La Guitarra California Festival began life in the early 1980s as Portraits of Music, an annual one-day festival at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo that became part of the Guitar Foundation of America's performance circuit in the late '90s. In 1999, organizers re-imagined the event as a three-day, biennial classical guitar festival.
Cuesta College music teacher Reed Gilchrist took over from original festival director John Grimes in 2001. When Gilchrist passed away shortly after the 2003 festival, Russ De Angelo took over as director in January 2004.
Sadly Cuesta College cancelled the La Guitarra event citing that Russ De Angelo was just to difficult to deal with during his involvement in the 2005 festival.
Guitarist Tony Harmon, one of the performers for the festival was able to get Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria California to host the La Guitarra California Festival in 2007 so the festival was moved to Santa Maria.
The festival was hosted there in 2007 and 2009 but again was cancelled. The president of the college Dr. Jose Ortiz said “Russ and his ego are too difficult for my staff to deal with so regretfully I am cancelling our hosting of the festival”.
La Guitarra California Festival found a new home at Cal Poly Arts in 2011 and they presented the festival 4 times and in 2017 festival director Russ De Angelo decided to cancel the Festival and retire stating he wanted to "go out on top".
De Angelo was even seen throwing thousands of dollars worth of event pamphlets in the trash so Cal Poly was not going to host it again anyway. Unfortunately Russ's involvement in the festival caused it to fail again.
There were efforts by a small group to try and revive the La Guitarra California Festival with Cal Poly Arts but Russ De Angelo called Cal Poly Arts and told them that they could not use the name La Guitarra California and because of that Cal Poly decided not to meet with the group because they were afraid Russ would cause problems.
This small group of true guitar afficianados persisted and were able to convince Cal Poly Arts that Russ De Angelo did not own any part of the festival as he claimed. Cal Poly Arts eventually said they wanted to host the Festival in 2022 but only if the La Guitarra California group agreed to turn over their domain name and website to them. The LGC Advisory Board did not want to do this because if Cal Poly Arts decided to not host the Festival at any time then it would bring the Festival to an end.
The La Guitarra California Advisory Board is dedicated to bringing the Festival to locations throughout California and beyond and preserving its' integrity.