Art Museum Merger Prompts Resignation

A veteran Newport Harbor Art Museum trustee has resigned over museum leaders’ handling of its merger with the Laguna Art Museum.

Eugene C. White, a Newport trustee for 14 years, said Wednesday that he is upset that the museum’s full board wasn’t more involved in planning the merger, which was negotiated by a committee of three executive trustees from each institution.

The merger was put to a vote by each museum’s full board. But the Newport Harbor executive committee “presented it” to rank-and-file trustees “as a fait accompli” only one month before the vote, White said, adding that the museum “had always done things with consensus of the [full] board.”

He also said trustees were “scared into” approving the merger by assertions that the museum would “go stone broke” without one.

Charles D. Martin, a Newport Harbor board member who has been named president of the new, consolidated Orange County Museum of Art, replied that the Newport Harbor executive committee acted legally in orchestrating the merger.

“You want to have [a full board of] 40 people go through negotiations?” he asked. “How can that be done?” He said the planning process included “substantive board briefings and open discussion” and he dismissed the idea that trustees were pressured into voting yes.

Merger proponents stressed that both museums were running deficits and advocated economic stability through economies of scale, Martin said. “But to say that people were stampeded or scared into it is a gross exaggeration of the facts.”

Martin also dismissed White’s assertion that the new museum’s bylaws give its executive trustees “all the power” to run the museum. “The powers vested with the executive committee,” Martin said, “are exactly those powers that existed at the Newport Harbor Art Museum before the merger.”