Sit still on the front porch of Renée Richetts’ home in Del Dios, a tiny unincorporated community between Escondido and Rancho Santa Fe, and there in the quiet, if you listen, truly listen, you can almost hear her artwork speak.
All over the porch, hanging from eaves and off the lanky branches of a hibiscus tree, Richetts’ fused glass artworks sway lazily in the warm summer breeze. The small fragments of colorful glass, strung along together, produce soothing sounds, their tinkling notes wafting through the air alongside a chorus of windchimes and the sweet scent of plumeria blooming in the garden.
“Before I forget, I want to make sure you frame all of this within the context of how art is healing,” Richetts said, while walking a reporter into the home she shares with her wife, Mary Jo Harte, a hospice nurse.
On a recent Thursday morning, Richetts’ artworks, the colorful shards of smooth shiny glass, were indeed speaking the language of healing — and spreading the gospel Richetts has been preaching for decades.
“Art — the art of making it, seeing it, talking about it, hearing about it — it’s healing,” she said.
She should know. Just like her spouse of 32 years, Richetts worked as a nurse for a long time before retiring in 2023 from Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla, where she specialized in intensive care.
“When you talk about healing, it’s all sorts of healing,” she said. “It’s physical, mental. It’s emotional trauma. It’s everything. I’m not talking out in the woozy woozy, OK? This is so well-documented.”
In her yard in Del Dios, Renée Richetts’ work can be seen all over, including fused glasswork hanging from eaves and off tree branches. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Ahead of her time
Mention Richetts’ name to people around town, and many end up using the same word to describe the 71-year-old: pioneer. It’s taken her a long time to get accustomed to the label, but these days, Richetts will tell you she’s finally comfortable enough to “embrace it.”
It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate being called a pioneer, a trailblazer. It’s just who she is. The Pasadena-born Richetts has lived many lives: nurse, artist, LGBTQ+ activist, feminist. In each of those lives, she always found herself on the fringes, always teetering on the edge, pushing for things that, looking back now, “were definitely ahead of their time.”
In 1993, as a volunteer, she co-founded the Lesbian Health Project at the San Diego Lesbian and Gay Men’s Community Center. In that role, she went around town talking about lesbian sex and lesbian health so openly that she made many uncomfortable.
“Lesbian health is just the same as women’s health,” she recalled hearing. “Why are you making an issue where there isn’t one?”
Yet she moved forward, undeterred. Growing up in a Quaker environment back in Pasadena, it was ingrained in her to push forward, no matter the odds, for the betterment of everyone.
“I was raised in a Quaker setting, went to a Quaker school, and the Quaker faith believes in engaging authority and engaging power in order to make everything better for human beings. And that means, in the United States at least, a lot of political activism. I was making anti-war signs as far as I can remember, and that was art!”
These days, she’s still fighting for the things that matter to her: LGBTQ+ issues, politics, mental health. Her weapon of choice? Art — specifically, art that’s a representation of all of her. The nurse. The artist. The activist.
“They’re all essential to who I am,” she said. “All of those identities are the sum of me, and the sum of me is greater than the sum of the parts. If a piece were to be removed, I’ll tell you, I would be very, very, very active trying to figure out how to put it back. Like when I broke my arm and I couldn’t do some of the art that I do, did that mean I stopped being an artist? No. Did that mean I stopped making art? No. I figured out a way, with a broken arm, to keep doing art.”
Artist Renée Richetts has an exhibit on display through July 30 at the Rancho San Diego County Library. Her work, which includes glass pieces, is created in her in-home studio in Del Dios in North County. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
All in the family
Art, you can say, is in her genes. Her parents owned a fine art gallery in Pasadena, a particularly artistic suburb east of Los Angeles at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. Her Chinese-Irish grandfather served in the Navy, for which he drew health-and-safety cartoons. Later, he would become an animator for Walt Disney. Her mother was a painter and printmaker, while her father was a master woodcarver. It was her father who taught her about three-dimensional art. Some of her siblings dabbled in the performing arts.
“There was a room like this one that children were not allowed to go into,” Richetts said, pointing to her own in-home art studio. “But there was also a whole other room that was, you know, knock yourselves out, kids, go for it, where there was always art supplies. Anything that we wanted, we got. I’m pretty sure I don’t know anybody that asked for oil paints as a kid.”
