Mother’s touch with Pop art

Constance Glenn, founding director of the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach, gives a light tap to a shiny, helium-filled Mylar pillow that has just floated into a museum entrance hall. The tap directs the wayward pillow back into the room from which it has escaped to reunite with the other puffy silver rectangles that make up the Andy Warhol installation “Silver clouds.”

When the museum is closed, three pieces of tape are stretched across the doorway to the installation -- but they have so far failed to keep the pillow herd from wandering off the farm. “They set off the motion detectors, and they go up into the skylight -- we have to use a very long stick and a piece of gum to get them,” grumbles Glenn, as though speaking of a class of unruly first-graders.

Glenn’s affectionately parental attitude toward the errant Warhol makes perfect sense for someone who has known and nurtured the Pop art movement since its infancy. Her long relationship with Pop, as well as other contemporary artwork, is explored in “The UAM Diaries: 1973 to 2004 The Glenn Years,” the museum’s tribute to the 70-year-old administrator who officially retired Aug. 22 but continues as director emeritus of the museum and the university’s museum studies program, which she founded. She also continues to teach in the art department.

The show, which continues through Oct. 10, re-creates several landmark exhibitions from the University Art Museum’s 32-year history. Included, from 1977, is “George Segal Pastels 1957-1965”; the George and Helen Segal Foundation donated two of the pastels to the museum in honor of Glenn, adding to several the museum already owns.

Also revisited, from 1997, is “The Great American Pop Art Store: Multiples of the Sixties,” which includes the Warhol installation. Overall, the show addresses the work of about 50 artists, including Charles Arnoldi, John Baldessari, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Lee Krasner and Lorna Simpson. In most cases, the museum tried to replicate the original shows as much as possible.

An impromptu tour of the exhibition with Glenn leads not only to important historical details about the artworks, but some delicious behind-the-scenes stories. The Segal pastels, she says, have maintained their fresh, bright colors because Segal stored them in a chicken coop, away from daylight, since the 1977 show. “I mean that literally -- he lived on a chicken farm in New Jersey and turned the coops into a studio,” she says of the artist, who died in 2000.

Glenn notes with a sort of retrospective horror that the museum at one time received a donation from Lichtenstein of thousands of his paper plates from 1969, one of which appears in the “multiples” show. There were so many paper plates that the staff used to eat off them. “In those days they were cheap, throwaway,” she says. Now they are carefully conserved and sold for $100 each.

Then there was the time the museum wanted to buy a certain drawing by David Hockney, one of his studies for the stage set for the Metropolitan Opera’s 1981 production of “Parade.” “He produced this drawing and said: ‘This is the drawing you want to buy,’ ” Glenn recalls. “And I looked at it and said: ‘David, what’s wrong with it?’ ” As it happens, Hockney had managed to put in the letters “P-A-R-D-D-E.” The artist took the watercolor back and hastily painted in a tiny figure carrying a letter “A” to make up for the one he forgot. But the extra “D” remains, hence the title: “Watercolor for Parade with two D’s / An Evening of French Musical Theatre.”

During her years in Southern California, Glenn has proved herself unafraid to correct the spelling of renowned artists -- or to challenge the area to appreciate contemporary art.

A native of Topeka, Kan., Glenn came West in 1969 to open an art gallery with her then-husband, Jack Glenn, first in Corona del Mar, then in Newport Beach. Some in the art world, including Patricia Faure, owner of the Patricia Faure Gallery at Bergamot Station, credit the Jack Glenn Gallery with raising the profile of contemporary art in conservative Orange County. Constance Glenn’s own art collecting began in 1981 with the purchase of a Warhol portrait of Merce Cunningham.

Glenn says that University Art Museum’s early mandate was to exhibit artists whose work was new to the West Coast. “We tried to make it a rule of thumb -- if the artist’s work was being displayed in museums in the area, or galleries in the area, we didn’t bring it, because we thought it was a waste of resources,” she says. “Since 1973, communications between New York and Los Angeles have changed dramatically, so that is not so important. Often now, work will come directly to California, leapfrogging New York.”

Glenn adds that there is no longer a geographical center to the art world. “It’s probably at art fairs; they all travel and there is a sort of whirling dervish of an art world, and it goes around meeting at events in distant and foreign places,” she observes. “That’s where it all happens these days, I think -- at the Basel Art Fair, the Venice Biennale, at Art Basel Miami Beach.”

The museum is primarily interested in collecting works on paper, rather than paintings or sculpture, for practical reasons. One: collecting paintings is prohibitively expensive. And two: “Storage -- it’s flat, it can go into a drawer!” Glenn exclaims.

But she is quick to add that there’s a little more to her particular affection for collecting drawings than practicality. “They’re so personal -- drawings are really so close to the heart, a way of climbing into the way an artists thinks, feeling the things that were important to them. For students particularly to get a glimpse into the thinking process is a huge gift, even if they weren’t flat.”

Stephanie Barron, chief curator of the Center for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, says that Glenn’s no-nonsense approach has served the university’s art students well. “Connie is eminently practical; one of the things she really believed in was training her students to be able to do everything,” Barron says. “Maybe they didn’t have to hang paintings, but they should know how. There are just so many people who got started with Connie that I’m never surprised to see in somebody’s resume that they first got turned on to art by taking courses with her.”

Pop artist Wayne Thiebaud, whose work appears in the current exhibition, agrees. “She gave the student community special access to some of the first-rate examples of both traditional and current works of quality and achievement, and given the nature of the crazy art world and the commercial aspects of it, she really brought off a kind of minor miracle.”

Glenn hopes that her devotion to hands-on experience with art and artists will remain the museum’s legacy. “I get really frustrated by writers and scholars who make assumptions driven by theory, particularly about the art that I grew up with, Pop art, that just absolutely have no basis in fact, when most of those artists are still alive and they could just go talk to them.”

And, she adds: “I don’t think there’s any reason to think that students should see the only art that they know about in a dark classroom with slides -- or these days, a PowerPoint presentation. If they can’t have experiences with the real thing, the education isn’t valid. I never saw an art museum until I went to college at the University of Kansas. I don’t think we should expect students to come here and not have the experience that I’ve had. I think university art museums should make a difference; I don’t think there’s any excuse for them not to.”

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‘UAM Diaries: 1973 to 2004 The Glenn Years’

Where: University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach campus, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays; noon to 8 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Closed Mondays

Ends: Oct. 10

Price: $4

Contact: (562) 985-5761