Bowers Dreams Big in a Small Space

Visitors to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s King Tut exhibit may do a double take at the banners hanging from light poles along the boulevard.

The ads are promoting “Mummies: Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt; Treasures From the British Museum,” an exhibit at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana, 40 miles away.

It was an aggressive move to increase Bowers’ profile. The smaller museum wanted “to feed off the excitement and energy of Tut,” said Rick Weinberg, Bowers’ director of public relations and marketing.

Despite its size, the Orange County museum, at 2002 N. Main St., has garnered a regional reputation in recent years with high-profile exhibits and widespread promotion.

“It is a small museum thinking big,” said Bowers President Peter C. Keller. “We don’t know we are small.”

A few years ago, many people didn’t know it existed.

The museum has been an Orange County fixture since it opened in 1936, but its focus on local history had little appeal outside the county. But in the last several years, it has become a regional attraction -- nearly doubling in size and landing international exhibits.

Keller, 48, who served as an associate director at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles before moving to Bowers in 1991, still can remember when the name drew blank stares in Los Angeles.

“I got so tired of explaining to people what Bowers Museum is,” Keller said.

“Now, 45% of the museum-goers are from outside Orange County, from virtually none about a decade ago,” he said.

The museum draws about 2,700 visitors each week. Recently, Katie Shiban, a third-grade teacher from Pasadena, toured Bowers after she went to the King Tutankhamen exhibit and saw Bowers’ banners.

“I am so impressed,” said Shiban, 44, who brought along Ivana Castellanos, 17, a former student. “We are ooh’ing and ah’ing. And we can take our time and look at everything because it is a small place.”

Nearby, John Challoner, a tourist from England, was equally impressed.

“What strikes me is that in such a small place they can have such a variety of exhibits,” he said. “You have Eva Peron over there, mummies from the British Museum over here, and California paintings on that side.”

Like the mummies, the Peron exhibit, “Evita: Up Close and Personal,” is on loan.

The sample of artifacts from Museo Evita in Buenos Aires made its U.S. premiere this summer and runs through until Sunday.

The museum has a permanent collection that includes early California paintings and Native American artifacts.

But what has made the Bowers remarkable in recent years is that it has been able to secure high-profile exhibits from around the world, said Mike McGee, gallery director at Cal State Fullerton’s art department.

“Their permanent collection isn’t of the same stature as, say, the county museum in L.A., the National Museum in D.C. or other high-profile institutions around the country,” he said.

“So what they’ve done to compensate for that is ... they’ve made very successful partnerships with different institutions around the world and brought rather exotic objects to this region that normally doesn’t get to see them.”

The foreign museums receive loan fees or a portion of ticket sales, but Keller credits tenacious networking for bringing the artifacts to his museum.

Board member Anne Shih’s contacts in China were instrumental in putting together “Secret World of the Forbidden City: Splendor From China’s Imperial Palace” in 2000, Keller said.

Keller himself spends much of his time traveling the world. “I see myself basically as treasure hunter,” he said.

The well-reviewed Forbidden City exhibit, which borrowed statues, pottery, paintings and other pieces from Palace Museum in Beijing, helped launch Bowers’ rising profile.

That profile, as well as the growing budget -- which nearly doubled in the last five years to $7 million -- is fueling the plan to add a 30,000-square-foot wing by next year.

It is the second expansion since 1988, when the museum closed for a four-year, $12-million renovation that nearly doubled Bowers’ size to its current 114,500 square feet.

Little remains of the original Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, situated in a wood-frame house that once belonged to citrus grower Charles Bowers. He and his wife, Ada, had created a trust to build the city-owned museum.

Today’s institution is a fast-moving, well-oiled marketing machine, but not everyone welcomes its success.

McGee, the Cal State Fullerton gallery director, said some museum directors are weary of institutions like Bowers, which put an emphasis on securing exotic exhibits rather than on education.

When Bowers exhibited a collection of rare Tibetan artifacts last year, local Tibetans and others protested, saying the exhibit glossed over Chinese occupation of Tibet.

There was no mention of the region’s political strife in the exhibit, which had to be approved by Chinese officials.

Keller defended the move, saying the exhibit, which later traveled elsewhere in the U.S., offered an opportunity for Americans to get a glimpse of a remote part of the world.

“It doesn’t matter who is in charge” of Tibet, he said. “You either are interested in Tibetan culture or you are not.”