It’s an Open Invitation

What to watch for in 1997?

* The appointment of a new president of the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

“We hope to fill the position around February,” center Chairman Mark Chapin Johnson said. “There will be no single more important thing [I do] in my tenure.”

* January’s christening of the Orange County Museum of Art on the site of the expanded Newport Harbor Art Museum.

For the first time, “a significant selection of the permanent collection [of the consolidated Newport and Laguna art museums] will be on view at all times,” OCMA Director Naomi Vine said.

* Financial recovery attempts by Opera Pacific, which revealed dire money troubles during a management shakeup last fall.

“We’re planning a special fund drive [to try to erase] our accumulated $1-million deficit,” General Director Patrick L. Veitch said. “My hope is to carry it out before the summer.”

Elsewhere, South Coast Repertory will upgrade its lighting and sound system, the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana will begin to wean itself off city funding, and the Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach will break ground for 75 additional parking spaces.

What does this all say about the year or so ahead?

County arts organizations “grew at lightning speed in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and now are settling into a stabilization phase,” said Bonnie Brittain Hall, executive director of Arts Orange County, the countywide arts service agency.

“It’s like personal growth,” Hall said. “You take a huge leap, then settle into it, adapt to it, before you take another jump.”

The next big leap is apt to be the widely discussed addition of another hall or more at the Performing Arts Center, without which the groups that use it--Pacific Symphony, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, Opera Pacific, and the like--have little room for growth, at least in the number of their concerts.

But at the moment, energies are devoted to matters critical to long-term viability: artistic and managerial strength, audience development and fund-raising--matters that center officials say must precede any physical expansion.

Consequently, Johnson still has not given even a rough timetable for the project, which could cost as much as $105 million, according to one estimate. Earlier this month, however, he stressed that “our mission for the next year and beyond is to cultivate major donors” to fund the expansion.

The community is far richer than when it ponied up $73 million to build the center, which celebrated its 10th birthday in September, Johnson said during an interview at the facility.

But it’s going to be tougher this time to get people to part with their money, he said. For one thing, potential donors are younger and thinking less about donating money than amassing it.

Also, less of the wealth is liquid. Years ago, much of it came from “current cash flow from developers,” Johnson said, but now it’s tied up in stock investments, appreciated real estate and the like.

“So our overarching goal has got to be getting back to square one to explain to the community what we do, why we do it, and why we believe that the art being performed on this stage changes lives,” he said.

With that accomplished, the money will come, Johnson said, “but that’s a whole cultivation process which we’ve got to get more adept at.” Thanks to the “visionary” arts patrons who financed the center’s creation, “we didn’t have to do it in the past,” he added.

The center’s new president is going to have to do lots of it, apparently. Johnson still refuses to discuss details of President Tom Tomlinson’s sudden resignation in July. But he said that Tomlinson’s replacement, in a “change from where we’ve been,” will have to be “out in the community 80% of the time.”

Even after a new chief is hired, he added, acting President Judith O’Dea Moor will stay on as programming director, the post she took on four months before Tomlinson left under pressure.

“Judy Moor brings an expertise in [programming], which the center very, very badly needs,” Johnson said.

There is a list of candidates for the job, but as of Dec. 27, no one had been interviewed at the center, a spokesman said. (Johnson had said the process would begin in December.) Shortly after the president is hired, a new vice president for development will be brought on, the spokesman said.

Development, a.k.a. fund-raising, will be paramount at Opera Pacific in 1997, Veitch said.

After his predecessor David DiChiera (who still manages programming) stepped down, the company announced a potentially crippling $1-million accumulated debt, which amounts to nearly 20% of its $5.5-million budget.

When Veitch came on, he said it would need an estimated $2.5-million infusion by September to survive.

Veitch has since roughly halved that estimate, saying it was “made within three weeks of arriving here.” The $1-million accumulated debt remains unchanged, he said, and $300,000 still must be raised to end the current fiscal year (in August) in the black.

But fund-raising and cost-cutting has reduced his initial estimate by about $700,000, he said. This season’s two remaining operas each will be performed five instead of six times. Also, five full-time staffers left around the time that Veitch came on, while another’s status decreased from full to part time.

One insider said “personality conflicts” with Veitch prompted the exodus. Veitch said that was “definitely not” the case with four of the employees. “With the other two, I don’t know,” he said. “However, I came in with a mandate from the board to restore the company to fiscal health. This is a company in crisis. In trying to [recover], I have tried to act as humanely as possible.

