Santa Monica Art Museum : Bridging the Chasm Between Culture and Commerce

Santa Monica finally has a public art museum, and it’s in a mini-mall.

The Santa Monica Museum of Art, which will specialize in contemporary visual and performing art, is not in your standard mini-mall with nail salon, frozen yogurt and tacos al carbon.

Its home is a $7.3-million, Frank Gehry-designed emporium that will feature stores offering organic produce, one-of-a-kind ceramics, books and fresh pasta.

“In my mind was the model of an Italian piazza,” said Abby Sher, the creator and developer of the mall project called Edgemar. “I fell in love with those community piazzas when I was in Europe. They usually have a small restaurant and various commercial services. And there is often a municipal building with frescoes on the walls.”

The first store in the development--the Gallery of Functional Art, featuring artist-made ceramics and jewelry--opened last week. The museum officially doesn’t debut until the spring, but last month it opened its doors to the public for the first in a series of pre-opening exhibitions.

A party at the site to kick off the pre-opening shows generated optimism. More than 1,000 people lined up to wander through Los Angeles artist David Bunn’s playful “Sphere of Influence” installation.

If the Santa Monica museum thrives it one day could be in a league with those that put such other beach cities as Newport Beach and Costa Mesa on the art map. It would serve as a model for how to present avant-garde works when public and corporate money for such purposes is scarce.

But neither good intentions nor savvy business sense--and Edgemar seems born of both--can ensure the success of a public museum with ambitious goals and little grass-roots support from artists and the community.

“When you hear about that project all you hear about is real estate,” said a Southern California museum director who did not want to be identified.

“You never hear about artists and artwork, which should be at the very foundation of this kind of museum. What you have down there are art patrons trying to act like art professionals. It’s part of a dangerous trend in the art world.”

On the other hand, Richard Koshalek, the director of the Musuem of Contemporary Art, believes the Santa Monica museum is a brave, welcome venture. “I think their most difficult problem is going to be dealing with the number of artists who are going to be knocking at their door,” Koshalek said. “This area is extremely rich in terms of artists and the work they produce. I think Abby has done this out of a genuine feeling that she wants to make a contribution to the community.”

Sher admits that she is not an arts pro. She sees herself in the entrepreneurial tradition as someone who provides an opportunity for a project to prove itself or go down trying.

She is giving the nonprofit corporation formed to run the museum an 8,300-square-foot building rent-free for five years. After that, the museum can purchase the building from her company, Sher Development, for one-half its then-fair market value. (Sher estimates the current value of the building at about $2 million.)

If the museum can’t raise the money by then, it will pay one-fourth fair-market rent during a two-year grace period.

If funds for the purchase are still not in hand after seven years, Sher can reclaim the building as commercial property.

“This is an experiment to get a museum started,” Sher said. “I feel that if the community doesn’t choose to support it to the extent that after seven years it can’t buy its building at half-price, then there is no reason for me to force it down their throats.”

She got the idea for the project in 1984 when artist Thomas Eatherton showed her the studio space he was renting in the former headquarters of Edgemar Farms, an egg processing company. The egg people had long since moved out of the hangar-like building, which was built in 1908 to house an ice plant.

With its 25-foot ceilings and clerestory windows, Eatherton thought that the building, which is on Main Street just north of Ocean Park Boulevard, would be perfect for a museum. Sher agreed and purchased the entire 50,000-square-foot lot.

From the beginning, Sher, the daughter of the late Sidney Sher, a pioneer shopping center developer in Orange County, envisioned the museum as part of a commercial complex. “It was important to me that there be the commercial along with the cultural,” she said.

“I would have never been interested in building a museum without a shopping center, and vice versa,” she said.

She hired Gehry, who designed a tile, sheet metal, glass, chain-link and concrete group of buildings for the retail part of the mall. The old egg building, earmarked for the museum, was virtually left untouched although Sher and her two brothers--Merritt Sher of San Francisco and Ron Sher of the Seattle area, who had joined her as partners--spent $340,000 to bring it up to code.

