ART : New Juice Curator Hopes to Give Artists Reasons to Stay Home in Orange County

It’s easy to get Dorrit Fitzgerald looking back down the path that led her to the Irvine Fine Arts Center, where she is curator of exhibitions. Just start off (and show off) by casually alluding to the literary reference in her first name.

“Yes, Dorrit is from ‘Little Dorrit’ by Charles Dickens,” she acknowledged. “It was my grandmother’s name, and her father--my great-grandfather--was a Dickens scholar. He loved the novel and was reading it at the time my grandmother was born.

“I was surrounded by books as a child but always liked the ones with images,” she continued. “I spent hours with them, and that was how I got interested in art. As a curator, I feel like an instrument through which art passes. I have the opportunity to make things available.”

She is now making available work by seven local artists, in a show called “New Juice in Orange County III,” at the center through Aug. 9. She also helped organize a yearlong series of photography exhibits at seven separate sites in the county, involving work by 50 photographers, some local, some not. The first show opens at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton on July 16.

Fitzgerald, 37, has put up 30 shows during her five years at the city-funded Irvine center, often concentrating on local, living artists. “A Serious Look at Humor” in 1985 presented artists treating contemporary issues as objects of satire and sources of fun. A 1984 exhibit called “In the Form of Furniture” displayed household objects crafted as art.

She can’t afford lavish shows. For four shows in the 1988-89 exhibition season, she has $13,000 to spend.

With high ceilings, some equally high windows and redwood walls, the 8-year-old center’s main gallery has a sense of airy calm. Sitting there, on a long, elegantly curved sofa, Fitzgerald impresses one as a quietly good-natured woman with an understated commitment to her work.

“The most important thing I feel I do is New Juice, because it serves the artists who live here in this county,” she said. “They have very few opportunities to exhibit in their own community. Many of them end up leaving Orange County to find success in the art world, but I keep hoping that by giving something back to them in terms of exposure, I can help give them some reason to stay.”

The current edition of “New Juice” has had a warm critical response. Such acclaim is not a constant. But, Fitzgerald said: “I think that in the end all criticism has had a positive outcome for me. I read all the pieces because I feel there is something I can learn from what another person thinks.”

The photography series starting this month, curated independently by participating community art centers and museums, is nothing if not wide ranging: The exhibit at the Chapman College Guggenheim Gallery is of work by 11 Japanese photographers, while the show offered by the Bowers Museum is rooted in county history.

Fitzgerald said she managed the overall coordination of the project, adding: “What is implied in doing this series is the contribution that these institutions have made to Orange County and our ability to collaborate.”

A neatly coiffed blonde in a black jump suit and bright, red socks, Fitzgerald is the daughter of an opera singer mother who nurtured her artistic interests and an Air Force captain-turned-Brooks Brothers salesman.

Raised in the San Fernando Valley, she worked for much of her 20s as a corporate personnel manager, quit, divorced, remarried and graduated with a masters in fine arts from UC Irvine in 1982. “I got out of the business world because I decided that art gave meaning to my life,” she said.

She joined the fine arts center a year later. Interests in painting and sculpting went on the back burner this year, as she devoted herself more fully to curating--and to amateur figure skating, a hobby with which she seems virtually obsessed. Curatorial work, she said, is a lot like what she did in her studio.

“Just as a practicing artist starts with zero, with a blank canvas, so does a curator,” she said. “An artist adds layers of paint. A curator starts to build layers of information. I go to artists’ studios. I do research. I develop concepts. I look for interpretive materials. It unfolds. You put things in. You take things out. What I like is that there is always a sense of adventure and an element of research.”

Which takes us to Fitzgerald’s maiden name: Rawlinson, as in Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, whom Fitzgerald claims as her great-great-grandfather. Sir Henry deciphered a inscription etched in the Behistun Stone of Mesopotamia while British consul to Baghdad in 1844. According to the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Archaeology, the Behistun Stone had been an “almost inaccessible” inscription in the Babylonian, Persian and Elamite languages, cut into rock by the Persian ruler Darius I to record his victory over his enemies in 521 BC.

Fitzgerald said the family’s oral tradition has enshrined the great moment when the consul was “swinging on a rope over a 5,000-foot cliff in Mesopotamia, saw a stone with writing on it embedded in the hillside and concluded there was something down there worth taking a closer look at.”

Illuminating the county’s culture may never get that challenging, Fitzgerald admitted, but giving others a closer look at what she finds often rewards her with great personal satisfaction.

“My needs for adventure and discovery are taken care of with skating and art,” she said. “I’m very fulfilled with my life as it is.”

“New Juice in Orange County II” continues through Aug . 9 at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave., Irvine. Hours: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays; 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Fridays; 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays. Information: (714) 552-1018.