Roofing Woes at Newport Delay ‘Goode’

“Joe Goode,” a retrospective of work from the past 30 years by the prominent California artist that was to have opened Sept. 23 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, has been postponed to September, 1996.

Museum director Michael Botwinick said Wednesday that worries about leaks in the building’s nearly 20-year-old roof triggered the postponement of the exhibition, which was being organized by Newport Harbor chief curator Bruce Guenther.

At the same time, Goode told Guenther he wanted to finish a new body of work for inclusion in the exhibition, so what initially was envisioned as a two-month delay for roof repairs stretched into the one-year hiatus, Botwinick said.

Earlier this year, the leaky roof caused the cancellation of another major show, “Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation.” The show, organized by the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was to have been at the museum April 21 through June 18.

Botwinick said a portion of the roof was repaired last spring, but a shower in June left a two-inch puddle in the Irvine Gallery in 15 minutes, making it clear that more work was needed.

He said a temporary roof patch over about one-fifth of the museum will be installed at a cost of around $10,000; to avoid further staff cutbacks, it will be funded by private donations rather than from the general fund. “We’re as cut back as we want to be,” he said.

Through Oct. 7, the museum will show works to be auctioned at its annual fund-raiser. After the auction, the museum will be dark until mid- to late October, when the roof repairs are to be finished. Work from the museum’s collection and a borrowed piece by French conceptual artist Sophie Calle will be shown through early December.

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The opening Dec. 9 of “The Art of Peter Voulkos,” work by the Northern California dean of ceramic sculpture, will not be affected by the roofing, Botwinick said.

He added that though engineers have assured him the patch will get the museum through the winter rainy season, he sees it only as a short-term solution. Re-roofing the entire museum, he said, would cost about $750,000--money that also would have to be raised from the community.

“We are going to address that in the context of larger [fund-raising] issues,” he said, adding that an announcement about the museum’s plans will be made early next month, at the start of the new fiscal year.