There’s an Art to Shopping Galleries for Gifts

Moon earrings. Cactus earrings zonked with rhinestones. Critter earrings. Checkerboard earrings. Plastic coil earrings. Dangling suffusions of color for the ear lobes. Pins made of paper, painted metal, ceramic and fabric.

This artist-crafted gift bonanza--at prices from $5 to $25--may be the best reason to stop by the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in a gift-giving season.

In the gallery, work by the center’s member artists is for sale ($75 to $800) through Dec. 20, with 50% of the proceeds plowed back into the artists’ cooperative. Ray Jacobs’ fanciful wooden toys include a house on wheels with a gray plume of smoke and a boatmobile. B. Lee Willmore does a wall piece with a series of open box shapes filled mysteriously with pink, yellow and blue light. Other home-grown work includes photography, drawings, prints (all matted, framed and ready to go) ceramics and mixed-media pieces.

Also for sale ($10 to $150) are Mexican and Guatemalan handicrafts from LaPalapa Fine Imports of Los Angeles, including masks with fierce and foppish expressions, tree ornaments, textiles, animal wall plaques and handcrafted silver.

The center, in Harbor Business Park (3521 W. MacArthur Blvd., Santa Ana), is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Call (714) 549-4989 for more information.

Meanwhile, don’t forget the museum shops for crafts and jewelry: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach (10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, noon to 6 p.m. Sunday); Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach (11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday); Bowers Museum, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana (10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday) and the Modern Museum of Art, 5 Hutton Centre Drive, Santa Ana (11 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily).