Fullerton Center Tries to Avert Clashes

In a move to avoid future power struggles like one that prompted its curator to resign in April, the Muckenthaler Cultural Center’s board of directors on Wednesday created a committee to define authority over the center’s performing and visual arts programs.

“The board doesn’t want to get up in the position they were in before,” said Wes Morgan, Fullerton’s community services superintendent.

The city-run community gallery became the center of a nationwide controversy in April when a small group of trustees ordered the removal of a nude photo of John Lennon from an exhibit entitled “Heroes, Heroines, Idols and Icons.” Board chairwoman Beverly Gunter said the photo--which had run almost 10 years before on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine--portrayed Lennon as “weak” and thus did not fit the “positive” theme of the show.

Trustees voted to restore the photo to the exhibit after the controversy broke, but center curator Norman Lloyd resigned minutes after the vote, saying the board had usurped his authority. Several principals in the brouhaha agreed later that a lack of policy defining the relative roles of the curator, trustees and center administration led to the controversy.

Amid similar charges of trustee interference, the stage company that had produced the Muckenthaler’s Theater-on-the-Green broke relations with the center in March. City officials said reasons for the break were mainly financial, but a spokesman for Fullerton’s Resident Theatre Company said that the “bottom line” was the trustees’ “insistence (on control) over programming.”

The center hopes to head off such incidents with the committee, which will recommend policy guidelines to the full board.

Meanwhile, the center has received about 30 applications for the vacant curator post and has narrowed the field to six, Morgan said. The first round of interviews will take place July 18.

Former curator Lloyd has been doing free-lance architectural design work while seeking a full-time museum position. He said this week that he may enter graduate school.