On a Cultural Cusp

In 1986, a flashy newcomer came to the home of bean fields, orange groves and Mickey Mouse, literally and figuratively changing the profile of the arts in Orange County.

Gleaming in steel and glass, with an enormous abstract “Firebird” sculpture winging from its commanding facade, the $73.3-million Orange County Performing Arts Center instantly became the county’s cultural beacon.

Twelve years later, 7.5 million people have sat in the plush red seats of Segerstrom Hall and watched 3,757 performances by such stellar companies as the New York City Ballet and the Vienna Philharmonic.

The center’s opening galvanized such local groups as the Pacific Symphony, Opera Pacific and the Philharmonic Society. As a magnet for patrons of the arts, the center also has given new prominence to the theater next door, the nationally hailed South Coast Repertory.

Yet, on the cusp of a new century, many believe the arts in Orange County are still a largely undercultivated crop. In an area with an increasingly diverse and sophisticated population of 2.5 million, a strong tourism base and a welcome mat out for leading high-tech industries, arts leaders are divided in their visions for a world-class arts community.

Should the county build more centrally located palaces of culture to showcase imported productions and exhibitions?

Or is the future in nurturing local artists in home-grown groups across the county? That would give them a reason to settle in the area, as they do in places such as Seattle and Denver, which are coming into their own as hubs of culture.

“We may have what we need as far as major large institutions,” said Thomas F. Bradac, director of Shakespeare Orange County. “Maybe what we need is a lot of smaller institutions that build a base for a larger audience.”

Whichever approach prevails, there are strong indications that Orange County, long overshadowed by Los Angeles, is poised to become a cultural center in its own right:

* South Coast Repertory, which has won a Tony Award for “distinguished achievement by a regional theater,” continues to premiere plays, such as David Henry Hwang’s Obie-winning 1997 “Golden Child,” that win critical acclaim in New York.

* Solid bookings at the Performing Arts Center--which keep its existing two halls full most nights--have prompted center officials to announce tentative plans to build a 2,000-seat concert hall.

* The Huntington Beach Arts Center has almost single-handedly created a SoHo-style environment for adventurous multicultural contemporary art while still showing traditional work by local artists.

* The Santora Building, a collection of artists’ studios and galleries in downtown Santa Ana, has been slowly developing through the 1990s as a focal point for a projected arts center in the urban core, to be anchored by the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, which was expanded and remodeled six years ago.

* In a county of voters famously averse to taxes, six in 10 responding to a recent Times Orange County Poll said they would vote “yes” on a bond issue for a new art museum--while fewer than four in 10 would pay for a football stadium. The younger the respondent, the more likely he or she was to support a museum (77% of those ages 18 to 34 versus 48% of people 55 and over).

Should There Be a Center? Where?

A key question for Orange County’s future is how to build a vibrant cultural community in a sprawling landscape of 31 cities with no clearly defined center.

Some favor creating an artistic complex in Costa Mesa, adjacent to the Performing Arts Center and across the street from the county’s retail tourist magnet, South Coast Plaza. Expansion-minded leaders of the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach also are looking at the area as a potential future home.

The county Board of Supervisors has declared the immediate area--which includes a half-dozen movie houses--the county’s “theater district.”

Jerry Mandel, president and chief operating officer of the Performing Arts Center, laments that a county with an economic base and a population comparable to Seattle’s or Denver’s doesn’t have enough performing arts venues.

“The Denver performing arts center has eight halls and 9,300 seats,” he said. “Orange County has our two halls, the Irvine Barclay, South Coast Repertory, the Cerritos Center [for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles County], and that’s about it. That’s only about 4,500 to 5,500 seats. We’re a growing area, and it takes a long time to build performing arts spaces, so we’re falling behind.”

But many, such as Bradac, believe that big arts halls are “almost like dinosaurs,” needing large cash infusions to keep operating. The answer may be in returning to small, grass-roots movements that spawned the arts in Orange County.

In the first half of the century, when the oases of culture in Orange County were--with the exception of Santa Ana’s Bowers Museum--found mainly along the county’s southern coast, showcasing local talent was a priority.

For decades, the venerable Laguna Beach Art Assn. (now the Laguna Art Museum) showed only members’ work. The pioneering Orange County Philharmonic, led by Laguna resident Frieda Belinfante, gave free concerts countywide to audiences that otherwise heard no live orchestral music on their turf.

Local arts institutions set up shop in rented spaces, powered by dreams and elbow grease. Some were started by hard-working local patrons, such as the 13 women who in 1962 founded what would become the Newport Harbor Art Museum on the upper floor of Balboa Pavilion.

