Artist’s Daughter Looks at Past, Present

Edgar A. Payne (1883-1947), a prominent California Impressionist, moved to Laguna Beach to paint in 1917. The next summer, a group of artists gathered in his Glenneyre Street studio to organize an art gallery where resident and visiting artists could show and sell their work.

The first exhibition opened July 27, 1918, in the city’s former town hall. Less than one month later, Payne and colleagues founded the Laguna Beach Art Assn.--today’s Orange County Museum of Art at Laguna Beach--and Payne was elected its first president.

Evelyn Payne Hatcher, his daughter, was only 4 years old that year, but today, at 82, says she still remembers those early association meetings.

“I dimly remember them--my father, [artist and association founding vice president] Anna A. Hills and my mother sitting there talking,” Hatcher said in a recent phone interview from her home in Minnesota.

In a recent phone interview from her home, Hatcher discussed the current state of Orange County’s oldest arts institution. A writer and retired anthropology professor at St. Cloud State University in Minneapolis, she has lived in Minnesota since 1955 and had not heard about the Laguna Art Museum’s recent merger with Newport Harbor Art Museum to create OCMA. Still, she didn’t mind expressing strong opinions about the county’s most controversial cultural issue of late.

Q: After museum trustees announced their intent to merge, protests arose from museum members and others who feared that the consolidation would close the Laguna museum. As a result, trustees signed a contract guaranteeing it would stay open as a branch of the new Orange County Museum of Art. How does that sit with you?

A: “I must say I’m glad of that. . . . Maybe it’s just sentimental associations and I hate things getting too big as they do so much these days. Bigger is not better. . . . [Also] I’d be very sorry if the thing my father started would leave Laguna Beach.”

Q: Some area residents’ decry the Laguna museum’s loss of independence. Do you?

A: “Yes, that bothers me because I’ve seen too many organizations grow big, and they get bureaucratized.”

Q: Merger proponents have said that the Laguna museum, which has no parking, may one day be moved to a freeway-close location, such as the area near the South Coast Plaza shopping mall. Is that a good idea?

A: “People like to go to art colonies [because they] have an arty quality, and that’s one of the things that makes Santa Fe and Laguna a good place. People interested in art come to a place that has art; they don’t go there because a freeway is there.”