COVER STORY : Museum Quality : Crafts aren’t just for flea markets anymore as new exhibit in Newport Beach proves.

The word “crafts” conjures up images of outdoor festivals and stalls filled with macrame wall hangings, calico-covered photo albums, birch-bark birdhouses, wooden foot loungers and beaded jewelry.

The Orange County Museum of Art has a higher order of artisan work in mind with its Pacific Craft Show opening this weekend and believed to be the first of its kind this side of the Mississippi.

About 1,200 pieces made from ceramic, glass, wood, metal or fiber that are deemed worthy of museum status will be seen and sold to the general public beginning Saturday and running through Oct. 1. Guests also can attend a special kickoff gala benefit Friday evening. The entire collection is valued at $2.5 million.

“This stuff is drop-dead beautiful, and people are going to love it,” museum spokesman Brian Langston said.

Consider a sleek bicycle-wheel table, masks fashioned from Tahitian mulberry tree bark and contemporary glass pieces that--well, simply defy description.

Prices are as diverse as the offerings. Ceramic candlesticks, silk scarves and some jewelry can be had for less than $100. If money’s not an object, you might want to consider a $54,000 Nicolai Medvedev inlaid box of sparkling blue and green gems and minerals. Craft art has been undergoing a redefinition, stealing itself back from the hippie culture that took it over in the 1960s. As the chasm separating it from fine art narrows, craft art now can be found in the prestigious halls of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the Smithsonian Institution.

Now, it’s Orange County’s turn.

“Fine craft art is an institution on the East Coast,” event chairman Karen Van Buren said. “We want to be the West Coast venue for craft art.”

Event organizers believe the time is right, as the workmanship of fine craft art has become more sophisticated, especially among local California artisans.

Nearly all of the show’s 54 exhibitors--selected by a jury of craft-art experts--are California-based. Fourteen are from Orange County.

Corona del Mar’s Linda Bergman, 46, is expected to steal the show with her contemporary take on the classic strand of pearls.

“For years, people have owned their mothers’ pearls and they don’t wear them because they look too old,” Bergman said. “I’ve taken those traditional pearls and turned them into something contemporary and unexpected. . . . These pearls don’t look traditional, but they’re not trendy, either.”

Bergman’s pearls are versatile, not staid. She offers “enhancers” of semiprecious stones with a pearl drop as a decoration to dress up a strand that can also be worn separately as a brooch. Or consider her mix-and-match variety of three strands of pearls: Wear them together, alone or wrap a strand or two around the wrist for a bracelet.

Bergman has been fascinated with jewelry making since childhood. Four years ago, she abandoned a successful retail career to design her creations full time. She knew she was on to something, she said, because strangers wanted to buy her homemade necklaces right off her neck while she was shopping for groceries.

Now, Neiman Marcus can’t keep her stuff in stock, it sells so quickly.

One of her most popular pieces is a woven necklace listed at $1,500. Pearls are intertwined onto strands of either 14-karat gold or sterling silver, giving the illusion that they are “floating”--like stars in the cosmos--at the neckline.

Bergman still is stopped at her local grocer. “It is inevitable that every time I wear one of my woven necklaces, somebody wants to buy it off my neck.”

She’ll have plenty of the necklaces on hand at the OCMA exhibit, along with $49 woven bracelets, pearl encrusted handbags starting at $750. There is even a strand of Tahitian pearls listed at $20,000.

Other showstoppers are expected to be David Speck’s decorative baskets, from $1,200 to $2,700.

Speck uses tree bark from Thailand and natural willow reeds from England to create baskets in oblong shapes that are 3 to 5 feet high. His so-called “vessels” could hold plenty, but they are meant only to behold, thank you.

“Crafts are opening up people’s horizons” about the nature of art, said Speck, a Dana Point artist. “People are not always thinking of art now as something flat to go on the wall.”

For a change of pace, Randy Au’s vegetable-inspired teapots start about $250. While most of us miss the artistic nuances of Italian squash or eggplant while shopping the vegetable stand, the 43-year-old Santa Ana artist has been inspired by their graceful shapes. To complete a full tea-service, Au makes cream-and-sugar sets that resemble bell peppers and acorn squash.

He is delighted to have his work shown at the museum in Newport Beach. “The ability of an artist like myself to be in a collaboration with a museum is really exciting,” he said. “It provides validation.”

A few of OCMA’s exhibitors come from France, New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia, including Susan Cauthen, who hails from Tallapoosa, a little town about an hour’s drive from Atlanta.

“I had an ugly little warehouse job, and then I got laid off,” the 28-year-old Cauthen said with a Southern drawl. “That’s when I really got serious.”

Serious about her handmade African American figurines, which sell individually for much more than she used to make in a month. Prices range from $1,800 to $3,000.

“I don’t even have a name for them,” said the show’s youngest exhibitor. “A friend thinks I should call them ‘souls’ because they are so soulful.”

Cauthen’s figurines--with their exaggerated hands and feet--celebrate the strength of character of people she sees in her small town, as well as on trips to New Orleans.

“Their hands and feet make them look strong and comforting, too. It’s like one of my old-woman pieces could just scoop up her own grandchildren with one hand.”

Some of Cauthen’s figurines that will be on display include an old woman relaxing in a bathtub with a drink, an older couple dressed up in evening clothes embracing, churchgoers holding hands and “voodoo” women acting “sassy and smoking cigars,” she said.

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Are Southern Californians ready for her Southern sensibilities?

“These are real people,” Cauthen said. “Everyone’s got a granddaddy. . . . [Californians] have seen these people before.”

The Pacific Craft Show is not the first time artsy crafts have been at OCMA. The museum previously hosted “Feast on Art”--one-evening craft-art affairs during which guests dined with artists at a sit-down meal.

Officials at OCMA, an institution created in 1996 out of the controversial and failed merger of the Newport Harbor Museum and the Laguna Art Museum, have tried various ways to appeal to new audiences with such unconventional approaches.

This is the first time, though, the museum has mounted an extended showing of craft art. Even more out of character, the show is free.

What’s the catch?

Half of the proceeds from purchases will benefit the museum’s children’s and other educational programs, which currently include bringing children to the museum for tours and taking art on the road to some Orange County schools, museum officials said.

Artists will be on hand to discuss their work at Friday evening’s gala to kick off the exhibit. The event also will be a tribute to Harvey Littleton, the renowned father of the studio glass movement.

In what is expected to be an emotional highlight of the evening, Littleton will be reunited with Marvin Lipofsky, one of his original proteges from the 1960s.

Lipofsky--now a famous worker of glass in his own right--will be showing nine of his “must see” contemporary glass pieces valued between $14,000 and $16,000.

BE THERE

Pacific Craft Show, Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Information: (949) 759-1122, Ext. 550. Opening night celebration: Friday, 6 p.m. Meet the artists and enjoy fine food, drinks and live jazz. Admission: $75 in advance; $90 at the door. Exhibit: Saturday through Oct. 1. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. daily. Admission: free. Lectures and video presentations by the artists and other craft experts in Lyon Auditorium. Family craft days: Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.: Free hands-on craft-making activities for ages 6 and older. Admission: Free.