No more coasting for OCMA

The Orange County Museum of Art is back. After a five-month closure, the museum is up and running with a $1.65-million renovation of its main facility in Newport Beach, its biggest ever “California Biennial” exhibition, a revamped website, a fresh graphic identity and a new outpost for media arts, Orange Lounge, at South Coast Plaza shopping center in Costa Mesa.

“We want to be consistently excellent,” says director Dennis Szakacs, who took charge in March 2003. “Our curators, Liz Armstrong and Irene Hofmann, and I have virtually overhauled every corner of this museum and overseen two construction projects -- one here and one a satellite -- in a little over a year. In what is very much a team effort, we have probably accomplished what a lot of museums would take three or four years to do. If you start moving everyone in the right direction, you can move very fast, very well.”

The most obvious change is the renovation. The museum’s once austere, art-less lobby is now a more inviting space that opens onto an outdoor patio and accommodates artworks, performances, screenings, lectures and social gatherings. But a lot of program planning has gone on behind the scenes. The inaugural show, “2004 California Biennial” (through Jan. 9), emphasizes an increased commitment to new art by filling the museum and Orange Lounge with 120 works by 28 artists. And the lineup of coming attractions promises a lively mix of contemporary and modern art, including homegrown exhibitions that will travel.

Observed as a short-term phenomenon, the transformation is a remarkable achievement for a small institution that operates on $3 million a year with a staff of 30. Viewed in terms of the museum’s life story, recent developments seem to begin a new chapter.

The museum was born in 1962 in a blaze of creative enterprise and sparkled sporadically well into the 1980s. But frequent changes of directors, a failed expansion plan and a contentious merger with the Laguna Art Museum contributed to an impression that it had lost its way. The new leadership has charted a course to restore the museum’s luster and expand its national presence.

Seeking higher ground

Time will tell if these aspirations are realized, but expectations are high.

“Dennis brings a lot of focus and energy and spirit to anything he does,” says Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, where Szakacs was deputy director from 1996 to 2003. “I think he wants to bring the museum to a higher level, and I imagine that will continue. He’s not somebody to sit back and coast along.”

The museum is in “a very dynamic phase,” says James B. Pick, a professor of business at Redlands University who has been a museum trustee since 1980. “I have seen a lot of teams over the years, and this is as good a team as there has even been, both in staff and board leadership.”

Founded by a small group of local art patrons, the museum got its start as the Pavilion Gallery on the second floor of the Balboa Pavilion entertainment complex, in a space that juts out over the ocean. The gallery became the Newport Harbor Art Museum in 1968, with the arrival of the first director, Thomas H. Garver, who quickly became a creative force in Southern California’s art scene.

Garver -- who led the museum twice, from 1968 to 1972 and from 1977 to 1980 -- called the Balboa exhibition space “the world’s only over-water art museum,” but the location wasn’t the only attraction. In its first decade, with the help of professional curators and volunteers, the museum presented a Morris Graves retrospective, photographs from Alfred Stieglitz’s circle, California Hard-Edge painting, Pop artist Tom Wesselmann’s early still lifes, Native American art from the Northwest Coast and works by California artists Richard Diebenkorn, Edward Ruscha and Joe Goode.

“I adored that place,” says Constance Glenn, founding director of the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach. “I was stunned to see Rauschenberg’s painting, ‘Barge,’ in Balboa,” she says, recalling the 30-foot-long centerpiece of Garver’s 1970 exhibition, “Robert Rauschenberg in Black and White.” “It’s a masterpiece, and it’s huge. I have no idea how they got it there.”

The museum moved to a storefront on the Balboa Peninsula in 1971 and settled into its current, built-for-the-purpose space in Newport Center in 1977. As directors came and went, the museum occasionally distinguished itself with exhibitions, including the first survey of Vija Celmins’ work, in 1980, and “Edvard Munch, Expressionist Paintings 1900-1940,” in 1986. Paul Schimmel, now chief curator at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, organized a Chris Burden retrospective and reexamined 1950s art during his Newport tenure, from 1981 to 1990.

But as Los Angeles’ art scene expanded, the museum in Orange County seemed less compelling for those who had to battle traffic to get there. Dreams of architectural grandeur sparked excitement in the late 1980s, when Kevin Consey directed the museum and Italian architect Renzo Piano designed a building for a 10-acre site that the Irvine Co. had offered to donate. But Piano’s plan was rejected in 1992 by trustees who thought that the proposed building would deliver too little usable space and cost too much. Another architect was hired, but the museum retrenched amid an economic downturn.

Then came the ill-fated merger with the Laguna Art Museum, intended to create a countywide institution that would pool resources of the two. The Newport museum changed its name to the Orange County Museum of Art in 1996 as part of the plan, but the alliance was fraught with problems from its conception and lasted a mere nine months. Naomi Vine, who presided over the museums during much of that troubled period, died in 2001 of a brain tumor, at 52.

