O.C. Museums Raising Funds--and Profiles

Orange County’s two biggest art museums, after weathering several recent years of shifting artistic visions and uncertain finances, are now staging an ambitious bid to move their institutions--and the county’s standing as a cultural destination--to the next level.

The Bowers Museum of Cultural Art and the Orange County Museum of Art recently launched separate initiatives to establish a greater presence on the national and international museum scenes.

As recently as a few years ago, the Bowers was running annual deficits averaging $300,000 and OCMA couldn’t crack the $900,000 mark in annual fund-raising.

Now the Bowers has a $300,000 unaudited surplus for its just-concluded 2000-01 season. It has more than doubled its income over the last three years, thanks to a series of high-profile traveling exhibitions from ancient China and Egypt. Next on the agenda is a proposed new wing that could house loaned artifacts from two of the world’s leading museums, the Smithsonian Institution and The British Museum.

OCMA, which prides itself in mounting its own in-house exhibitions of contemporary art, has enjoyed two consecutive years of topping the $2-million mark in fund-raising. It has withstood a nearly complete turnover in its top ranks without falling into financial drift. Now its leaders are contemplating a relocation and expansion that would more than triple the museum’s size: one site under consideration is within an arts plaza in Costa Mesa next to the Orange County Performing Arts Center and South Coast Repertory.

The art world outside Orange County is beginning to take notice.

“For the last three years I’ve been actively watching, visiting and following the exhibits and collections of these museums. They look extremely solid,” said Rochelle Mills of the Fellows of Contemporary Art, an arts granting organization based in Los Angeles. “The museums are in good standing in such a way that they can compete in the art market and hold their own. When a museum has a solid organization, it certainly comes through.”

Bowers has reinvented itself since closing in the mid-1980s from lack of funding and support. It reopened in 1992 with a renovated site and renewed focus.

Until three years ago, the museum focused on the arts of vanishing cultures and tribal and Oceanic peoples.

“It really didn’t have the appeal to meet the needs of the public, both young and old,” said Peter Keller, the museum’s president. The solution: host traveling exhibitions from around the world and promote them with a $100,000-per-show marketing campaign that includes radio, TV and print. Now two-thirds of the museum’s attendance come from outside Orange County.

The shows brought some of the name recognition the Bowers craves, including attention from art writers at the New York Times and Art in America, a major art world publication.

The payoff, Keller hopes, will come in donations and corporate sponsorships. Those can be difficult to land “when you have to spend an hour explaining what Bowers is,” he said.

Aligning itself with powerhouses--the Smithsonian and The British Museum--also adds cachet. The Bowers recently became an affiliate of the Smithsonian and is negotiating a partnership with The British Museum.

The financial turnabout at the Bowers makes it more attractive to other high-profile museums. A few years ago the museum took in about $3 million a year and ran annual deficits averaging nearly $300,000, according to the museum’s federal tax returns. In the last two years, revenue has climbed to $6.6 million annually. Paid attendance soared from 96,500 in 1998-99 to 163,000 during 2000-01.

The Bowers’ fund-raising also has improved markedly, from $796,000 in 1998-99 to $1.3 million during each of the last two fiscal years. Profits at the museum’s store have soared from $118,000 to $668,000 in the last three years. Annual government funding from Santa Ana has held steady at about $1.2 million.

Milly Muzzy, head of development for the museum, acknowledges that the Bowers is “going out on a limb” by importing expensive exhibitions, which can cost $500,000 for a three-month run. Arts institutions use their endowment funds as a safety net, but the Bowers’ endowment is only about $500,000, Muzzy said.

She envisions a campaign that would not only fund the museum’s expansion, but build its endowment to $20 million or more.

The Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach has built its reputation with contemporary art exhibitions. In the 1980s, when it was known as Newport Harbor Art Museum, plaudits greeted shows that critics described as “venturesome” and “scholarly.”

The momentum slowed in 1996 when Newport Harbor Museum became enmeshed in a merger with the Laguna Art Museum to create OCMA. (The Laguna museum later broke off to operate independently, though it continues to share a 3,800-piece permanent collection.) OCMA emerged from the debacle the following year and started exhibiting big-name California artists, including Tony DeLap, Chris Burden and Peter Alexander.

But fund-raising lagged until two years ago. Bolstered by two major contributions of at least $750,000, the museum topped the $2-million mark in contributions for 1999-2000 and 2000-01. The endowment grew to $8.2 million.

“I think we did a little better job in getting our message out,” said Brian Langston, the museum’s marketing director.

Last year progress was slowed by the exodus of four key administrators: the chief curator and department heads in charge of fund-raising, finance and education. Partly because of that upheaval, the amount the museum spent on new acquisitions was halved from $398,000 to less than $200,000.

Still, Langston said, “we were able to keep our financial house in order” while boosting attendance.

“We had a small staff with a lot of big ideas and diminishing support base,” said director Naomi Vine, looking back on the problems of a few years ago. “Now we’ve reached a point that we can really implement the kinds of programs that we’ve envisioned from the beginning.”

Even though the biggest visions have yet to be realized, Orange County has become a destination for art lovers, said Mills, who leads museum tours in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

“There’s an energy, excitement and intimacy in going to the smaller museums in Orange County,” she said.