Others were founded by working artists such as theater teacher David Emmes and actor Martin Benson, who opened the future South Coast Repertory three years later in a marine hardware store on Balboa Peninsula.

Volunteers were plentiful in the days before middle-class women worked outside the home, and arts organizations often struggled for years without professional management. When boards of directors were formed, the trustees were overwhelmingly affluent white men.

In recent years, major arts institutions opened board membership to women and minorities, whose perspectives may be increasingly needed as the county’s white population is projected to dip below 50% over the next decade.

Progress has been slow. The Performing Arts Center’s 60-member board, for example, includes two Asian Americans and no members of other minority groups.

It wasn’t until 1993, seven years after the center opened as a presenter of classical music, ballet, opera and Broadway shows that it booked its first ethnic groups: the Irish band the Chieftains and a Siberian dance troupe.

The following year, the center booked its first Latin-themed offering, the Spanish flamenco dance company Teatro de Danza Espanola, co-presented with the Philharmonic Society.

The change has been spurred by the California Arts Council and other grant-giving organizations that reward institutions for diversifying their boards of trustees and offering programs that embrace other cultures.

In 1991, the Laguna Art Museum acquired works by artists in the East Los Angeles group, Self-Help Graphics; two years later, the California Arts Council funded a traveling exhibition of the works. In 1995, a council grant allowed the Pacific Symphony to premiere “1975,” a symphonic suite by Vietnamese American Khoa Le of Orange.

Barbara Pieper, director of the California Arts Council, lauds Santa Ana’s Artists Village as “really illustrative of developing a kind of arts corridor along a Main Street” and praises the civic efforts behind installation of public art at Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim.

For the most part, though, artists in the county’s Latino, Vietnamese, Iranian, East Indian and other ethnic communities still lack visibility in the county’s larger art world.

Visual Arts Offer a Broader Picture

Orange County’s visual arts institutions--including college and university art galleries--have led the way in cross-cultural programming.

The Huntington Beach Art Center in recent months has shown a Vietnamese-themed installation by Hong Kong-born Simon Leung and “Desmothernismo,” a critically praised installation by Mexico City-born Ruben Ortiz-Torres of Los Angeles.

Bringing together these parallel arts communities without diluting their important differences is a goal perhaps better defined by members of the minority communities than by the county’s arts leaders.

“We need a cultural and historical center,” said Paul Apodaca, former curator of the Bowers Museum and now an assistant professor of American studies at Chapman University. He also is a regional advisor to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

“The diverse population that has come into Orange County, as well as the historic populations that founded the county, need a place to meet and reaffirm their value in the life of the county,” Apodaca said.

He would like to see a venue in Santa Ana, the county seat, specifically for historical exhibitions, performances and “the sharing of food and intellectual discourse.”

Prang Nguyen, president of Little Saigon Television and the Vietnamese Broadcasting Network, proposes “one big art museum” dealing with “the arts and letters of different cultures.”

It would be not only a learning center, she said, but also “a sign of unification” of the county’s cultures.

Some county arts leaders say the future depends on nurturing young audiences and new generations of artists. To that end, Arts Orange County, an Irvine nonprofit, and the Orange County Department of Education have teamed up to administer an $80,000 initiative linking the schools with local visual and performing arts organizations.

“I don’t see arts in the schools,” said Barbara Palermo, director of development for the William Hall Master Chorale, one of two vocal groups that appear at the Performing Arts Center. “Where are the future audiences going to come from? The generation of parents who have children in school now have very little exposure to the arts, and they don’t push for it.”

Doug Rankin, general manager of the Irvine Barclay Theater, agreed. “The live performing arts experience still remains more of a 35-and-beyond activity” in Orange County, as opposed to Berkeley or New York, he said. Part of the problem is the cost of tickets. But there are solutions.

“We have discounts for students which are being used more often over time,” he said. “And people are writing checks to make tickets available below market to certain groups.”

Arts programmers at some venues are just beginning to tap into the tastes of younger audiences.

Charles Martin, president of the board of trustees of the Orange County Museum of Art, marveled to find himself “surrounded by a bunch of twentysomething and thirtysomething kids” at a summer performance of “Rent” at the Performing Arts Center.

“Contrast that with the night ‘Rent’ opened (several days earlier) and the affluent, conservative patron base was there--and half of them walked out,” Martin said. “You have this challenge and dilemma of needing the financial support” from patrons but potentially alienating them “if you undertake this more challenging type of artistic agenda.”

