Laguna Art Museum Is Losing a Curator

Laguna Art Museum announced Wednesday that its exhibitions curator has resigned.

Tyler Stallings, a recipient of the $50,000 Fellows of Contemporary Art award, officially resigned Feb. 1. With personal projects to complete, including two books, Stallings says he wants the more flexible schedule that being an independent curator allows.”The main reason I’m deciding to move on is that I have all these things coming up, and I need the time to do them,” Stallings said.

One book that Stallings is completing is titled “The Fiction of Whiteness,” a spinoff of his upcoming show, “Whiteness or Coloring Authority,” which looks at race and identity. It is scheduled to be on exhibit at the Laguna Art Museum in 2003. Stallings’ second book, a novel titled “Womazon Winnie,” is about a female wrestler, a modern-day Amazon, who has to deal with her physique and how society responds to her.

Stallings, who was curator at the Huntington Beach Art Center from 1995 to 1999, when he began working at the Laguna Beach museum, will continue to work with the Laguna institution as a guest curator to complete three exhibitions: “Surf Culture--The Art History of Surfing” in July, the “Whiteness” show scheduled for March 2003 and “Some Fuzzy Logic: The Joan Simon Menkes Gift” in summer 2003. He also plans to develop other shows for the museum as an independent curator.

“Tyler has been a great asset to this museum,” said museum director Bolton Colburn, who hired Stallings. “While we’re sorry that he will no longer be associated with the museum full-time, we are fortunate to be able to work with him on future exhibitions.”

Interim exhibitions curator Susan M. Anderson, who served as exhibitions curator, acting director and chief curator at Laguna between 1989 and 1995 and is married to Colburn, will temporarily oversee Stallings’ duties and work with the museum’s collections curator Janet Blake.

The museum will conduct a national search for a curator to replace Stallings.