Art Quest: Not a Pretty Sight : Museum’s Founder Exhibits Scars of 5-Year Battle in Santa Monica

It’s not as though Abby Sher wasn’t warned when she decided to create a contemporary art museum out of a Santa Monica building once used for candling eggs.

“I told her when she started she was asking for trouble, getting involved in the art world,” said Frank Gehry, the architect Sher hired to transform a group of dilapidated structures on Main Street into an updated piazza complete with a museum. “I told her she was walking into a cannon.”

Five years later, Sher, who had no previous experience either in development or museums and no art collection of her own, has indeed become a woman besieged.

Faces Charges

Instead of winning praise from the city of Santa Monica for her philanthropy, she is facing misdemeanor criminal charges for alleged building and fire code violations.

Instead of being praised for enhancing the Ocean Park neighborhood, she is being closely watched by hostile homeowners.

Instead of earning the gratitude of the burgeoning coastal art community, she has incurred the animosity of several of its more prominent members. Some artists suspect her of using the museum as a phony lure to obtain permits for building her Edgemar complex of stores and offices.

“I’m boycotting that joint,” said painter Billy Al Bengston. “I don’t think of it as a museum. It’s a shopping mall.”

In some ways, the story of the Santa Monica Museum of Art is a neighborhood dispute, in a city so sensitive to community concerns that City Council members were even willing to venture into residents’ bedrooms in order to personally conduct noise tests.

But in another sense, it is a cautionary tale for neophytes who might entertain hopes of infiltrating the prickly and quarrelsome realm of art, where ego and diplomacy can count just as much as taste and good intentions.

“I have problems with people who are not art professionals operating as if they are,” said one respected museum director who did not want to be named. “Abby seems like a very nice person . . . but it just doesn’t work because she’s not coming from within the field.”

Unbowed by the assaults, Sher, 44, acknowledges she had “very little understanding of the workings of museums” but bristles at challenges to her integrity. “There were a million ways to make this project lucrative,” she said, “and this is probably not one of them.”

A former clinical linguist at UCLA, Sher also attributes her problems to the anti-development sentiment in Santa Monica and the cynicism of the times. “People are just not used to someone who’s not doing something primarily out of self-interest,” she said.

Meanwhile, an imposing $7.3-million galvanized steel and mesh complex stands on the site of the former dairy plant, but three-quarters of the commercial space is empty and the museum has yet to officially open.

Despite Sher’s travails, the museum managed to stage a series of pre-opening exhibitions last summer, which exacerbated her problems with the city but drew favorable reviews from art critics.

A number of heavyweights in the Los Angeles art world say the museum will be a valuable addition to the cultural life of the museum-poor Westside, where a lively gallery scene has been migrating over the last few years, especially in Santa Monica.

Staunch backers of the new museum include Frederick M. Nicholas, chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, art collector Marcia Weisman, a MOCA board member, and painter Sam Francis.

“Whoever doesn’t like it should have his head examined,” Weisman said, adding that “the ego of an artist is second to none.”

Sher said she did not even know what a mortgage was until she bought the property, a block from her home, with money inherited from her father, a shopping center developer.

European Look

As the plans evolved, she decided that the 10,000-square-foot museum would be a kunsthalle, an exhibition space of the type more common in Europe. It will offer temporary shows by visual and performance artists but have no permanent collection.

It was Sher’s buy-back plan that fueled the controversy over her intentions. She is donating the museum rent-free to a nonprofit corporation for five years following its official opening, now tentatively scheduled for June. Eventually, she expects the organization to buy it back at half its market value, currently estimated at $2 million. Otherwise, it will revert to commercial use.

“If the community feels (the museum is) of value, I believe it’s up to them to share with me in the burden,” she declared.

Some of her critics believe that deadline is unrealistically tight, that donors will be loath to give money to an enterprise that could wind up as a hardware store.

” . . . Just when they started to get on their feet and get a reputation as a museum, they’d have to turn around and start looking for another space,” said artist Laddie John Dill.

