New Yorker to Head Long Beach Museum of Art

Harold B. Nelson, a New York-based art administrator with a vision of Long Beach’s potential as a culturally diverse art center, has been named director of the Long Beach Museum of Art.

The 41-year-old administrator is director of exhibitions at the American Federation of Arts, which circulates art exhibitions to museums throughout the country. He will take over the Long Beach post April 3, succeeding Stephen Garrett, who resigned last August after a four-year tenure.

Reached at his New York office, Nelson said he hopes to raise the profile of the rather sleepy museum by helping it to find a central place in the community.

“I don’t plan to make radical changes,” Nelson said in a telephone interview. “I want to continue and enhance the fine programs that have been going on there.”

But there has been a “problem” with “a lack of identity that has confused the public about the museum’s mission,” Nelson said. “I’d like to enhance the museum’s educational role and reach out into the community, which I understand is 51% non-white and includes Asian, Hispanic and black Americans,” he said.

Nelson said the Long Beach Museum of Art should not duplicate efforts of other Southern California institutions. Instead, it should distinguish itself by focusing on the ethnic diversity of the community, which sets Long Beach apart from Newport Beach and Laguna Beach--two nearby cities that also have art museums.

He also thinks programming should address the fact that Long Beach is a major port on the Pacific Rim. An upcoming exhibition of Japanese-American artist Masami Teraoka’s paintings is “a good example of the interface between Eastern and Western cultures,” he said.

In general, Nelson envisions a program that would continue to show Southern California art but with a stronger community context. He hopes to facilitate energetic outreach programs and make more extensive use of video-taped interviews with artists.

The museum’s internationally known art video program will continue, Nelson said, but it will become more accessible. Video programs will be incorporated within the museum’s exhibition program instead of standing alone as separate units. And now that the medium has come of age, video artists are less interested in simply exploring the form and are more inclined to investigate “larger issues” of concern to the public, Nelson said.

Linda McCullough, president of the museum’s board of directors, said she was delighted with Nelson’s appointment and with interest in the position. “We had applicants from all over the United States” who were eager to take on the “challenges and opportunities” at “a small museum in a growing community in Southern California,” she said. The museum currently has a staff of eight full-time employees and three contract workers.

“Hal has extensive experience with exhibitions that appeal to the museum public. He has serving the public in mind and that’s what the museum is all about,” McCullough said.

She also lauded Nelson’s experience with grant-writing and corporate fund-raising. The Long Beach museum’s current annual budget is about $800,000. Both McCullough and Nelson said they would like to raise the budget to $1 million in the near future. They also hope to enlarge the membership, which currently stands at about 1,150.

The Long Beach Museum of Art was a city institution for 30 years, but in 1985 it was reorganized as a private foundation. The city agreed to allow the museum to continue to occupy its seaside location on Ocean Boulevard and to provide financial support of $357,000 a year until 1990, when the agreement will be evaluated in light of the museum’s financial health.

Nelson has been at the American Federation of Arts since 1983. (Part of that time he was director of exhibitions for the San Francisco-based Art Museum Assn. of America, which merged with the AFA a year and a half ago.)

At the federation, Nelson has been in charge of a $1.7-million budget and a staff of 11 employees. His development responsibilities have included preparing grant requests for government funding and soliciting corporation and foundation support for AFA/AMAA programs. Nelson has also assessed the merits and marketability of exhibitions proposed to the federation.

Prior to his federation post, Nelson worked in art museums. He was head registrar at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York from 1980 to 1983. For three years before that, he was registrar and curator of American and contemporary art at the Museum of Art and Archeology at the University of Missouri.

Nelson was graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, in 1969, obtained his master’s degree from the University of Delaware in 1972 and is a Ph.D. candidate at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where his dissertation topic is artist Romaine Brooks.