Folk Art Museum Spreading Its Wings : Art: By joining two buildings, the museum will triple its space and be able to show its permanent collection and temporary exhibits when it opens in October.

After four years of moving and waiting, planning and revising, the Craft and Folk Art Museum is set to expand its facility by joining two buildings on Wilshire Boulevard, tripling its space for exhibitions and programs.

“We have previously been able to only show exhibits in a sequential format,” explained Patrick Ela, executive director of the museum. With the expansion planned for an October opening, three to five galleries will be available at any one time, so the museum will be able to simultaneously show items from its permanent collection and temporary exhibits, and will not have to close down between shows, as it has in the past.

“One of the things that we’ve all yearned for is to have several shows all at once,” said museum founder Edith Wyle.

The expansion process has been long and painful. It started in 1965, when Wyle started the gallery-restaurant the Egg and the Eye.

“We showed contemporary craft and folk art as art --showed it in a gallery and on pedestals that made people think of it as art,” she said. But Wyle realized no one was collecting the work at that time. So in 1973, with the approval of the IRS, the Craft and Folk Art Museum was born as a nonprofit organization in the Egg and the Eye space.

By 1987, the museum was cramped in its storefront facility and was facing large expenditures to make the building earthquake-safe. The board of directors began working with the Ratkovich Co. to develop and build a 22-story Museum Tower, which would house the museum, retail stores, offices and residential condominiums.

In exchange for its Wilshire lots and about $12 million, the Folk Art Museum would have owned two floors (55,000 square feet) of Museum Tower and established an endowment. The museum and the developers spent months and $800,000 obtaining the many entitlements needed to build the multipurpose facility. In 1989, the Craft and Folk Art Museum moved to a temporary location on the top floor of the nearby May Co. store at Wilshire and Fairfax and started a fund-raising campaign.

“Being in the May Co. looking forward to being in a new museum was wonderful,” Ela said. But three years later, they were still there, and Los Angeles real estate had taken a turn for the worse. The developers were unable to raise the investment capital to start construction. By June, 1992, with California’s economy stalled in a recession, the plan was scrapped altogether.

In October, the museum board leased the building on Wilshire adjacent to the Egg and the Eye, with an option to buy it. The group then hired architects Craig Hodgetts and Hsin-Ming Fung to design a way to connect the two structures. It turned out to be a lucky move. Within weeks, May Co. announced its merger with Robinson’s; the Wilshire-Fairfax May Co. would close at the end of January and the Folk Art Museum would have to move out.

The museum hurried to complete the first phase of the construction: adapting the new building to usable office and library space so the staff could move in. Then on April 15, the board approved a set of plans for future remodeling.

“The Craft and Folk Art Museum is thought of as a multicultural, non-Eurocentric kind of institution, and the kind of symbolism of joining these two buildings was excellent,” Hodgetts said. “We really were looking for and trying to devise an architectural structure that would allow for those two to stand as historical bookends and create a linkage that would accentuate the differences rather than make it all look the same.”

The older building--now earthquake safe but nearly gutted--will be turned into a museum shop and a revived the Egg and the Eye. The buildings, constructed some 30 years apart, will be connected by inclined ramps that create “architectural tension” between them, Hodgetts said. “Superimposed on all of that is a luminous canopy (which is) kind of a beacon. It will be back-lit, because . . . it’s on the south side of the street,” he said. “That luminosity will create this area between the two buildings that rather than being in shadows will be the hub of activity.”

Ela is unsure of what the total cost of construction will be--the museum is taking bids from contractors. It’s also still raising money, though it received large contributions from the May Co. and the Bing family. “We’ve adopted a pay-as-you-go philosophy,” Ela said.

A later phase of construction will enclose the rest of the parking lot and rearrange the office space to allow for a large central gallery and space for studios and educational activities. The total space will be about 35,000 square feet.

The museum also owns a duplex on Curson Avenue, behind the museum, which will eventually be used to store its 2,000-plus piece collection, which ranges from ancient wood carvings to contemporary furniture.

While it’s not the 55,000 square feet the Craft and Folk Art Museum would have had in the Museum Tower, Ela is glad just to have some space again. While the operations--including the annual Festival of Masks--survived three years in the May Co. attic, the museum can offer programs, lectures and classes again now that it has a facility to host them.

The museum will be open for the 1993 Festival of Masks Oct. 16-17. But the museum’s first major show will be a comprehensive exhibit of its permanent collection--featuring 19th- and early 20th-Century American quilts and the recently donated Warmbold Collection of Mexican Folk Art.

“We were one of the first institutions in L.A. to recognize the importance of cultural diversity and work with issues of cross-culturalism,” Ela said. The new space will only enhance the museum’s ability to interpret social connections through craft.

Wyle said the new facility reflects the museum’s style. “The old building is being (renovated, but) the facade will stay the same. The new building on the corner will be very contemporary looking. It tells about us--that we’re both folk art and contemporary design.”