Despite Affluence, a Funding Challenge

Younger audiences have made a huge impact on the county’s pop culture, a fertile incubator of punk and alternative rock since the 1970s. In the mid-’90s, multiple-platinum albums by the Offspring in 1994 and No Doubt in 1995 put Orange County on the rock ‘n’ roll map. The demand for pop and rock music also has kept Orange County on the tour circuit for the biggest acts in the business.

And several savvy institutions have successfully combined highbrow and pop culture. Exhibitions of customized car designs (at the Laguna Art Museum) and contemporary art based on cartoons or advertising (at such venues as the UC Irvine Art Gallery, the Huntington Beach Art Center and Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery) have given the county’s visual arts scene a forward-looking, youthful air.

Winning financial support remains a challenge, though, even in affluent Orange County.

Marcy Mulville, a longtime Pacific Symphony board member, says there are many prosperous residents who have yet to be tapped for donations. Moreover, in a county of competitive cities with differing ideas about arts facilities, “to get people all together to give to one thing is a little harder,” she said.

With little in the way of local public funding for the arts, Pacific Symphony and Opera Pacific must generate 70% of their income in ticket sales at the Performing Arts Center, versus 56% to 60% for similar groups in U.S. cities where there is more public financial support.

“That means you can’t take the artistic chances you want to,” said the center’s Mandel.

The solution he proposes is a cultural tax--perhaps a percentage of the sales tax or a tax on hotel rooms--with the proceeds going to the arts groups. That, he said, is how cities such as Denver, Seattle and Cleveland keep their arts communities vital.

For all their concerns, many arts leaders are hopeful for the future, whether they find parallels with other centers or celebrate the county’s uniqueness.

“If you look at any major metropolitan area in the country, we’re finding [Orange County] to be as diverse in interests, taste and demand for quality as anyplace else,” Rankin said.

As it grows, Orange County may be a new template for an arts community, according to the arts council’s Pieper.

“The lovely thing about California is that we don’t have to be like other places,” she said. “We don’t have to adopt the tightly clustered [arts] communities of New York or San Francisco.”

* MUSEUMS FOR YOUR MUSE

Guide to Web sources for exemplary art. B2

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

About the Poll The Times Orange County Poll was conducted by Baldassare Associates. The random telephone survey of 600 adult Orange County residents was conducted July 23-26. The survey included interviews with 456 registered voters. The sample reflects the demographic characteristics of adult Orange County residents. The margin of error for the total sample is plus or minus 4% at the 95% confidence level. That means the results are within 4 percentage points of what they would be if all adults in Orange County were interviewed. For subgroups, such as regions, the margin of error would be larger. For registered voters, the margin of error is plus or minus 5%.

About the Series

Beyond 2000 is a series of articles that explore how our lives will change in the next millennium. The series will continue every Monday through the end of 1998 as The Times Orange County examines what’s in store for the county in such areas as transportation, education, growth and technology.

On The Internet

The Beyond 2000 series and an interactive discussion are available on the Times Orange County Edition’s Web site at https://www.timesoc.com/HOME/NEWS/ORANGE/beyond.htm

TIMELINE

‘TEENS

1918: The Laguna Beach Art Assn. (now Laguna Art Museum) founded to exhibit art by 150 members in the town hall

1918: The Laguna Playhouse has first season

‘20s

1929: Laguna Beach Art Assn.’s $20,000 building opens on South Coast Highway; first major structure in Southern California designed solely to house works of art

‘30s

1936: Charles W. Bowers Museum opens in Santa Ana with a broad collection ranging from natural history specimens to Native American ethnographic objects

‘40s

1941: Laguna Beach Art Assn. establishes a permanent collection

‘50s

1953: Orange Coast College Art Gallery opens in Costa Mesa, initially as classroom space

1954: Orange County Philharmonic Society’s first concert, at Santa Ana High School Auditorium; in 1962 the orchestra will be disbanded and the society will become a presenting organization

1956: Master Chorale of Orange County (now William Hall Master Chorale) founded

‘60s

1961: The Fine Arts Patrons of Newport Harbor open the Pavilion Gallery on top floor of Balboa Pavilion in Newport Beach to show contemporary art

1962: Laguna Beach Civic Ballet (now Ballet Pacifica) founded in Laguna Beach

1964: South Coast Repertory mounts its first production, Moliere’s “Tartuffe,” at the Newport Beach Ebell Club

1965: UC Irvine Art Gallery opens, with distinguished art critic and painter John Coplans as first director

