Laguna Art Museum Gets Big Boost With Gift of 109 Works

In a major coup likely to boost its profile nationally, the Laguna Art Museum has been given 109 contemporary works by prominent and emerging California artists from Judith and Stuart Spence, San Fernando Valley 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, sculpture and works on paper from the ‘70s to the ‘90s includes 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 is thought to be worth considerably more at auction.

It is the largest single gift of art ever given by the Sunland art patrons, who are friends of Colburn’s. For much of this decade, ArtNews magazine has included them on its annual list of the 200 “top international” collections.

Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, called the Spences “collectors’ collectors” because they excel at spotting important artists, such as Baldessari, before they have become celebrated.

“Their collection is so highly respected by other collectors that the fact that the Laguna museum has been able to get a portion of it is an indication of the prestige the museum has among people really interested in what’s happening in art today,” Schimmel said Wednesday.

Their donation includes several works exhibited at the Laguna Beach museum eight months ago in “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 prominent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, 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.”

Spence also praised Tyler Stallings, whom the museum recently hired as curator of exhibitions, and the 80-year-old museum’s broad focus on 20th century California art.

“I love their Plein Air collection” of landscape paintings, Spence said. “And they show contemporary work and pop culture. 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 after moving to a smaller house, the couple can no longer display as much of their collection as they used to. “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 eventually will donate to one of the world’s larger museums. The works they are giving to Laguna were chosen for their connection to that museum, as in those from the “Life Lessons” show.

The gift also includes “anything [we have] that has anything to do with surfing,” Spence said, noting that the couple, avid fans of L.A. artist Craig 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 previously had given the museum a work from that exhibition.

The recent donation, in negotiation since “Life Lessons,” comes at a time when the museum is working to rebuild its collection after regaining autonomy in 1997 following its nine months as a satellite of the Orange County Museum of Art, Colburn said.

The merger that briefly united the two museums created a shared 3,600-piece Collections Trust composed mostly of historical works that the Laguna museum had previously amassed. The county’s oldest arts institution, the Laguna museum was left with complete control over only about 200 works, most from the ‘60s to the ‘80s.

Colburn said he and Stallings will discuss how and when they will exhibit pieces in the donated collection.