Art Center Fills 3 Key Jobs for March Debut

The opening of the Huntington Beach Art Center, postponed repeatedly since first announced in 1991, appears a step closer to reality with the hiring of three key staff members.

City officials, who now say they will open the center in March, have hired Marilu Knode as its curator, Tyler Stallings as its education coordinator and Joe Husovsky as its exhibitions designer and preparator, according to Naida Osline, the city cultural services supervisor who will direct center operations.

Knode, an independent curator and arts administrator from Los Angeles, most recently worked as acting associate director of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), a leading alternative art space. Before that, from 1988 to 1992, she held various positions at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach including that of assistant curator. She is scheduled to curate a major retrospective of Llyn Foulkes’ work at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach next year.

Stallings, also from Los Angeles, is a writer, visual artist and curator currently employed as public arts assistant to the city of Los Angeles’ Cultural Affairs Department. From 1991 to 1993, he planned experimental multimedia art classes at Oakwood High, a private school in North Hollywood. Stallings has read his art theory at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Husovsky, of Irvine, has been chief preparator at Newport Harbor since 1990. Before that, he was preparator at the Laguna Art Museum for two years and an intern at the Severin Wunderman Museum in Irvine. He is to start his new job in late October; Knode and Stallings are to begin in January, Osline said.

Various problems, mostly construction-related, have delayed the opening of the center, which is to occupy a refurbished 11,500-square-foot building at 538 Main St. downtown. The refurbishment is expected to cost $1.3 million.