‘SATELLITE’ GALLERY TO STAY 2 MORE YEARS : IT’S BEEN A SUCCESS, LAGUNA ART MUSEUM, MALL OFFICIALS SAY

The Laguna Art Museum and South Coast Plaza have agreed to continue the museum’s “satellite” gallery operation at the Costa Mesa shopping center for two more years, officials for both organizations announced Tuesday.

Although the rent-free mall lease for the museum expired Dec. 31 and mall operator C.J. Segerstrom & Sons Inc. offered to extend it, the museum board had postponed a decision for months pending cost studies.

Museum officials said Tuesday, however, that they now feel confident they can raise the $100,000 a year needed to operate the facility. That money is in addition to the funds needed to run the museum’s newly expanded main facility in Laguna Beach. The 1987-88 operating budget for the main site is $710,000.

“We believe we now have the backing to operate the mall site as well,” museum director William Otton said.

“We believe the support is out there, especially now that we have gotten our main facility in place and operating. . . . The mall program is now an integral part of our entire museum operations.”

Otton cited the success of museum supporters’ raising $2.2 million to expand the main facility, which reopened last September after a 17-month reconstruction. Structural expansion cost $1.6 million; the remainder of the money was for equipment and new exhibition and education programs.

The South Coast Plaza gallery, which opened in October, 1984, is the only such collaboration between a museum and a shopping mall in Orange County and one of the few in the country.

Initially, the satellite gallery was to be a temporary operation while the main structure was being rebuilt, Otton said. But both museum and mall officials said the mall gallery has proved a success.

“We’re delighted that the museum is staying,” said Maura Eggan, director of marketing for the mall. “As far as we’re concerned, it’s been a very successful partnership” from a community service and from marketing strategy standpoint, she said. The annual rental value of the 3,000-square-foot space would be about $112,000, she said.

The first show under the new two-year agreement opened Friday and will run through May 31. It is a 30-work exhibit of impressionist-style art collected by such firms as the Fieldstone Co. and Allergan Inc., Otton said.

A California Historical Artists series featuring Donna Schuster and A.G. Rider opens June 5. And in late July, a traveling exhibit from the American Crafts Museum of New York will be featured there and at the main branch.

A children’s section will be installed soon at the mall facility, Otton said. Lectures and classical and jazz chamber concerts are planned, and the museum is considering video art displays.

The satellite gallery exhibits-- including shows on quilts, fashion design and ceramics, and exhibits devoted to California painters and sculptors--generally have been aimed at mall shoppers. Satellite gallery attendance has risen from 50,000 in 1984 to 65,000 last year. That figure compares to 75,000 last year at the main site in Laguna Beach, Otton said.

C.J. Segerstrom & Sons Inc. is now planning a 15,000-square-foot “satellite” gallery in its proposed office complex in Costa Mesa north of the San Diego Freeway. That gallery is part of an overall office plan still to be approved by the Costa Mesa City Council. The firm is negotiating with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to operate that gallery.