Doing more with less

Szakacs, her successor, knows this story and chooses to focus on the cheerful episodes.

“From the beginning, this institution was very entrepreneurial, in the way it did its programming, in the way it supported itself, in the way it was run,” he says. “That DNA is still kind of with us.” Volunteers don’t build temporary exhibition walls and paint the galleries as they did in the Balboa days. But the renovation carries on the tradition of “high impact, low cost,” he says.

The lobby -- now called the pavilion, in honor of the museum’s original home -- was transformed on a tight budget by Bauer and Wiley Architects of Newport Beach. The firm reconfigured the long rectangular space, installed a roll-up glass door leading to the sculpture court and converted the court into a venue for public programs.

“This puts the heart of the museum in the center, which was kind of empty,” Szakacs says. “Before, when you walked in, right on top of you was the store and the admission desk. The first message we were sending people was, ‘Buy and pay.’ Now you walk into an art space.”

The 30,000-square-foot museum hasn’t grown and the galleries haven’t changed. But moving the shop to an adjacent section of the building freed up prime space “for what we do best,” he says.

“We rethought all the public areas of the museum, both inside and outside, to address very practical concerns, like lighting, acoustics, surfaces and materials, to make them more welcoming. At the same time, we created a platform for art and all kinds of activities: dance parties, jazz concerts, outdoor film series, lectures and cabaret performances,” he says. The new admissions desk, pushed back and off to one side, is housed in a fluorescent-lighted structure that accommodates audiovisual equipment and a bar. Behind it, the new cafe doubles as a cabaret.

“Opening up the pavilion area and lining it with walls where we can hang art, gives us a space that is different and more public than a gallery,” curator Elizabeth Armstrong says. “It lends itself to artists who are making different kinds of work.”

Renewed focus

For “2004 California Biennial,” Sean Duffy’s “Double-wide Sofa,” a reinterpretation of George Nelson’s classic “Marshmallow” loveseat, is installed among the artworks near the entry of the pavilion.

“We wanted to make the biennial a much bigger deal,” Szakacs says of the show that has varied considerably since its first edition, in 1984. “For the first time it’s taking up every single bit of our exhibition space. By making it the first show in our renovated building, we are sending a signal that this institution is really behind the next generation of important California artists and will continue to be involved with that every two years. That means we are constantly in biennial mode, looking around at what young artists are doing. It’s a regular part of our thinking.”

The museum will also pay attention to what Szakacs calls “the intersection of popular culture and contemporary art” in exhibitions such as “Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture.” Organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, it will appear in Newport Feb. 6 to May 15, 2005. There will also be surveys of the work of contemporary artists who should be better known, he says, including a 2006 show of New York painter Mary Heilmann’s work.

In addition to the contemporary art program, the museum -- which deals with art from the early 20th century to the present -- will celebrate its permanent collection in a series of exhibitions and organize shows of historic material on a regular basis. One of Armstrong’s projects is a traveling show of California abstraction that will incorporate furniture, architecture and graphic design.

Sparked, in part, by the museum’s 1964 exhibition, “California Hard-Edge Abstraction,” the exhibition-in-progress struck Armstrong as “a natural way to tell the story of California art and remind us of our own roots. And I don’t just mean as an institution,” she says. “Orange County is beginning to feel like it has some history. I’d like to combine all those forces and ideas and look at how this little place on the beach had great vision.”

Despite the museum’s ups and downs, it has overcome financial problems and amassed a $9-million endowment, its leaders say. Except for a $6,000 contribution from the city of Newport Beach, the museum’s $3-million annual operating budget must be raised privately.

“That insulates us from the ups and downs of government funding of the arts,” Szakacs says. “If we expected half our budget to come from government sources, we would be in a pickle right now,” he says. “We are not. We have tapped into a reservoir of good feelings and great memories. Over the past year we have raised a million dollars from sources that are either new to the museum or haven’t given in many years but are getting excited again.”

But challenges remain. Szakacs wants to double the museum’s 3,000 membership in the next year and a half. And Timothy W. Weiss, who recently took charge of the board of trustees after heading the board of South Coast Repertory, hopes to add business and community leaders to the museum’s 35-member board.

“We have gone through difficult times,” Weiss says. “Our energy was zapped and we lost sight of the mission of the museum and the role it plays in the community and nationally. Now that we have a stable management team and leadership environment, people will see that this is not a museum that’s always in transition.”

Even so, it’s necessary to “create a buzz about the museum,” he says. “Arts institutions have to reinvent themselves all the time to keep themselves fresh and bring in new participants. You can’t rest, but that’s part of the excitement.”