Under the Masks, a Love of Adventure and Art

In a celebration of ethnic diversity, guests sported masks and costumes from around the world at the Halloween party for the Collectors Council of the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana on Saturday night.

Host Robert Gumbiner, board chairman of FHP health services, which he founded in 1960, donned a Venetian carnival mask and glittering gold cape to welcome party-goers into his art-filled bay-side home in the Naples area of Long Beach.

Huge, intricately carved jack-o’-lanterns lit the walkway, leading guests into Gumbiner’s stunning gallery, where hundreds of pieces of abstract figurative art were on view.

When guests weren’t ogling the art collection--most of it Latin American contemporary regional paintings--they were eyeballing each other’s costumes and telling tales of where they’d purchased them.

Bic Lockhart wore a monkey mask he found during a recent trip to Bali with the Collectors Council, an 80-strong support group of the Bowers founded by Mark Gumbiner (Robert’s brother) and Peter Keller, the museum’s executive director.

“See my jaw?” Lockhart asked, his “monkey mouth” moving as he talked. “It’s articulated.”

Keller wore an embroidered chief’s robe from Nigeria. But he carried his Bali tribal mask. “It’s very uncomfortable,” he said.

Patricia House, the museum’s director of development, wore a kanga --the African equivalent of a South Seas sarong--and teamed it with a mask of feathers. “We sell the kanga at the museum gift shop,” she said. “You can wear them 100 ways.”

Sadiq Tawfiq wore the formal costume of his native Afghanistan, a cocoa-colored tunic with a cream silk-embroidered bodice. “When you wear one of these in my country it means a woman really loves you,” said Tawfiq, who owns the Khyber Pass art gallery in Laguna Beach. “It takes a year to hand-embroider a piece like this. My sister made this one.”

Janet Seward turned heads in a cranberry-colored costume from Chajul, a village in the highlands of Guatemala. Colorful pompons trimmed her headdress. And shoulder-length strings of red acrylic thread tied with green and gold balls and coins accented her ears.

“Aren’t these earrings unusual?” said Seward, who will lead a Collectors Council trip to Guatemala in April. “The villagers put three holes in their ears and string the thread through them. The beads are made of thin glass, like old Mardi Gras beads.

“And the coins were actually used during the Spanish era. When the government devalued them, the Indians saved the coins and used them for jewelry.”

Bettye and Charles Peach, who collect Chinese art objects, bought their masks at Chinatown in Los Angeles.

While both masks were standouts--his portrayed a growling Asian visage, hers a beautiful, serene one--Bettye’s was the most exciting. It was topped by a gold-leaf headdress studded with stones.

Lifting the chin of her mask, Bettye confided: “The headdress is actually the top of a 50th anniversary wreath that I found at a party store. I took the ‘50’ out, put the mask in its place.”

During the ‘20s, Bettye’s grandmother, Mrs. E.W. Boerstler, toured China during a trip around the world. “We have given many of her things from that trip to the Bowers Museum,” Bettye said. “She was really something--decided to go around the world and took one cruise ship after another to do it.”

For Collectors Council founder Mark Gumbiner, Saturday’s party was a dream come true. “I have always wanted to give people who love cultural art an opportunity to get together, get involved, enhance each other’s interests.

“Cultural art is a wonderful thing because it’s affordable, within everybody’s reach. It’s a big fascinating world out there--particularly in the area of the folk cultures.”

The Collectors Council (whose membership is open to any lover of cultural art) also enables its members to discover the world together. “We can organize trips you wouldn’t want to do on your own,” said Mark Gumbiner. “For example, after a recent trip to Indonesia, some of us went on to Borneo. We needed to rent a houseboat, so we did. You can’t rent a houseboat by yourself.”