Display Space Shrinks So Gift Shop Can Stretch

If visitors to the Lun*na Menoh show get the feeling that Laguna Art Museum’s satellite gallery in South Coast Plaza has shrunk, they’ll be right.

The museum has reduced the gallery’s floor space by half, to 600 square feet, to expand the adjacent gift shop.

The redesign was “done basically to make more profit from shop” sales, museum acting director Susan M. Anderson said. Like arts organizations nationwide that have seen private- and public-sector funding dwindle, “We are looking for new ways to be entrepreneurial right now,” Anderson said.

The redesign is not necessarily permanent. It is viewed as the “first phase of what we hope is a complete redesign of the space,” Anderson said, which may lead to exhibitions that extend “into the space of the plaza itself.” Plans also call for more functional art, such as artist-designed furniture, to be offered in the shop.

“We’re hoping that, with the renovation and the new product mix, we’ll bring more people into” the satellite, she said.

Meanwhile, the museum this week announced the bequest of a contemporary art collection and that it has hired a temporary replacement for its recently resigned associate director of development.

The 140-piece bequest is from the trust of Richard H. Mumper, a Laguna Beach art collector, longtime museum member and English teacher who died in May. It includes works by Richard Diebenkorn, Carlos Almaraz and Billy Al Bengston, and is “one of the most impressive collections of contemporary art given to the museum in the past decade,” said Bolton Colburn, the museum’s curator of collections.

Jan Young is the part-time “development consultant” hired to stand in until a permanent replacement is found for Marilyn (Mickey) Shaw, who resigned in August.

Young, who will oversee the museum’s fund-raising programs, will retain her other job as a marketing and development consultant to Santa Ana’s Discovery Museum. Anderson said she expects to hire replacements soon for two other development staffers who resigned recently.