1966: Muckenthaler Cultural Center opens in Fullerton in 1925 mansion (placed on National Register of Historic Buildings in 1981)

1967: South Coast Repertory purchases a former Sprouse-Reitz Variety Store in Costa Mesa and turns it into a 217-seat theater

1968: Irvine Master Chorale formed, now Pacific Chorale in Santa Ana

‘70s

1972: Laguna Beach Art Assn. becomes Laguna Beach Museum of Art

1975: Guggenheim Gallery opens at Chapman University

1977: Newport Harbor Art Museum moves into 23,000-square-foot new building in Fashion Island

1978: South Coast Repertory moves to a new $3.5 million, 507-seat home in Costa Mesa; the campaign would become a model for future capital fund drives for the arts in the county

1979: South Coast Repertory’s 161-seat Second Stage opens

1979: Pacific Symphony founded at Cal State Fullerton, now in Santa Ana

1979: Grove Theatre Company opens; will fold in 1993

‘80s

1980: Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, an artists’ collective, opens in Santa Ana

1981: First performances of the Baroque Music Festival Corona del Mar

1981: Irvine Meadows Amphitheater opens

1983: Pacific Amphitheater opens in Costa Mesa (it will go dark in 1995)

1983: St. Joseph Ballet, inner-city youth dance company, founded in Santa Ana

1984: Mozart Camerata (now Mozart Classical Orchestra) founded in Mission Viejo

1985: The Coach House opens in San Juan Capistrano

1986: The $73.3-million Orange County Performing Arts Center opens in Costa Mesa; Segerstrom Hall has 2,994 seats

1986: Laguna Beach Museum of Art unveils a $1.9 million, 20,000-square-foot expansion, nearly doubling its size; name changes to Laguna Art Museum

1987: Opera Pacific presents first production, “Porgy and Bess,” at Performing Arts Center

1987: Newport Harbor Art Museum selects Italian architect Renzo Piano to design a $20-million building on 10.5 acres of coastal land donated by the Irvine Co. (Piano would be dismissed in 1990, and plans to build would be indefinitely postponed in 1992)

1987: Alternative Repertory Theatre opens in Santa Ana

1988: South Coast Repertory wins a Tony Award for “distinguished achievement by a regional theater”

‘90s

1990: Irvine Barclay Theatre opens.

1992: The Bowers Museum reopens after $12-million expansion and renovation

1992: Shakespeare Orange County mounts first season at Chapman University in Orange

1993: Arrowhead of Pond of Anaheim opens

1994: First glimmerings of long-planned Santa Ana Arts District, with artists moving into refurbished Santora Building

1995: Huntington Beach Art Center opens

1996: Newport Harbor Art Museum and Laguna Art Museum merge to form the Orange County Museum of Art

1997: Orange County Museum of Art completes $1.8-million expansion and renovation that doubles its exhibition space and triples its size

1997: Laguna Art Museum regains its independence

2000: Santa Ana’s Artists Village filled with tenants

The State of the Arts in O.C.

Operating budgets are a key indicator of audience growth.

Orange County Performing Arts Center:

1987*: $14.6 million

1998-88**: $27.7 million

South Coast Repertory:

1965-66*: $20,600

1998-99: $7.5 million

Philharmonic Society of Orange County

1979-80 $279,000

1998-99: $4.3 million

Pacific Symphony:

1979-80: $51,347

1998-99: $7.28 million

Irvine Barclay Theatre:

1990-91: $1 million (approx.)

1998-99**: (projected) $3.2 million

* First full year

** Projected

Times O.C. Poll

* Would you vote yes or no on a bond measure to build a new:

*--*

Natural Art history Football museum museum stadium Yes 61% 70% 37% No 38 28 62 Don’t know 1 2 1

*--*

Source: Times Orange County Poll; individual institutions

Arts Venues

1. Orange County Performing Arts Center

2. Orange County Museum of Art

3. South Coast Repertory

4. Bowers Museum of Cultural Art

5. Santa Ana Artists Village

6. Huntington Beach Art Center

7. Moulton Theater

8. Laguna Art Museum

9. Irvine Barclay Theatre

10. Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre

11. Pacific Amphitheatre

12. Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim

13. Muckenthaler Cultural Center

14. UC Irvine Art Gallery

15. Fullerton Museum

16. Cal State Fullerton Art Gallery

17. Brea Cultural Center

18. Irvine Cultural Center

19. Vietnamese Cultural Center

20. Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University

21. Orange Coast College Art Gallery

22. Saddleback College Art Gallery

23. Grove Theater Center