer and workshop leader. On May 20, 1995, we celebrated her 80th birthday at Sunset Center with the release of her book Edna's Nudes and the premiere of the traveling exhibition of the same name in the Marjorie Evans Gallery. Hundreds attended, we signed books for hours, and Governor Pete Wilson sent a representative with a proclamation honoring her contributions to the culture of the state.

In 2010, I helped coordinate the premiere of my father's Color Light Abstraction exhibition, shown in the gallery that once bore his name, with a book signing and a panel discussion in Carpenter Hall that drew an overflow audience.

The Center is an enormously important contributor to the cultural and educational life of the Monterey Peninsula, and I am deeply grateful for all it does, including providing a home today for such organizations as the Center for Photographic Art, the Monterey Symphony, and the Carmel Bach Festival to name a few. My hope is that it continues to build on that legacy for generations to come.