Modern Museum of Art in Santa Ana Has Closed

The Modern Museum of Art, an entity with no permanent collection and no curator for three of the four years it existed, has closed its facility in the Hutton Centre office complex, and owners say that they have no plans to reopen in the near future.

“The building had been sold and we were looking for a new location, (but) right now it’s a real bad economy,” museum co-director Robert Abbott, a former tennis pro and trophy shop owner, said this week.

However, a spokeswoman at Heitman Properties Ltd., owner since 1987 of Griffin Towers, which housed the museum, said Wednesday that Heitman still owns the building.

The museum opened in September, 1987, in 7,000 square feet of ground floor space donated by Griffin Realty Corp. (a partner in the joint venture Metro Associates, which later sold the property to Heitman’s parent company).

The institution’s profile was so low that its closure during the summer went virtually unnoticed on the Orange County art scene. Neither Abbott nor his wife, Ann, the museum’s vice president and co-director, came to the enterprise with an art or museum background, but when the facility opened, it did have a curator--Mike McGee, former Laguna Art Museum programs coordinator. After McGee resigned in May, 1988, the position went unfilled.

The museum generally showed exhibits packaged by other museums and circulating exhibition services. Although Ann Abbott explained before the museum’s opening that the word modern in the title indicated its intention to use video and other educational devices in innovative ways for the general public, most of the exhibits were accompanied only by sparse wall texts and catalogues supplied by the organizing institution.

The museum also initiated an art education program, “Communication in the Arts,” which has been purchased by several Orange County schools and sponsoring companies. This program is ongoing, Abbott said.

The museum’s final exhibit was “California Perspective,” a show of works donated by Southern California artists, which opened in May and culminated in a benefit art auction on June 8.