O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Fullerton Grad Comes Back Through the Exit : Mike McGee, who helped found the student gallery, talks about his plans for the widely praised exhibition program he has inherited.

When Mike McGee was an undergraduate at Cal State Fullerton in the mid-’70s, there was no place for student artists to show their own work on campus. As he recalls, the campus’s strong-minded gallery director, Dextra Frankel, “hardly ever let the students near the gallery to exhibit their own work.”

So he and his pals started putting up their stuff in the hallway of the art building near the EXIT sign. Known jokingly as the Exit Gallery and subsequently relocated to another building, it became a permanent fixture of the art department.

Now that he’s back on campus, in Frankel’s old job--she retired last year after 24 years--McGee says he was amused to find his office located across from the gallery he co-founded.

McGee, a genial, mild-mannered 37-year-old, says he sometimes wonders why he was chosen over higher-profile candidates for tenure-track position, which also involves teaching art department courses and coordinating the two-year master of arts program in exhibition design.

Begun by Frankel in 1967 and formally established as a graduate program in 1973, the widely praised museum curriculum was the first in the United States to emphasize exhibition design.

Even today, among institutions accredited by the National Assn. of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), there is only one similar program at the graduate level, at the Philadelphia College of Art and Design. (Another exhibit-design program, at Cal State Long Beach, was discontinued this year as a result of major budget cuts in the Cal State University system).

Frankel--who is still active running Dextra Frankel Associates, a museum design consulting firm in Santa Monica--explained recently that her objective at Cal State Fullerton was to prepare students “to go directly into a museum and not have to bluff. That’s why, as word of this got out, museums (across the country) would call and ask for students from the program.”

She set up a demanding curriculum that included courses in curatorship, museum education and art conservation--taught by museum professionals--as well as vigorous hands-on experience. The tiny graduate program, which had no more than six students at a time during Frankel’s tenure (there are nine today) was designed to cater to students’ specific backgrounds and professional aims.

“If they had a studio (art) background, I insisted they take more art history. If they were art history (majors), I insisted they take design,” she said. “They painted, spackled, sanded and constructed. They packed art. They did the lighting and they did the cleanup and they gave lectures in the space. . . . I wanted them to search in collections and know how to select objects. . . . They put together a slide-sound (educational program) and took care of all the insurance and P.R.”

Jerry Samuelson, dean of the School of the Arts, described Frankel as “a unique individual. (The program) was something she gave a lot of love and energy to.” But, he adds, “Mike has a great commitment to our program. I think his energy level is great.”

After earning his master of fine arts degree from UC Irvine in 1980, McGee plunged into a busy decade of curating and teaching. He directed the Edge Gallery in Fullerton, moved on to become programs coordinator at the Laguna Art Museum, served briefly as chief curator of the now-defunct Modern Museum of Art in Santa Ana and directed the Orange Coast College Art Gallery in Costa Mesa.

In recent years, he also juggled art teaching jobs at six Orange County college campuses, and he is running Rancho Santiago College’s “Art Forum” lecture program through the current academic year.

Before he took over at Cal State Fullerton in August, the museum-studies program had been managed by an interim director; the steady stream of incoming graduate students attracted over the years by Frankel’s reputation had dried up. He had to hustle to lure a new batch of students, but says he is especially pleased with their diversity of backgrounds and interests.

One student managed an art gallery in Irvine; another is a former English major at UC Irvine who chalked up work experience at a short-lived science museum in Mission Viejo and contemplates a post-graduation job at the Monterey Aquarium.

First-year students also include a history major from Stanford University and a graduate of the now-defunct undergraduate exhibition-design program at Cal State San Diego (where she studied under Tina Yapelli, a product of the Cal State Fullerton graduate program who is now curator of exhibitions at the Madison Art Center in Wisconsin).

Another entering student is a sculptor with a background in computer-aided design--widely used by architects and others--which will become part of the Cal State program this year, now that McGee has acquired two computers for the department. McGee also picked up a new student who had been all set to enter the Cal State Long Beach program before the budget ax fell.

These days, money is tighter at Cal State Fullerton too. But Samuelson sounds confident about the future of the program. So far, money-saving measures have been limited to such adjustments as requiring McGee to teach one more class than Frankel did and eliminating graduate assistants in the gallery.

McGee has been busy working on a new “mission statement” for the program (which is up for renewal of its accreditation from the NASAD this year), appointing an advisory committee of museum professionals and applying for a grant from the Institute of Museum Studies to have the university’s little-known print collection appraised.

He also is arranging for students to work on real-life “case studies” based on specific problems at Orange County museums.

“It would be great for the students to have that kind of personal contact” with local museum personnel, he says, “plus they would feel they were doing something that really matters.”

