2 Museums to Jointly Occupy May Building

In a move that unites two major Los Angeles museums and revives a languishing historic building, the Southwest Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Monday announced plans to jointly occupy the former May Co. building on Wilshire Boulevard.

The defunct department store, which is just west of the encyclopedic art museum and was purchased by it for $25 million in 1994, is being re-created as a “marketplace for the arts” that can simultaneously accommodate, as it will this winter, exhibitions of Navajo textiles and paintings by Vincent van Gogh, an interactive educational presentation about Egyptian art and shopping opportunities.

One of Los Angeles’ largest and most prominent examples of late Streamline Moderne architecture, the May Co. was completed in 1939 and opened in early 1940. The five-story building, sheathed in black granite and gray limestone, was designed by Albert C. Martin and S.A. Marx. Its most distinctive feature is a vertical cylinder covered with gold mosaics and surrounded by a flamboyant, curved black framework, at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax Avenue.

The store flourished through the 1960s but slipped during the subsequent decades as suburban shopping centers proliferated and the Miracle Mile’s commercial district declined. The landmark store ceased its operations in January 1993 in the wake of the merger of May Co. and Robinson’s department stores.

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The Southwest Museum plans a $1.4-million project on the street level of the building, now dubbed LACMA West. A central section that once displayed men’s ties will house an 8,200-square-foot gallery complex, designed by Chris Carradine, vice president and executive concept architect of Walt Disney Imagineering.

Adjacent spaces to be used by the Southwest Museum will hold an interactive educational gallery and a museum shop.

The county museum has ambitious plans for the rest of the first-floor space, including exhibitions, educational programs, a cafe and retail outlets. The exhibition hall will be launched Jan. 17 with “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs: Masterpieces from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam,” which is expected to attract huge crowds during its three-month run at the May Co. building. An experimental gallery for children will open in October with “Body & Soul: Art and the Afterlife in Egypt and Sub-Saharan Africa.”

Lauded by officials of the two institutions as a mutually beneficial arrangement, the partnership ends a five-year search for a satellite space for the Southwest Museum, which was founded in 1907 and has made its home in a landmark Spanish Revival building on Mount Washington, north of downtown, since 1914. The museum is known as the repository of one of the nation’s best collections of native American art and artifacts, but it outgrew its space decades ago and suffers from being outside the area’s major cultural centers.

“We are very excited about the possibilities of this collaborative venture,” said Duane H. King, executive director of the Southwest Museum. “First and foremost, it gives us an opportunity to make our collections and programs available to a much broader audience. Establishing a satellite facility where we can present exhibitions in one of the most important museums in Los Angeles on Wilshire Boulevard’s museum row is perhaps the best way to reach a much wider spectrum of the community.”

Only about 2% of the Southwest Museum’s collections can be displayed at one time in the existing facility, which will continue to operate. The new space will allow the museum to bring more of its textiles, pottery and baskets out of storage, and exhibit some of them for the first time. The opening show will be “Navajo and Pueblo Textiles in the Southwest Museum.”

The Wilshire satellite also will allow the Southwest to stage public events for large audiences and double the number of school children who see its collections each year, from 45,000 to 90,000, King said. Activities at LACMA West are expected to raise funds from admissions, retail shop sales and increased memberships. The museum, which operates on a budget of $1.6 million a year, has about 2,900 members and an annual attendance of 75,000, including school groups.

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The development of the former May Co. building also has significant benefits for the county museum, said Andrea Rich, president of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “Having this building as a resource enables us much more quickly to reach all our long-term goals,” she said. “The facility allows us the opportunity to expand, bring a greater sense of community to the museum, enhance educational opportunities, orient ourselves toward families and children and have more possibilities for traveling exhibitions.”

The county museum struggled to purchase the May Co. building during a period of cutbacks in both public and private support, and is just now recovering its financial health. A plan to lease part of the May Co. building to Otis College of Art and Design was announced in May 1995 but abandoned six months later when the college, citing concerns about parking at the May Co., bought a building in Westchester instead.

Officials at both museums would not reveal financial terms of the new partnership, but King said that rent paid to the county museum will be based on gate receipts. Rich said that funds received from the Southwest will simply “cover costs but not make money.” The agreement is set for three years; after that, the museums will consider renegotiating for a long-term arrangement.

The partnership is the first official acknowledgment of the county museum’s plans for the May Co. building, but some improvements have been made and many plans are in the works. After the Van Gogh show, the county museum’s exhibition space will be used primarily for exhibition of the museum’s permanent collections.

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Built as the western anchor of the strip of Wilshire Boulevard known as the Miracle Mile, the May Co. building was an imposing monument when it was new. The firm proudly announced its first branch store as “a truly modern streamlined living reality of [founder David May’s] vision of the future, through which pulses the friendly spirit of his ideals of honesty, courage and utmost service to the public.” The store boasted 96 “intriguing and intimate shops” of “the world’s finest merchandise,” free valet parking, roof-top dining in the Wilshire Terrace Cafe and a beauty salon.

The county museum has spent about $1 million so far on improvements to the property; among them, an adjacent appliance outlet, gas station and parking area have been replaced with fenced lawns. Street-level windows are being used for special installations of contemporary art. The fifth-floor cafe and roof-top patio have been refurbished for special-events use by the museum and other groups.