“To be frank, I have been very demanding. But I have applied a discipline that did not exist before. This company didn’t have a full-time general director until Sept. 24.”

Veitch plans to freeze two of the open positions indefinitely and maintain other recent budget cuts as well as the pumped up fund-raising.

“So, it’ll basically be a year of consolidation after a year of great change,” he said. “It’s not just a matter of cutting expenses once, it’s cutting and then living at that level of expenditure; it’s boosting fund-raising, but not letting it drop back down.”

OCMA’s Jan. 25 opening likewise will mark the end of a period of tumultuous change and a new beginning.

Now that the much ballyhooed new museum--with bigger galleries, a broader mission and double the art in the vaults--has finally become reality, will the people come? What about the hefty donations trustees were so sure of receiving?

President Charles D. Martin said that $2.6 million has been raised for the Newport Harbor’s expansion, $700,000 of that for an endowment.

Also, a handful of donations of at least $500,000 and a couple of at least $1 million “are coming,” Martin said, but would not elaborate. The donors have requested anonymity and that no announcement be made, he said.

OCMA may build a big new museum sometime around the turn of the century.

Still, “the repositioning of [the two museums] as a county institution has brought donors that would never have supported a Laguna museum or a Newport museum,” Martin said.

And what will draw the crowds?

OCMA “will be the only museum in Southern California,” Education Director Maxine Gaiber said, “that will give a scope of the history of California art from its plein air infancy to the cutting edge art of today.”

The year also should reveal more about the Laguna Art Museum Heritage Corp.’s ability to raise money, the corporation’s artistic preferences and its working relationship with OCMA.

Beginning April 1, Heritage will be required to raise $168,000 for the ocean-bluff museum annually. To date, it has raised at least $60,000, spokesman Steve Josephson said. It also will underwrite a Southern California artists exhibit at the Laguna site, which it is helping organize. Heritage advises OCMA on the site’s programs and hopes to have the show juried by Henry Hopkins, director of the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Josephson said.

Even before Heritage shifts into high gear, the Laguna site’s status could change.

Motivated Museum Members, the Laguna Beach-based group that has sued OCMA, wants nothing less than total independence returned to the museum, plus return of its collection and endowment to the community.

A Superior Court trial is set to begin March 3, preceded by a Feb. 14 pretrial settlement conference.

Both sides recently met to see if the issue can be settled before then. Neither is ready to express optimism that any sort of compromise will be reached, but relations seem to be warming. The rhetoric, at least, is softening.

“Just talking is a positive step,” MMM member John Bing said.

“I think there’s a greater understanding between the parties,” OCMA’s Martin said. “The dialogue, as a first step, was very constructive.”

*

Here’s a roundup of other arts issues and plans as we enter 1997:

* The city of Santa Ana, which contributes about one-third of the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art’s $3-million budget, in July will begin to reduce its support by 10% per year until the museum is self-supporting by 2007. No progress on the museum’s hoped-for expansion is expected.

* Fullerton Museum Center expects to start construction in the fall on an adjacent outdoor Museum Plaza. Planners envision a fountain, terraced eating areas and a bandstand in the 27,000-square-foot space.

* Supporters of the proposed Museum and Institute of Contemporary Art, who have yet to come up with funding, hope to open a small, interim home by year’s end in downtown Santa Ana’s Float Building. Escrow on the building, adjacent to the city’s fledgling Artists Village, is expected to close early in ‘97, buyer Arthur V. Strock said.

* The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art expects to move midyear from its temporary home in the Artists Village to a permanent site there.

* South Coast Repertory will update its 20-year-old lighting and sound system in the summer using some of the $500,000 Harry and Grace Steele Foundation grant it received in October.

* The feud involving Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre continues. Businessman Harry Shuster, whose 29-year lease on the land expires Feb. 28, seeks a permit to demolish the facility. Shuster’s attorney, however, has said that Shuster’s efforts are only a negotiating strategy to get the Irvine Co., which owns the land, to pay him for improvements made over the years.

* The Art Institute of Southern California plans to break ground in spring for a new parking lot, the first step of a long-planned expansion. Around summer, it will name a new president to replace John W. Lottes, who died earlier this month.

* St. Joseph Ballet, yearning to double or triple its facility size, hopes to make an offer on an empty Santa Ana lot near the Bowers on North Main Street.

* In January, OCMA trustees will launch long-term planning talks. They are expected to decide by the end of 1997 whether to move to a bigger facility, probably not sooner than four or five years from now.

* The second annual Newport Beach International Film Festival will take place April 3-13.