Art Museum Opens With Big Crowds

NEWPORT BEACH — Like a human zoom lens, Scott Lindsey slowly walked away, then toward, then away from the lushly colored abstract paintings. He didn’t want to rush through Saturday’s grand opening of the Orange County Museum of Art.

So, what did he think?

“I love it,” said Lindsey, a Chapman University graduate student. “Orange County is not necessarily known for its liberal support of the arts. This is a celebration of the arts in the county.”

A celebration and a “landmark” event, say museum officials, who welcomed some 5,000 people to a frenetic, daylong open house featuring children’s hands-on art workshops, face painting, watercolor demos, art videos and gallery tours.

“It’s a real step forward for the cultural life of Orange County,” OCMA director Naomi Vine said.

Now, she asserts, the county’s visual arts are on par with its music, dance and theater arts as represented by the Orange County Performing Arts Center and the South Coast Repertory, both well-regarded nationally.

OCMA, housed at the expanded, renovated Newport Harbor Art Museum near Fashion Island, was created through last year’s hotly contested merger of the Laguna and the Newport Harbor art museums.

The widely publicized dispute over the consolidation continues today in lawsuits, acrimony and political maneuvering, though the factions are working to settle the matter.

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On Saturday, however, the focus was on the new museum’s opening, which drew a larger-than-expected crowd who braved intermittent rain to meander through the spacious, white-walled galleries.

“It’s terrific,” said Roberta Miller, gazing through the 60-foot-tall glass wall in the museum’s cavernous entryway. The expanded lobby, built with funds from Pacific Mutual Foundation, is the only physical addition to the old Newport site, though remodeling doubled the gallery space.

Next door, the Museum Education Center, occupying the vacated Newport Beach Public Library building, houses two art studios, a classroom, a 108-seat auditorium, storage and offices.

On Saturday, the classrooms were wall-to-wall children. Trevor Sandlin, 6, glued pink, purple and blue fabric scraps onto a piece of cardboard for an untitled work he signed in orange oil pastel.

“Soccer,” Trevor said, is only “a little, teensy-weensy bit better than art.”

His mother, Selena Sandlin, said her son gets art instruction only twice a month at Abraham Lincoln Elementary School in Corona del Mar.

“We’re really excited,” she said, “because the museum is close by and they offer art classes.”

A lack of space prevented the former Newport museum, founded 35 years ago, from staying open all year. It was closed for weeks at a time while exhibits were installed or struck. And it never had enough room to display simultaneously the art works it owns and the art it exhibits temporarily.

But the $1.8-million renovation, expanding the site’s gallery space to 15,800 square feet, solves both long-standing dilemmas.

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OCMA will be open year-round and will offer temporary or touring exhibits along with a continuous display of works from its 6,000-piece permanent collection of California art, which provides a historical sweep from the 19th century to today. That continuous display makes the museum unique in Southern California.

“You get a good feeling of what the area used to be like and what it’s like now,” said Elaine Santangelo, a court mediator from Anaheim.

The permanent collection works currently on view range from dreamy Impressionist landscapes to aggressive paintings that question gender roles.

Some prefer the dreamy works over the contemporary ones, but the new building seemed to draw unanimous praise.

The Newport museum’s redo, designed by Archimuse of New York, started only five months ago, OCMA officials proudly note. It offers the potential for handling big touring exhibits that have bypassed the county in the past, they said.

But no two art museums in the nation have ever merged successfully, and Saturday’s christening hardly came easy.

Trustees, who sought greater financial stability and broader public appeal through the merger, were sued by Motivated Museum Members last year. The Laguna Beach group asserts that the consolidation was fraudulently engineered. It wants independence returned to the 79-year-old Laguna museum, which now operates as an OCMA satellite.

Even as opening festivities began Thursday night, merger opponents distributed fliers during a trustees dinner.

“Deception, conspiracy and mismanagement,” read the fliers, “are not the proper way to open a new museum.”

The next night, some guests at a members’ reception that drew roughly 2,000 wore pins bearing the slogan “Save the Laguna Art Museum.”

Earlier in the week, the Laguna Beach City Council unanimously resolved to support MMM for “helping to preserve” the city’s cultural heritage.

A Superior Court judge will hear OCMA’s motions Thursday to dismiss the case. Otherwise, trial is set for March 3.

Meanwhile, the local Laguna Art Museum Heritage Corp., which is helping to raise funds and organize exhibits for the satellite, is trying to renegotiate its contract with OCMA trustees.

Insiders say that OCMA trustees and Heritage are discussing the possibility of giving Heritage ownership of the Laguna museum this year--instead of in 2002 or later--and giving it access to OCMA’s entire collection and roughly half of the Laguna museum’s $2-million endowment. The deal also would require MMM to drop its suit.

While the wrangling continues, OCMA officials are pursuing their goals confidently. They believe the new facility will enable a hoped-for move into a larger museum in five years or so.

“We will become more financially stable,” trustee Joan Beall said earlier in the week, “and have a place that [major local art collectors] would like to contribute their art to.”

The immediate challenge will be getting people to keep coming back, museum education director Maxine Gaiber said Saturday. Is there an audience to support an even bigger visual arts institution in the area?

Gaiber thinks so. There is, however, one thing for certain, she said, referring to a leading Los Angeles cultural venue, the Museum of Contemporary Art:

“No more MOCA-envy.”