Latin American Art Gets a New Place to Call Home

A Latin American museum finally is opening its doors in Southern California today, although it’s not the museum everybody’s been waiting for.

After decades of planning, politicians, Hollywood stars and Latin American diplomats celebrated the dedication of the Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture in downtown L.A. nine months ago. But because of bureaucratic delays, according to Latino museum board chairman and state Sen. Charles Calderon (D-L.A.), the 25,000-square-foot museum still isn’t expected to open until March, at the earliest.

Meanwhile, the Latin American Art Museum in Long Beach opens its first wing today,christening a 2,000-square-foot gallery with 60 figurative paintings from local collections by some of Mexico’s leading modern and contemporary artists, including Rufino Tamayo, Francisco Toledo, Sergio Hernandez and Julio Galan.

“We’re setting the stage,” said museum Patricia House, chief executive officer, calling this first stage a “preview opening.”

“We want to get Long Beach, the Latino community and the art community at large aware of the fact that we’re here,” she said.

Also opening today are a museum store and a gallery that will accommodate educational programs. If renovation is completed as scheduled next fall, two more large galleries and a 199-seat theater will bring the facility’s square footage to about 33,000.

In contrast to the L.A. institution, which will feature Latinos working in the United States, the Long Beach museum will focus on artists living or working in Latin America and the Caribbean. At its heart is the collection of the Dr. Robert Gumbiner Foundation. Gumbiner founded HMO giant FHP International Corp. in the early 1960s and opened a gallery in his Long Beach medical clinic a decade ago.

The now-retired doctor spent 30 years amassing art while traveling, and his 250-piece collection outgrew the allotted space, so he decided to convert his clinic, built as a skating rink in the 1920s, into a museum. His foundation gave $10 million for the building’s renovation by Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan and for operations.

The collection is clearly personal; Gumbiner, 73, admits he chooses according to “regional flavor.” Works by artists “trained in the United States or Europe,” he said, “don’t have the colorful, figurative” look he associates with Latin American art.

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The collection focuses on mostly contemporary work by mid-career artists from Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean and includes such Mexican mavericks as Arturo Elizando and Sergio Hernandez. It does not have, for example, work by Diego Rivera.

Gumbiner says he’d rather amass works by lesser-knowns, hoping they “will some day be the Diegos.” His collection includes a few mid-range pieces by Tamayo and Toledo, but acquiring household names “is a no-brainer,” he said, adding that it’s expensive. “You don’t get much for your money.”

Charles Merewether, a curator at the Getty Research Institute of Art, History and the Humanities who serves on the museum’s advisory board, admits that Gumbiner’s collection is geographically restricted and fails to “show the different trends in both modern and contemporary art throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.”

But Merewether praised Gumbiner for hiring House, former vice president of programs and development at Orange County’s Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, whom he believes will bring in experts to hone the collection and shape museum programs.

Indeed, House pointed out, all special exhibitions will be organized by guest curators, including Margarita Nieto, professor of art at Cal State Northridge, and John Coppola, an independent curator formerly with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Only one gallery of the museum’s four will be devoted to the permanent collection, she said, although some of Gumbiner’s works will accent various shows.

The museum, however, probably won’t show much of the most avant-garde work coming out of Latin America today, Gumbiner said.

Expected to have a $2-million annual budget, the museum doesn’t plan to show much work by local Latino artists, House said. All programs will be presented in Spanish and English, however, one of the museum’s attempts to reach the Latino community.

Attracting some visitors to the area east of downtown Long Beach will be a challenge, House predicts, but Gumbiner has helped to clean up the immediate neighborhood, she said.

“He bought the land across the street, cleaned it up and put a park in. There were major drug sales right there, but he also bought the building at the end of the block, had it all [painted] and now we’re going to put a gallery in.”

Such moves please Long Beach city officials, who view the museum, billed as the largest of its kind in the Western United States, as part of a general redevelopment effort.

“I think it’ll be a regional and perhaps national draw, ultimately,” said Long Beach city councilwoman Jenny Oropeza.

* The Latin American Art Museum opens today at 628 Alamitos Ave., Long Beach. Hours: Wednesdays-Saturdays, 11:30 a.m.-7:30 p.m.; Sundays, noon-4 p.m. Admission: $2.50. (310) 437-1689.