In her dealings with the art community, Sher probably made several strategic errors, according to both critics and supporters, beginning with her failure to immediately establish an official board of directors.

She alienated some of the artists by firing her first museum director, Hal Glicksman, former director of the Otis-Parsons Institute’s art galleries. Glicksman wanted the museum to build a permanent collection of the work of local artists, as well as a historical record of their careers.

Almost immediately after Thomas W. Rhoads was installed as director last year, he found himself buttonholed by groups eager to make use of the fledgling institution. The museum’s response, however justified, did little to engender good will.

Organizers of the Venice Art Walk, an annual benefit for the Venice Family Clinic, thought the new museum would be an ideal spot for the post-walk fund-raising dinner. Rhoads, a former official with the New York State Council on the Arts, turned them down, explaining, “We thought our first benefit should be for ourselves.”

Another group wanted the museum to stage the Artists Against AIDS exhibit, which was shown instead in West Hollywood. Rhoads said the museum was not yet equipped to display valuable works by artists such as David Hockney and Sam Francis.

“That annoyed a lot of people,” said Christopher Ford, co-owner of the Pence Gallery on Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica.

Last spring, the Santa Monica and Venice Art Dealers Assn. tangled with Rhoads after asking the museum to put on a show of works from its 20 member galleries. Rhoads agreed, provided that each gallery become a corporate member for $2,500.

“The membership thought it would look like they had bought the show,” said Lee Musgrave, the organization’s former president, explaining why the deal fell through.

Sher believes that the museum will eventually improve its relationship with the galleries, and she dismisses the conflict with the artists as “pettiness.”

Rhoads said he is confident the museum will be able to operate on an annual budget of $350,000, with nearly half that expected to come from the board of directors when it expands to 30 members. As for whether the museum will be able to buy the building, he said, “One million dollars is not a lot of money in this town.”

Whether some of the neighbors will ever accept the project is another matter.

So angry are these neighbors that when a museum employee disposed of the remains of an ice sculpture, someone reported it to the city as toxic waste dumping, Sher said.

As she sees it, a handful of residents were dead set against the project from the outset, and were lying in wait for her as she wound her way through the thicket of boards and reviews required by Santa Monica and the Coastal Commission.

She needed permission to use the rear half of the parcel, zoned for residential use, as a restaurant site. She also needed to demonstrate that the project would have adequate parking.

A neighborhood group “found it in their interest to cast me as a villain,” she said.

As the homeowners see it, however, they supported her once she abandoned plans to put a third story of residential units on top of the complex, which would have blocked their ocean views.

“There was never a negative comment about the museum per se,” said Steve Spencer, whose home faces the back of the project. “We’re pro art.”

City officials say they made numerous concessions because of the museum. “That was a very exciting concept to the Planning Commission,” said Suzanne Frick, a principal planner for the city.

Frick and Spencer say their relationship with Sher began to sour when her construction crews violated local noise regulations.

A critical moment came last year when Sher asked the city to modify the restaurant operating hours that both sides had agreed on in order to accommodate a prospective tenant. Spencer and his allies felt betrayed. The restaurant she had in mind was much more upscale and likely to be far more disruptive than the one they had pictured, the critics said.

“It looked like she was taking the whole theme of the project in a different direction,” Spencer said.

The neighbors were not merely upset, said Councilman Herb Katz, “they were like alligators in heat.”

After noise tests were conducted in neighboring homes with the help of Katz and other council members, Sher was allowed to lengthen the restaurant hours. But the restaurateurs, feeling unwelcome, backed out.

The coup de grace, city officials said, was Sher’s decision to hold the pre-opening museum events last year before she had a certificate of occupancy. For that, she got slapped with the misdemeanor citations.

Sher’s attorney, Charles R. English, said the criminal case the city filed against his client last month is based on a misunderstanding.

“We believe at least we had de facto compliance,” he said, adding that the city is quibbling over minor issues, such as the height of the tampon dispenser in the women’s restroom.

But city officials say Sher has ignored repeated attempts to communicate with her. A court appearance is set for today.