The museum organization was founded as a nonprofit corporation in 1985 with attorney Richard Hirsch as president of its small board. Sher is vice president, where her vote counts for no more than any other member’s.

It’s important to her that the public doesn’t perceive that she is dictating the museum’s policies.

“There were people who had the idea that I was building a private museum to house my personal collection,” she said. “I don’t even have a collection. We had to get away from perceptions like that. People had to know that this was a public museum.”

But Hal Glicksman, who was hired in 1985 as museum curator, contends that Sher runs the show. “I literally worked for Abby,” he said. “The board does what she wants.”

Glicksman, who formerly was the director of art galleries at Otis Parsons Art Institute and at the University of California at Irvine, said he thought there was a conflict of interest between Sher as landlord and as museum founder.

“She was essentially negotiating with herself,” he said. “As time went on she decided more and more on the side of the developer.”

He felt it was unreasonable to expect that the museum would be able to raise the money to buy the building, in addition to pay operating costs, within seven years.

“She wanted to play museum,” he said, “but not if it cost her too much.”

When the matter could not be resolved, Glicksman said, he withdrew.

Sher counters that she has no undue sway over the board and that her donations to the museum--in cash, time, planned free rent and purchase concessions--have been more than generous. She said the primary disagreement with Glicksman was about his desire to be director and curator of the museum.

“He was asked to leave,” she said.

Local arts administrators warn that the new museum will have a rough time raising the funds it needs. “It is an amazing struggle for us just to raise operating costs every year,” said Joy Silverman, executive director of the most prominent West Coast enclave for contemporary artists, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

Silverman said that she is a fan of the Santa Monica project and that she has met with Sher several times. “I do think they have a real chance by virtue that they are on the Westside,” Silverman continued. “But it’s still going to be very tough.”

Thomas Rhoads, who was hired by the board in January to be museum director, also believes geography is on the project’s side.

“The time is right for this to happen in Santa Monica,” he said. “I’ve been told that 60% to 70% of the people who support MoCA are on the West Side. And look at the number of galleries that have relocated here.”

Koshalek, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, confirmed that the majority of his museum’s funds come from sources on the Westside.

And during the last two years, such well-known gallery owners as James Corcoran, Irving Blum and Roy Boyd have established outposts in Santa Monica.

Rhoads, who was a fiscal and program officer with the New York State Council on the Arts, has begun a program to add nine members to the present six-person board.

The board includes Elyuse Grinstein, one of the founding members of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and independent film producer Mitchell Block. Rhoads wants to add people from local insurance, banking, construction, real estate and film companies.

He also is eager to find corporate sponsors willing to contribute toward a $1-million endowment, and he has begun a membership drive to meet operating costs, which he estimates will be between $250,000 and $300,000 a year.

Also needed is money to renovate the building’s interior, now just a shell. Sher and her two brothers will install bathrooms and space for offices and make other basic improvements. To do more, Rhoads will have to find the funds.

He plans to open the museum with an international exhibition that would be a collaboration with other organizations. The hope is that the current pre-opening series and the opening show will establish the Santa Monica Museum of Art as a museum with a mission--to present and document visual and performance works on the cutting edge. It will not have a permanent collection, which Rhoads believes will keep it fresh.

In the meantime, Sher continues to develop the commercial part of Edgemar. The next retail store in will be the first outlet in California for Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. She is finalizing a contract with the owners of the Chaya Brasserie to open a Japanese-style barbeque in one of the buildings, and she is searching for other businesses that fit her piazza vision.

Sher wonders what her father would have thought of Edgemar and his daughter’s commitment to devote one-third of its commercial space to an entity that will not produce any revenue for at least five years.

“If my father was still with us I would have never been able to do this,” she said ruefully. “No prudent real estate person would ever undertake this project.

“But when this is all complete; when people are coming here to visit the museum, shop in the stores, sit on the deck, do their daily shopping . . .” she said, the confidence returning to her voice. “When he sees what all this means to the community--then I think it will be something he would be proud that I have done.”