Quick Take
For more than 40 years, Dag Weiser's Market Street house in Santa Cruz was a dazzling display of creativity and charm every Halloween. But now the house has been sold, and a great local tradition comes to an end.
On Halloween night, on an otherwise dark and quiet street in the middle of town, just a few houses down from where the mayor lives, a great Santa Cruz arts tradition came to a bittersweet end.
Dag Weiser’s annual Halloween display at his house on Market Street might not have been the largest, or the most elaborate, or the most expensive of such displays in Santa Cruz County. But for more than 40 years, it was easily the most original, the most moving, the most miraculous of visual gifts to the community.
And on Friday night, with admirers gathered at the sidewalk, it glowed and gleamed for the last time. Weiser and his partner, Leslie Murray, have rented the old 1914 farmhouse for decades. But the house’s current owners have decided to renovate it to eventually sell it, displacing the tenants, who will now have to seek out new housing.
Even in Santa Cruz’s rich and diverse creative community, Weiser is a unicorn, a gifted visual artist who executes his bold, colorful, sometimes psychedelic visions with the simplest of materials: cardboard — plain, old, everyday, Amazon-box cardboard. On Friday, his yard was festooned with giant origami paper cranes, all made from cardboard, in arresting fluorescent colors, flittering in front of an enormous peace symbol and the word “peace” in Japanese characters.
The sidewalk crowd was small but, at least in my many years of visiting Dag’s amazing Halloween-night display, I found it to be especially concentrated with award-winning artists, musicians, curators and writers, all of whom make an effort to come by on a busy night when there are a thousand other appealing places to be. On this Friday, to take one example, Jozseph Schultz, Santa Cruz’s nonpareil culinary artist and the genius behind India Joze, was hanging out, handing out chocolate treats.
Susan Heydt has been a neighbor for 27 years. “It’s so amazing,” she said, in the glow of the cardboard cranes. “For years, I hosted a [Halloween] party, and the pinnacle of our party was at the end when we would all walk down here and see this — yep, our Halloween was complete.”
Weiser, a tall, snowy-haired, jovial man, was all laughs and hugs on Friday. But he was also wistful. “I’m trying not to think about it too much,” he said, “But yeah, it’s a little melancholy. I mean, I’ve been living here for more than 40 years, and I don’t think there was ever a morning where I didn’t think, ‘The other shoe has got to drop on this place. I’m gonna hear from the landlord today.’” When that call finally came, he said, it was a “gut punch.”
The Halloween tradition began in the early 1980s, and, in all those years since, Weiser has never created the same display twice. Fans, friends and neighbors often bring up his more memorable efforts — enormous ants crawling all over the house, cardboard puppets all playing violins (a play on the punny theme “Stop the Violins/Violence”), a stunning tableau in which half the yard was covered in angels and the other half in devils in a vivid battle of good versus evil.
Among Weiser’s most fervent champions over the years has been former Museum of Art & History curator Susan Hillhouse and MK Contemporary Art gallery owner and curator Melissa Kreisa. Weiser has found a welcoming showcase at Kreisa’s gallery on Front Street next to the MAH, not only for his intricate cardboard art, but for his paintings as well.
“I always say to people, there’s so few really unique artists in the world. Everybody’s always standing on the shoulders of someone else,” said Kreisa, who came to pay respects on the final Halloween night Friday. “But Dag is truly unique.”
The idea for a Halloween display was born when Weiser first moved in during the Reagan era, said his partner in the project, Leslie Murray, herself a graphic artist. “Nobody [in the neighborhood] was doing anything for Halloween,” she said. “We were just kind of goofing around with some art supplies and made a big spider. And we had some red transparent stuff and we cut out a little hourglass and stuck it to the spider and shined a light through it,” to make it look like a menacing black widow.
The annual display quickly became more ambitious and less connected to the tired tropes of Halloween. For an early display entitled “The Undersea World,” Dag and Leslie recruited a number of friends to help make a school of brightly colored fish to fill the yard.
There were just a couple of occasions over the years in which life circumstances prevented Weiser from doing a Halloween display. There were a few others in which his painstaking installation was washed out by rain. But, for the most part, the house has been a reliable beacon of dazzling creativity every Oct. 31, once the sun goes down.
Weiser is never shy about expressing provocative opinions and has occasionally put a political bent on his Halloween shows. But, more often, the displays played with familiar imagery in intriguing ways, like the year he created several giant candy bars that, at the end of the night, he tossed out into the street for cars to run over.
Despite cardboard’s versatility and durability, few artists have embraced it as a medium because of its ephemeral and makeshift nature. In that spirit, Weiser has adopted a deep conviction that art should mostly be temporary. For decades, his habit has been to unveil his installation only on the night of Halloween, and take it down before going to bed. “Tomorrow morning, it’ll be like none of this was ever here,” he said, gesturing to the fluorescent cranes.
Friends have persuaded him to give out some of his artworks as gifts, rather than dragging his creations to the trash to be recycled the day after Halloween.
There is, of course, a scenario in which Dag Weiser’s beautiful Halloween installations continue, just not at the Market Street house. At this writing, Dag and Leslie don’t know where they will land. They have until mid-January to find a new place. These days, their emotional energy is taxed as they face the painful reality of moving out of the place they’ve called home for almost 45 years.
On Friday, Weiser’s way of processing the emotion of the moment was not to stand up and say a few tender words. Instead, accompanied by a guitarist, he came out of the house wearing a bizarrely tall cardboard crown of his own making and sang, through a cheap loudspeaker, the cheesy old chestnut from the 1960s, “The Shadow of Your Smile.”
It was a response befitting his art — charming, weirdly spellbinding, and … unique.
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