HUNTINGTON BEACH : Another Step Taken for City Arts Center

At the end of a stretch of new condominiums, restaurants, theaters and shops that will make up the city’s Main Pier redevelopment center, the city is setting aside a corner for art.

With the City Council’s approval this week of conceptual design plans, officials are on the way toward opening the Huntington Beach Art Center in the spring of 1991.

The center will be in a renovated, 39-year-old international-industrial-style building on Main Street at Acacia Avenue. In June, 1988, the city paid $758,000 for the building, which had been used as office space for Southern California Edison.

The yearlong renovation is expected to cost an additional $750,000. The improvements will be funded by the newly formed Huntington Beach Arts Center Foundation, a nonprofit group, according to Naida Osline, the center’s director. The foundation is raising money largely through grants and corporate and private donations.

Plans call for the 11,000-square-foot center to include three galleries, a studio for workshops and classes, a multipurpose room that will feature performances, lectures, films and videos, and an art-related bookstore.

Osline said the center will exhibit paintings, sculptures and various mixed-media art forms.

“We want to give people a cultural context so it means something to people, not just something decorating the walls,” she said. “We are going to try to involve people in ideas and issues.”

The city’s only other art facilities are small galleries at Golden West College and the Huntington Beach Central Library.

The new art center is the culmination of more than a decade of effort by the city’s Allied Arts Board, a council advisory committee that identified the Main Street building in 1983. The idea took shape in 1986 when the city created a cultural affairs division of the Community Services Department, Osline said.

Residents will get their first chance to tour the future art center building, examine renovation plans and meet the center’s coordinating staff at an open house scheduled for 5 to 7 p.m. on Tuesday.