Laguna Museum Promotes Colburn

Bolton Colburn, curator of collections at the Laguna Art Museum, has been appointed chief curator, replacing his wife, Susan M. Anderson, who left the museum in June.

Colburn, who joined the museum in 1987, has been responsible for managing all aspects of its 2,000-piece collection. Although he probably is best known as co-curator (with Craig Stecyk) of “Kustom Kulture: Von Dutch, Ed (Big Daddy) Roth, Robert Williams and Others,” most of his exhibitions have been drawn exclusively from the museum’s holdings.

Among the most memorable have been an exhibition in 1988 of minimalist sculpture from the Herbert and Pauline Hirsh Collection; the high-spirited “I Thought California Would Be Different: New Work in the Permanent Collection” in 1992, and last year’s “Too Cool: Assemblage and Finish Fetish in Los Angeles.”

Before coming to the Laguna museum, Colburn was registrar of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art (now the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego). He graduated in 1984 from UC San Diego with a degree in art history and criticism.

Colburn’s father, Sam, who died last year, was a well-known painter in San Diego. (Coincidentally, Sam Colburn is being honored this month at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, where “Six Decades of Watercolor” is on view through Sept. 29).

Anderson left the museum to become an associate producer at Orange County public television station KOCE.