Security Pacific Headquarters to House Free Art Gallery

Plans were unveiled Tuesday for Security Pacific Bank’s 9,000-square-foot Gallery at the Plaza in Costa Mesa, where rotating exhibits will be devoted to living artists of local, regional, national and international stature.

At a Tuesday luncheon that attracted virtually the entire visual-arts leadership of Orange County, Security Pacific officials displayed plans for the art gallery, scheduled to open mid-March on the ground floor of the bank’s new regional headquarters at 555 E. Anton Blvd. opposite Sakioka Drive, walking distance from South Coast Plaza and the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

The new gallery will be nearly three times larger than the company’s original Gallery at the Plaza at Security Pacific corporate headquarters in Los Angeles. The free gallery will be open 6 days a week, including weekends. Tressa Miller, founding gallery director and director of cultural services for Security Pacific, will oversee the art program in Costa Mesa, together with exhibition consultant Mark Johnstone, a photographer, college photography instructor and free-lance curator.

The gallery program will be similar to the Los Angeles Gallery at the Plaza, which has displayed about 80 thematic exhibits since its founding in 1975.

Richard J. Flamson III, chairman of Security Pacific’s board of directors and chief executive officer, declined to divulge the cost of operating the Los Angeles gallery or the projected costs of the Costa Mesa facility, other than to call it “big bucks.”

But the new Costa Mesa gallery, in addition to being larger, will include a “project room” for site-specific installations that will remain on view for 6 months. In a coup for the new gallery, Los Angeles-born artist Jim Turrell will create the first of these installations. Turrell, who lives in Arizona, is internationally celebrated for his work with altered light within enclosed spaces, including an ambitious project in the crater of an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert.

The rest of the gallery will house four exhibitions in 1989, beginning with “Art in the Public Eye” (March 13 to June 3), which will juxtapose work by 12 to 15 artists represented in the bank’s permanent collection with recent pieces by the artists. (The Security Pacific Collection, a division of the corporate art program, contains more than 9,000 objects.)

Other shows scheduled for 1989 are: “Art of Design” (June 18 to Aug. 5), a display of artist-designed functional objects; “Media Talk” (Aug. 26 to Oct. 28), work by artists who incorporate language and images from the mass media, and “Sculptural Intimacies: Recent Small-Scale Work” (Nov. 12 to Jan. 6, 1990).

Miller stressed the “flexibility” of the gallery program and the attention it will offer to local and lesser-known artists, as opposed to the more structured and pressured environment of museums. (Miller said the gallery does not count the number of visitors it has annually, though she estimates the total at about 10,000 in Los Angeles.)

Orange County artists will be included in future shows; Johnstone will soon start making local studio visits.

(Artists wishing to send slides of their work should address them to him at Security Pacific, 333 S. Hope St., H9-65, Los Angeles, Calif. 90071.)

Although Miller said that art conveying “blatant sexuality” will probably not be shown in the gallery, she added that ground rules have eased over the years. (During the last year, the L.A. gallery has started showing nudes.)

The gallery is designed by Santa Monica architect Frederick Fisher, whose other art-related architectural projects include Meyers/Bloom Gallery and the Eli Broad Foundation offices, both in Los Angeles. Fisher is chairman of the department of environmental design at Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design.

He will collaborate with Los Angeles artists Lita Albuquerque, Jud Fine and Eric Orr on the design of furniture and the treatment of wall surfaces for the gallery. But his biggest challenge was to revamp space never designed to house contemporary art, with walls inconveniently broken by colored glass windows and ceilings just 12 1/2 feet high.

Fisher’s design solutions involved altering the color of light filtering through the windows, creating more wall space and enriching the relatively low ceilings with coffering (sunken panels) that will conceal the lights, give the illusion of height and add visual interest.

Asked what motivates Security Pacific’s creation of a gallery in a potentially income-generating space, Flamson said: “You can’t just take everything out of a community--you have to put something back.”

Beyond philanthropy, Flamson said, the positive “association we get from the arts” has been “very rewarding” to the bank’s clients and shareholders.

“We’ve never had any complaints.”