Naomi Vine: Cautiously Optimistic : Art: The new head of the Laguna museum keeps an eye on the bottom line as she envisions expanding exhibitions and support.

It must be daunting to start a job in a new city at a level of authority you’ve never had before--and with the knowledge that your predecessor was fired after 5 1/2 years of service.

Add the lingering effects of the recession and the Orange County bankruptcy, and the climate may not seem propitious for freewheeling opinions or pie-in-the-sky plans.

So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Naomi Vine, the Laguna Art Museum’s new director, projects a cautious, non-judgmental attitude, tightly focused on the bottom line.

An arts administrator who came to Laguna Beach from New York in early March, garlanded with tributes to her managerial abilities and interpersonal skills from past employers, Vine has never been a museum director. She has served as associate director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and deputy director for external affairs at the American Craft Museum in New York.

Interviewed in her office a couple of weeks after she assumed her new position, Vine was accompanied by board member Tim Pearson. His presence was insisted upon by Vine and Pearson--an unusual prerequisite to a face-to-face interview with a top-ranking arts official.

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Slender and smartly attired in a verdigris-hued jacket and a short black skirt, with comma-like waves of immaculately coiffed blond hair framing her face, Vine initially seemed guarded and carefully noncommittal, but her warmth and candor shone through as the two-hour talk progressed.

Asked for her interpretation of a recent letter from board president Teri Kennady to museum employees--which stated that “substantial changes” would be made “in the way the museum is run,” including “redefining many job descriptions, with some positions being eliminated and new ones created”--Vine’s response was vague.

“I think anyone coming to a new situation is going to have different standards, different priorities than anyone else,” she said. “I’m very impressed by the staff. (But) I can’t really say what might happen down the road.”

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Vine was somewhat more specific about the general direction of the 77-year-old museum, dedicated to collecting and exhibiting California art.

“The museum has done really important things, especially in the past five, six, 10 years, and I really want to build on that,” she said. “I don’t want to do anything to change the direction of the exhibition (program) or anything like that. I think it’s important to keep a balance . . . to show art from every period of California history.”

The major change Vine does want to make is “to broaden the context a bit in which California art is shown, both through the kinds of works of art that are selected and the kinds of educational materials used to document exhibitions.”

Stressing that she hasn’t worked out her ideas on the subject, she said she wants to present the national and international context of California art, as well as emphasizing its uniqueness. That approach would preclude a major exhibition of German art, but not a comparative look at certain German and California artists.

Next year’s exhibitions were planned before Vine arrived. “I would love to take more credit for (them),” she said, singling out as “exceptionally important” two shows of a scholarly nature: the long-awaited retrospective of the work of abstract painter John McLaughlin and “The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism.”

Vine recently went into the museum’s storage vault to select works for her office. Somewhat surprisingly--in view of the many works by well-known modern and contemporary artists owned by the museum--she chose a courtyard scene and a still life of apples by two long-forgotten artists.

“I decided to challenge myself, and I picked a couple of early California paintings to live with for a while,” she said.

“I find that I am really coming to love this still life, and I just don’t understand the other painting at all. I don’t understand the way it’s painted. It doesn’t make sense to me, either as an Impressionist work or an Expressionist or a representational work. It just doesn’t hold together in an interesting way.”

When her visitor suggested the painting was simply not very good, Vine agreed that might be the case. But she praised California plein-air painting in general, remarking that she was “stunned” by the “beauty” of some of the works in the museum’s current show, “Paintings From Paradise: Selections From the Laguna Art Museum Collection of California Impressionism.”

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Responding to a lament for the endangered species of risky and ambitious Orange County museum shows in the conservative ‘90s, Vine choose instead to define the word in a fiscal sense, and defend it.

“ Conservatism is a funny word,” she said. “I think it’s very important to be very careful with (the museum’s) income. It’s a public trust. That means accounting for it very accurately . . . monitoring budgets very carefully, and not assuming that income is going to be there even when you don’t know where it is going to come from.”

Nor is Vine one to assail the enemies of the National Endowment for the Arts. She said she recently has become “a little more sympathetic (to) and understanding of the people who see themselves as (unwillingly) supporting us (through their taxes). . . . Maybe (we need) to do a little more to help them understand and care about what we do.”

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The big issue, as she sees it, is “responsibility.” Granting that “no organization can exist for every public,” Vine added that “we have a responsibility to the people who come through our doors who want some kind of experience in the gallery, as well as to the taxpayers who are (because of federal and state grants) supporters of what we do. We have an obligation to make what we show accessible to them.”

Boards have serious responsibilities, too, Vine said. “They really have to exercise oversight, particularly in financial and management areas but also in (sustaining the museum’s overall mission). . . . There have been cases when professional staff members or board members have gone too far. (But) I think what we’re all always trying to do is the best job we can.”

With her dual training in art and business--Vine holds both a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Chicago and an MBA from Emory University in Atlanta--she certainly sounds like the perfect person for the job.

“I hope,” she remarked disarmingly, “that everyone agrees in a year.”

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So how does she view her relationship with the 36-member board? This is, after all, a body that fired her predecessor, Charles Desmarais, without cause, although privately some members have voiced displeasure with his administrative leadership.

“I think one of the reasons I was selected is that I have strong professional skills, because I understand the role of a museum director,” Vine said. “I do expect to take the leadership in deciding what specific way we work with the board’s policies. But I do see it as the role of the board to formulate those policies, and I expect to uphold them.”

The conversation turned to marketing, fund-raising and other administrative areas of the museum.

“One of the things I’ve realized is that the museum doesn’t have a consistent image,” Vine said. “So we’re working with a couple of our board members to redesign our newsletter and brochures . . . and just look at the way we present ourselves visually.”

The board also has been drafting a new, long-range plan, which Vine will be reviewing during the next few months. One portion of the plan calls for a new endowment campaign to supplement the museum’s two existing nest eggs. (One endowment of roughly $1 million has been in place for years; the other, initiated in 1993 as a 75th-anniversary project, is more than $1 million away from its $2-million goal.)

“It’s going to become increasingly important to rely on our own earned income . . . rather than having to rely on contributed income to the extent we do,” Vine said.

Does she expect the capital campaign to be her greatest challenge at the museum? “I don’t really know,” she said. “I’m still learning people’s names and reading the documents.”