How Board Undercut Laguna Art

Clearly, the biggest art event of 1996 in Orange County was the merger of the Laguna Art Museum and the Newport Harbor Art Museum. But not everyone is cheering the birth of the Orange County Museum of Art. Some of us believe the Laguna trustees consistently failed to comprehend the special character of the Laguna community and the role the nearly 80-year-old museum played in it.

Even worse, the trustees appear to have deliberately misrepresented the OCMA architects’ intentions regarding the museum’s future in Laguna Beach. Hitherto confidential documents that have come to light in recent weeks make their lack of trust in their community startlingly clear.

Merger ballots sent to the membership last winter were accompanied by a letter, dated Feb. 29, from the Laguna trustees. It presented reasons in favor of merging and stated that a merger “does not necessitate closing the Laguna Beach building.”

The letter said the trustees were “committed to” finding “a viable way to maintain a permanent facility in this city.”

However, a confidential report from the Laguna museum’s president to the board of trustees, dated more than a month earlier, included this stipulation: “. . . once NHAM renovation is completed, the LAM building will be closed and offered for sale or lease.” No alternative was even suggested for the Laguna site.

By the second year of the merger, the proposal stated, OCMA would be run solely from the Newport Harbor Art Museum site. Meanwhile, as minutes from the Laguna board’s Feb. 27 meeting confirm, the new museum would assume the Laguna museum’s bylaws for its own, as well as Laguna’s “long-range vision and plan,” including its exhibition schedule.

The terms of the merger agreement were eventually modified--as a result of negotiations with Save Laguna Art Museum (SLAM), the original anti-merger group--to allow Laguna’s Cliff Drive building to continue serving its museum function. But the report disturbingly clarifies the trustees’ real intentions.

They somehow failed to perceive the enormous gulf between Laguna Beach and Newport Beach community cultures. And they didn’t realize that using Laguna’s $2-million endowment and art collection as the basis for a “world class” county mega-museum likely to be situated eventually in the South Coast Metro area would grate against everything the Laguna locals stand for.

In recent years, the feisty, friendly city has weathered the arrival of vacuous architecture, glitzy shops that no longer cater to community needs and escalating retail rents without selling out. Even today, small-town neighborliness persists.

The museum--which, unlike most other art institutions (including Newport Harbor), started out as an artists’ membership organization--was symbolic of this spirit.

Members paid a small annual donation (or received a free artist’s membership, repaid many times over when those artists donated works to the annual art auction) and voted on key museum issues (a privilege that ended with the merger), all of which made them feel a part of the museum’s cozy traditions.

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Such a close-knit community surely would have rallied to save its museum if, as its trustees claimed, it was in serious financial trouble. But even that argument seems suspect in light of an audited financial statement from August 1995 showing a $226,615 budget surplus.

OCMA trustees’ standard reply is that a few donors provided a substantial financial boost and that any admission of insolvency would have risked alienating major funding organizations. But once again, the trustees seriously underrated their well-heeled community’s ability and readiness to save their own museum--as soon as they could be convinced that it truly was in danger.

As a sop to SLAM, the merger agreement established a curiously powerless entity, the Laguna Art Museum Heritage Corp. OCMA director Naomi Vine has called it “an advisory board and fund-raising council.”

Although the Heritage Corp. is responsible for generating two-thirds of the museum’s bare-bones annual operating cost, it is entirely beholden to OCMA trustees. They retain all appointment, approval and veto rights relating to staffing, use of the art collection and even Heritage nominees for trustee positions.

The merger agreement may be terminated as soon as five years after it was signed, and theoretically the Heritage Corp. would then get to keep the Laguna site, the collection and half the $2-million endowment.

But wait. According to the agreement, the OCMA board of trustees “cannot approve the transfer of such assets because [it] would be a breach of the board’s fiduciary obligations.”

No criteria for making this determination are listed in the agreement. Privately, some OCMA trustees have suggested that Heritage Corp. would need to raise its own $2- to 3-million endowment to even begin to prove its “fiduciary responsibility.” But how many other roadblocks might OCMA place on the route to independence?

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On Feb. 14, OCMA and Motivated Museum Members (MMM), the group that has filed an amended lawsuit to nullify the merger, are to take part in a settlement conference; if they can’t reach an agreement, a trial is scheduled to begin March 3.

The worrisome thing is the lackluster program MMM supporters are proposing for an independent Laguna museum: local artists and the museum collection.

Considering that Laguna Beach is no longer a viable artists’ colony, such a museum would not even be a return to past glories, but rather a sad embrace of provincialism and obscurity.

Although the Huntington Beach Art Center doesn’t have a collection and lacks the Laguna museum’s long history, it could serve as a model of how to reach the community in a low-key, inclusive way on a small budget while remaining in touch with the pulse of contemporary art.

Hiring top-quality, independent-minded staff with a high or rising profile in the art world is the key. In fact, the day OCMA trustees finally figure this out will be the day their museum will be potentially able to express the sophisticated cultural vision that distinguishes the real “world class” museums of this world.