ART MUSEUM’S OPENING DELAYED

The Laguna Art Museum’s expanded main facility in Laguna Beach will now reopen in June instead of May because of a four-week construction delay caused by the discovery of an underground spring on the site, according to museum director William Otton.

The discovery last month was “wholly unforeseen,” Otton said. He said the problem has led to the redesigning of the facility’s drainage system and elevator shaft. “It (the spring) ran right under our site from the hills to the ocean, about 15 feet under the shaft. But it (construction) is right back in full swing,” Otton said.

Otton also disclosed that a new show is being considered for the June reopening, as replacement for the originally announced Elmer Bischoff retrospective. The Bischoff show, a traveling exhibition organized by the Laguna Art Museum, will not be available in June, he said.

The museum’s main facility, built in 1929 on a Coast Highway site above the beach, has been closed since April 29. Under a $1.1-million construction project, the facility is being expanded from 9,000 to 15,000 square feet.

Meanwhile, the museum has been operating a 3,000-square-foot “satellite museum” in the South Coast Plaza mall in Costa Mesa since October, 1984, in a rent-free arrangement with C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, the mall’s operator.

A recent museum board decision to shorten the museum’s name from Laguna Beach Museum of Art to Laguna Museum of Art was for “regional identity” reasons, Otton said.

“The change makes us less local sounding and more what we really are--a museum of regionwide standing,” he said.

The museum dates back to 1918 and the founding of an artists’ group under the name of the Laguna Beach Art Assn. The association name remained in effect--even after the permanent facility was built in 1929--until 1972, when the name Laguna Beach Museum of Art was adopted.