When Frankel became gallery director in 1967, exhibit-design students had no fixed campus location in which to present their major projects. (The Main Gallery, which opened in 1970, occupied three different buildings before coming to roost in the new visual-arts complex.) Still, she says, “I wanted it known by artists how well we exhibited their work, and that the exhibits were of substance,” she says.

“It was important to me that (artists) wanted to show there. . . . I wanted all the exhibits to be of museum quality rather than have it be an insular university gallery. . . . I rarely showed (artists) from Orange County. Many people in Orange County don’t go to Los Angeles, so in a way it was kind of bringing (the art) to them.”

The exhibits during Frankel’s early years ranged from “Transparency: Reflection,” a 1968 exhibit of work by 21 contemporary sculptors, to “India: Arts of the People--Tribal, Village, Town,” a 1970 show of more than 350 objects borrowed from museums and major private collections.

Used to making do with limited resources, McGee sounds delighted with the spacious, well-equipped exhibit space. “This is the first time I’ve ever come into a program where I didn’t have to almost literally take a hammer and a nail and start building things from the ground up,” he says. “There’s a workshop here that is bigger than the one they have at the remodeled Bowers (Museum).”

These days, the bare-bones cost of mounting four exhibits a year in the Main Gallery comes to at least $30,000, McGee says, of which $20,000 comes from student fees, $5,000 from the art department, and the rest from the Art Alliance, a support group (which also raises another $7,000 annually for student scholarships). A $90,000 allotment from the university this year will pay for a much-needed refurbishment--including new lighting and climate control--of the Main Gallery.

After picking the brains of several Southern California museum curators who have worked with program graduates, McGee learned that the students tend to be deficient in art-history knowledge and writing skills, contrasted with those who went through museum programs at USC and UCLA--shortcomings he eventually hopes to remedy.

During Frankel’s tenure, student curators were not required to write a catalogue essay explaining the rationale for each exhibit.

Frankel defends the practice, pointing out that students tended to be “consistently bad” as writers and that they had many other tasks to perform. Instead, she made sure there was money in the budget to pay an experienced art critic or historian to do the writing when necessary. Additionally, she insisted that students take an advanced class in writing from the English department.

McGee says he has discussed the catalogue-essay issue with Howard Fox, curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“He thinks--it’s this East Coast-mentality thing--that the (student) curator should write the main essay for the show,” McGee says. “It’s ideal, but in this program, we’re putting out a lot of people who don’t want to be curators. They (only) want to do exhibition design.”

W. Rod Faulds, who graduated from the program in 1980, gives it high marks for teaching “a wide range of practical skills.” Currently associate director of the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Mass., Faulds will become assistant director of operations and public programs at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in February.

“The position I’m in is largely administrative . . . dealing with financial management and project management,” he says. “But the design skills that are part of Dextra’s program have really distinguished what I’ve done here.

“My involvement in exhibition design and publication design is not necessarily part of my job description, but it has been a very important part of what I do for this museum in terms of how the galleries look and how our catalogues look. . . .

“Dextra would use the analogy of gallery and museum work being like the theater, particularly the behind-the-scenes aspect. It was a collaborative undertaking. (Although) some became ‘stars’--perhaps the artists or the curators--it really couldn’t be done without a team of people thinking about all of the necessary details.”

Patricia Watts, 32, entered the Cal State Fullerton program a couple of years ago with a degree in business administration from Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., and a dream of becoming a museum director.

“Dextra presented the program to me as (one in which students) decided what they wanted to do, and she helped them accomplish those goals,” Watts says. “I’m not going to be an exhibition designer . . . but it’s a great tool. How space is designed is really important as to how viewers experience the artwork.”

Watts says she spent all summer sending out applications to museums around the country, as well as to art councils and foundations.

While searching for a job--”I’m really looking for assistant curator, development, P.R. or administrative positions,” she says--Watts must fulfill a six-week internship to complete her museum-studies certificate (which also requires courses in museum conservation, education or audience development, curatorship, elementary accounting and writing). Typically, students work at art institutions (Faulds, for example, worked with then-director Tom Garver at Newport Harbor Art Museum.)

Watts is considering working for a respected art appraiser in Los Angeles. “The more I know, the more marketable I’ll be,” she says. “Especially with shrinking budgets, if you can do more than one thing you’ll be in a better position.”

The sagging economy has made placements more difficult in recent years, though McGee says graduates have found work at institutions as disparate as the Wight Art Gallery at UCLA and at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda.

Although Frankel reiterated that the program she conceived was specifically for people planning art-museum careers, McGee seems to take a broader view. He mentions graduates who have applied their skills to such projects as business-convention design and designing theme-park rides. (Van Romans, who was in one of the department’s first graduating classes, is director of arts management at Walt Disney Imagineering in Burbank.)

“The students who come out of this program tend to be much more common sense-oriented” than graduates of other programs, he says happily. “That’s because they’ve had to build exhibits from the ground up.”