Exhibitions

Even the Getty Center can’t match the eclecticism of a handful of exhibits bringing high and low, old and new art to Orange County cultural institutions this year.

“Treasures From the Royal Tombs of Ur,” at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana beginning in October, illuminates the life and afterlife beliefs of Sumerian kings and queens living in 2600-2500 BC in the Mesopotamian city of Ur.

Among the exhibition’s highlights, unearthed from the Royal Cemetery of Ur, are a wooden lyre adorned with a gold and lapis lazuli bull’s head, a gold statuette of a goat nibbling leaves and an elaborate gold and carnelian headdress. Each piece was excavated in the 1920s by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, which organized the traveling show.

British archeologist C. Leonard Woolley, the dig’s chief excavator, classified 16 of the project’s 1,800 individual burial sites as belonging to royalty, in large part because each of these “death pits” also contained the bodies of numerous servants, grooms and attendants.

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, the Fullerton Museum Center will open “Humor in a Jugular Vein: Art, Artists and Artifacts of Mad Magazine” in June. The 76-piece show will feature original paintings, drawings and archival pieces from 1955, the year of the magazine’s debut, to the present.

Thanks to collector Mark J. Cohen of Santa Rosa, owner of the show’s contents, Alfred E. Neuman’s mug may be the among the summer’s most popular portraits. The traveling display was organized by Exhibit Touring Services, a program of Eastern Washington University.

On a more serious note, Igal and Diane Silber of Laguna Beach have amassed a vast, well-respected collection of ceramics, some of which they will lend to the Laguna Art Museum for a show opening in March.

“The Igal and Diane Silber Collection of International Contemporary Ceramics,” which the couple accumulated during three decades of worldwide travel, will include sculpture and vessels by some 60 artists from the United States, Germany, Belgium, Poland, Korea, Japan and Israel.

Museum director Bolton Colburn say the show is fitting for Laguna Beach, which has had a thriving community of ceramic artists since the 1930s. “This one of the most important collections of contemporary ceramics in California,” Colburn said. “Few ceramic shows have this kind of geographic scope.”

A love of beads led Dorrit Rawlins, curator at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, to “Pure Vision: American Bead Artists,” which will bring free-standing sculpture and wall hangings made with the tiny baubles to the center in July. Twenty-eight artists from around the country will be represented in the show, organized by ExhibitsUSA.