Billy Al Bengston, for Decades an Influential California Painter, Is Now Set to Give the Laguna Art Museum’s Board of Trustees . . . : An Artist’s Perspective

The newest member of Laguna Art Museum’s board of trustees walked into their annual meeting last week, sat, and, for all outward appearances, could have been Billy Al Bengston.

His mottled gray-and-white shirt, set against a cadmium-orange sweater, matched a canvas the artist painted in the ‘80s.

Lo and behold--it was the artist.

“I’ve been a big fan of Billy’s for a long time,” said LAM director Bolton Colburn, explaining how the museum got onto its board one of the country’s most famous contemporary artists.

Bengston, 64, went public last Tuesday, when trustees at the meeting were asked to stand.

“I hope this thing’s going to work out for all of us,” he said privately after the meeting.

Museum boards are made up mostly of business and community leaders, but many institutions strive to add the voice and vote of working artists.

LAM and other area visual arts groups have succeeded at this intermittently, but Bengston arguably is the best-known such artist-cum-trustee to join any local board in recent years.

The union makes sense. LAM specializes in California art, of which Bengston has been an integral part since the late ‘50s.

Then, he was one of the young iconoclasts who helped put Los Angeles on the art map with shows at the Ferus Gallery. A decade later, his lacquered metal squares helped define Southern California’s signature Finish Fetish school.

LAM, which owns six Bengston works, exhibited one of those metal squares, “Dentos8,” in its 1993 hit show, “Kustom Kulture,” and last winter devoted its main gallery to a survey of colorfully lush, Matisse-like abstracts Bengston painted during trips to Mexico in the ‘70s.

“I got to know him over the years,” Colburn said by phone recently, “because I’ve talked to him whenever we did exhibits pertaining to an area he was involved with.”

*

In January, Bengston friend Carol Dunstan joined the board and asked him to do the same. Dunstan, who met Bengston 14 years ago while helping developer Donald Bren acquire artworks, now does marketing for Westfall Interior Services, a Fountain Valley firm.

Bengston recently worked with Westfall to design interiors of Anaheim’s Disney Call Center, a travel agency, and other offices.

The artist has been asked to join other boards--this is the first invitation he accepted. That’s no small coup for a museum whose budget runs $300,000 below the $1-million benchmark the California Arts Council uses to define “major” arts institutions.

That, said Bengston, is why he said yes.

“It’s a friendly little place, and hopefully I can contribute something,” he said, “whereas at bigger museums I don’t feel I can be of much assistance.”

Bengston, who will serve a three-year term on LAM’s 30-person board, also has shied from board service because he thinks trustees should be wealthy enough to make significant financial contributions. (LAM’s trustees must pay at least $2,500 each, but many contribute more.)

He also hasn’t liked the idea that anyone might assume he’s “stumping for my cronies and trying to get jobs for myself.”

Bengston will be one of 150 artists donating work for the museum’s 16th annual art auction Oct. 16. Standard museum ethics, Colburn said, would prevent LAM from staging any Bengston solo exhibits while he’s on the board, and the artist would have to abstain from votes about group shows containing his work.

Bengston said he hasn’t sought that kind of exposure for a while. He has maintained a lower profile in the ‘90s but was earlier the subject of major survey shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Washington D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art and other leading institutions.

“I don’t think I’ve been ignored,” said the Kansas-born Venice resident, adding that he has soured on the gallery scene too. “Most of the dealers I worked with either died, or phased themselves out because of the commoditization of art.”

*

Bengston wants to help the Laguna museum boost attendance through programming and said he intends to use the contacts he has developed as a veteran member of the L.A. art community to do so (he declined to discuss specific ideas).

Still, he doesn’t see that as helping friends; in fact, it strikes him as more of an imposition on them.

“I know many artists who can barely make enough of their work to supply the galleries that represent them or the people [who collect their work regularly],” Bengston said, “and to take away from their inventory [for a museum show] is to take away from their [livelihoods].

“When you’re coming up, you need the exposure, but when you’re up there, you don’t.”