She said she considers herself lucky that “we got space to do it. … It was so much a part of my childhood. I also realized my parents are artists, so all their friends are creatives, and so when I go to my buddies’ houses … I did not realize that a house could exist without an art studio. … It wasn’t until I went to public school in the ninth grade, and I started having public school friends and going to their houses, and I’d kind of look around and ask, ‘Where’s your art studio?’”
Back in high school, she took an aptitude test that identified potential careers.
“I looked at the aptitude test and I saw I had a strong, strong aptitude for nursing, social work and teaching,” Richetts said. “I also had a strong interest in art and wanted to be an artist. I also realized, since I had all these artists in my family, that art is not, especially for a woman, a lucrative career.”
“And so at the age of 14, I was already planning my career trajectory with a big focus on how can I be an artist, and that trajectory looked at what combines well with art, so you can have a career where you’re making a living wage and you can have an art career at the same time. So from the beginning, from the get-go, it was always going to be a combination of art and something else.” In her case, it was the career in nursing that gave her the opportunity to pursue art.
It’s that forward-thinking mentality and tenacity that have earned her praise in the community.
“I see in Renée’s art her pioneering spirit as a long-term activist in our community,” said Bob Lehman, executive director of San Diego Art Matters, the region’s largest arts advocacy group. “Her depth of emotion, perseverance and sense of caring flow through the layers of her artwork.”
Lehman, who serves on the county arts commission with Richetts, added: “I’m fascinated by Renée’s work and how she adds facets to include other disciplines. For example, she created artwork inspired by a book about the internment of Japanese people during WWII which she illuminated with a live reading by the book’s author.”
Artist Renée Richetts has an exhibit on display through July 30 at the Rancho San Diego County Library. She specializes in a genre of art known as “artist’s books,” art inspired by books or art in the physical form of a book. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Connecting through art
That ability to create artistic bridges cuts to the core of who Richetts is an artist. She specializes in what’s known as “artist’s book,” a genre of art that is inspired by books or is in the physical form of a book. At the Rancho San Diego County Library, a handful of Richetts’ work is on display through July 30 in an exhibition titled “Inspired By, III.”
When she bumps into a stranger who asks, “What kind of artist are you?,” Richetts said it’s often easier to just describe herself as a mixed-media artist. If they want to know more, she said: “I have this joke where I tell people … if it can’t run away from me, I’ll put it in my art.”
Her pieces, many of which are three-dimensional, are indeed an eclectic collage of things: bottles, transistors, screws, toys, stickers. She almost exclusively uses repurposed materials, from used electronic parts to scraps of fabric. Her work is part of collections, both private and public, across the globe, including at the University of California San Diego, of which she’s an alumna.
At 17, she picked UCSD because, she said, “for about 20 minutes, I thought I really wanted to be a doctor.” While at UCSD, she pursued degrees in linguistics and French literature. After college, she studied art history and architecture in France, and upon returning to the United States, she pursued her nursing degree at Palomar College, graduating in 1982.
Even though she worked as a nurse full time for decades, it was art that gave her an outlet, an opportunity to express her true self. Art, she said, is what gets her “excited.”
“It stimulates so many parts of my brain,” she said. “There’s the cognitive part of my brain, the part that likes to solve problems. I’m a mixed-media artist, so I’m all the time having to solve structural problems and material problems and think them through. And then there’s the part that’s right-sided that allows me to express my emotions through my art. …”
“I’ve always got another project in the back of my brain, and coming out my fingers and coming out of my heart all the time,” she said. “It’s kind of a seven-day-a-week thing. Sometimes I make myself take a day off.”
On days when she’s not making art, Richetts is talking about it. On July 18, for example, she’s moderating a panel at the Rancho San Diego Library about how “art can foster hope, optimism and emotional healing.”
“Art,” Richetts said, “stimulates different parts of my body. Like, I can feel it. It heals me.”
And there in the stillness of her front porch, Richetts looked out toward Lake Hodges from her perch high atop Del Dios. She paused, as if to listen, truly listen, to what the breeze was saying on this sunny summer day.
Then, a wisp of woodland air, followed by a confession or perhaps even a revelation. In the quiet, surrounded by her art, Richetts said without hesitation: “Art, to me, is a form of prayer, a meditation.”
Then she closed her eyes.
Art discussion and tour of “Inspired By, III”
When: 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. Saturday, July 18
Where: Rancho San Diego County Library, 11555 Via Rancho San Diego, El Cajon
Admission: Free
Phone: 619-660-5370