Newport Harbor Art Museum to Expand

The Newport Harbor Art Museum has announced plans to double its gallery space by expanding into the 14,000-square-foot Newport Beach Public Library next door, signaling the museum’s decision to finally abandon long-cherished hopes of a high-profile new home.

The library building--acquired from the city by the Irvine Co., which is donating it to the museum--will be vacated next spring when the library moves into new quarters on Avocado Avenue.

The museum meanwhile has ceded its claim on an Irvine Co.-owned 10.5-acre site on Pacific Coast Highway where a once-ballyhooed new museum was to have been built. The expansion announced Monday is estimated to cost between $3 million and $4 million; the new building would have cost at least $30 million.

A community fund-raising campaign to renovate the current museum and the library, initiated by a $500,000 contribution from the Irvine Co., will begin in January pending approval of the project by the City of Newport Beach.

Under the expansion plan developed by Charles Froom and Benjamin Kracauer of Archimuse, a New York-based museum design firm, the 16-year-old, 23,000-square-foot museum building would be used strictly for exhibitions, storage and art preparation. Offices would be moved to the library building, which also would house an art education center with an auditorium and classrooms.

The museum would end up with 18,500 square feet of gallery space. Museum director Michael Botwinick pointed out Monday that this space is comparable to the exhibition area allotted by architect Renzo Piano in his design for a new building. However, that space was criticized by the museum’s former curatorial staff as insufficient and contributed to the abandonment of Piano’s plan and his ouster as architect in 1990.

The major impetus for a new building was lack of sufficient space in which to show both the museum’s permanent collection of post-World War II California art and related temporary exhibitions curated by staff at Newport Harbor as well as other institutions.

Once lauded in the national art press for its inventive, well-researched exhibitions of historical and cutting-edge art, Newport Harbor has been focusing for the past few years on programming for audiences unfamiliar with contemporary art. Though plans for a new museum have been on the back burner since 1991, the new scheme is evidence of a major retrenchment in arts philanthropy in a community that only seven years ago opened a $73-million performing arts center built entirely with private funds.