ART / Allan Jalon : Curator’s Passions Strictly Californian

Bolton Colburn, the 33-year-old registrar and curator of collections at the surf-side Laguna Art Museum, not only has a deep-water background in museum work. He was a competitive surfer until 1979, having won the American Surfing Assn. ’77 Amateur Championship.

Several times a week, when he has completed his more scholarly duties--such as a talk he gave Thursday on the evolution of California art--he trades his white shirt and tie for tropical colored swimsuits and rides his board into the waves.

While the quintessential California sport is one of Colburn’s passions, California art is the other.

“Most people in California who are interested in art look to the East Coast for their aesthetic,” he says. “If you take art at a college level or even at a high school level, all the art books have been made around New York or Europe, and you will come away with that kind of information. Worldwide trends did not come out of California, that is true. But it has been an important regional cultural resource.”

Making the Laguna a repository for California art is a mission that Colburn inherited when he assumed his post in December. He oversees all the administrative details of managing the museum’s collection, from cleaning the 2,000 paintings and sculptures to making sure insurance payments are up to date to making recommendations on new acquisitions.

At UC San Diego, where Colburn earned his undergraduate degree in art history and criticism, “most of the professors were conceptual artists with a New York background,” he recalls. “I studied with Allan Kaprow, David Antin and others who were influential in the 1960s and 1970s, and they just didn’t consider what happened in art on the West Coast as significant.

“Basically, neither did I consider it as ‘important art.’ But, at same time, I could always relate to it and enjoy it. The surfing had a lot to do with it.

“A lot of the California artists in the 1960s and 1970s surfed. They came out of Venice and Los Angeles. The person with the highest profile of the people I’m thinking about was Billy Al Bengston. I know he surfed. Robert Irwin surfed.

“They used the materials used in surfboards, fiberglass resin. They put a great deal of emphasis on the smooth clean look of surfaces that comes about with the light in Southern California. I liked the art, but I didn’t let myself take it seriously.”

Colburn worked steadily at his college studies between 1976 and 1978, then took off two years to surf competitively around the world, from Japan to Florida. He started working at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in 1980 as registrar, handling paper work involving collections and exhibitions, and worked at night on finishing his degree. He graduated in 1984.

His job at the La Jolla initiated his more serious attitude toward California art. “That’s a lot of their collection, California art, but it was a part that was being overlooked by the museum,” he said. “There was a concentration on the minimalism that was coming from the East Coast.”

Colburn said officials at the La Jolla gradually took more interest in California art but still not enough to satisfy him. He also wanted to have responsibility for shaping a museum’s permanent collection and exhibiting it. When such a job came up at the Laguna, he applied.

He admits that there are limitations in Laguna, especially governing the acquisitions of new art. “Laguna has about half the budget that the La Jolla does,” he says. “We’re at about $750,000, here and they’re at about $1.5 million there, and so there is a lot less money to spend on art.

“This year, I think we’ll spend about $30,000 on purchases. But about 98% of the works we are able to acquire come through gifts from collectors, people in the community and artists.”

At the Laguna, Colburn says, he is learning more about California art before 1960. In fact, the Laguna collection goes as far back as the 1850s: “I think that a lot of our best work is that of California impressionists. . . . Light was very important to the early California artists, many of whom came here for the chance to work outdoors.”

Colburn, a native of Carmel (and a virtual Robin Williams look-alike), literally grew up playing with art. Both his parents are professional artists: His mother does mostly assemblages and collages and his father is mainly a watercolorist. Some of Colburn’s earliest memories include playing in his father’s studio in Carmel.

“I remember being able to play with these colorful forms my father used as models,” he says. “They were toys for me. . . . They were big enough to bounce around on if you were a little kid.”

The family moved to San Diego when he was 12, and he started bouncing around on the waves as well. The interest intensified through his teens. “But I never hung out at the beach,” Colburn said. “In high school and college, I would surf and then I would go home and read about art. I always felt they were very compatible. Surfing was a great physical outlet. Art was an intellectual outlet. Together, they kept me in balance.”