Collectors Give 109 Artworks to Laguna Museum

In a coup likely to boost its national profile, the Laguna Art Museum has received 109 contemporary works by prominent and emerging California artists from Judith and Stuart Spence, Sunland residents considered among the world’s top art collectors.

“This gives us a real leg up and a good start toward a stupendous holding of contemporary art from Southern California,” museum Director Bolton Colburn said Wednesday.

The donation of paintings, sculptures and works on paper from the 1970s to the 1990s consists of pieces by 57 artists, including John Baldessari, Allen Ruppersberg, Kim Abeles, Chris Wilder, Meg Cranston, Mark Heresy, Russell Crotty, Robert Williams, Craig Stecyk, John Boskovich, Sandow Birk and Chaz Bojorquez.

The collection has been appraised at $250,000, but it is estimated that it would fetch considerably more at auction.

It is the largest single gift of art by the Spences, who are friends of Colburn. For much of this decade, ArtNews magazine has included the San Fernando Valley couple’s holdings on its annual list of the 200 top international collections.

Their donation includes several works exhibited at the Laguna Beach museum eight months ago as part of “Life Lessons: How Art Can Change Your Life.” The show was curated by Colburn to spotlight, for the first time, artworks amassed by Judith Spence, a psychiatrist, and her husband, a scientist and inventor.

Stuart Spence said Wednesday that the couple, who have donated to such prominent institutions as New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, chose the Laguna museum because they consider Colburn “one of the brightest people working on the art scene today.”

Stuart Spence also praised Tyler Stallings, whom the museum recently hired as curator of exhibitions, and the museum’s broad focus on 20th century California art.

“They show contemporary work and pop culture,” Spence said. “This is a marvelous combination, and I think this museum is where the life of the Orange County art scene is.”

They made the gift now, Spence said, because since moving to a smaller house, they can no longer display as much of their collection. “It’s very important to our artists that they do get seen,” he said.

The donation does not include the elite pieces in the couple’s collection, which Spence said they will eventually donate to one of the world’s larger museums.

The gift to the Laguna facility also includes “anything that has anything to do with surfing,” Spence said.

The couple, avid fans of Los Angeles artist Stecyk, met Colburn through “Papa Moana,” a 1989 surf-themed exhibit of Stecyk’s work that Colburn organized at the museum’s former Costa Mesa annex. The Spences had previously given the museum a work from that exhibition.

The recent donation comes as the museum is working to rebuild its collection. It became autonomous in 1997, Colburn said, after operating for nine months as a satellite of the Orange County Museum of Art.

The brief merger created a shared 3,600-piece Collections Trust, mostly historical works the Laguna museum had amassed. The 80-year-old Laguna facility was left with complete control over only about 200 works, most from the 1960s and later.