One patron’s handiwork

“IN my former career I built 55 medical centers and four hospitals in nine states. I know something about building things,” says Dr. Robert Gumbiner, founder of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach. A soft-spoken, no-nonsense guy at 84 -- he sets his watch alarm to keep up with appointments and brings his own questions to interviews -- Gumbiner is a former general practitioner who made a fortune in managed care. He has long since shifted his attention and business acumen from medicine to art, but he hasn’t stopped building. His latest “thing” is a $15-million expansion and renovation of a building that has evolved, Gumbiner style, from roller rink to senior health center to art museum.

Opening today after four years of sporadic progress, the new addition gives the 11-year-old museum an eye-popping presence, with a splash of modernity and a desert landscape, on a bleak stretch of Alamitos Boulevard. Mexican architect Manuel Rosen has designed the facade with two rectangular arches -- intended to symbolize bridges between diverse cultures -- connecting a bright blue, two-story cylindrical structure and a vivid pink wall covered with water that flows into a reflecting pool. The pool mirrors the bridges and refers to the nearby Pacific.

Inside, Rosen has more than doubled the museum’s space, bringing the square footage to 55,000 and adding a new entrance and gift shop, a studio for visiting students, a film-screening room, a research library, offices and expanded galleries. Two large galleries are devoted to a sampling of the museum’s 750-piece permanent collection, which encompasses works by such internationally renowned figures as Fernando Botero, Jose Luis Cuevas, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Francisco Toledo and lesser-known artists including Mexico’s Rafael Coronel and Laura Hernandez and Costa Rica’s Miguel Antonio Bonilla.

About 75 works appear in thematic sections: “Metaphorical Landscapes,” “The Mestizaje (blending) of Identity” and “Political History.” Another large exhibition, “La Presencia: Latin American Art in the United States,” consists of works from MoLAA’s collection and loans from other institutions.

“I think it turned out pretty well,” says Gumbiner, settling onto a bench in one of the galleries and surveying last-minute work in progress.

He’s talking about the building. And he’s talking about money.

“If you were to build this museum from scratch,” he says, “it would probably cost $50 million. We did it for $30 million. We got our money’s worth.”

But mostly he’s talking about realizing his particular vision of a museum -- what he calls a “consumer-oriented museum” that’s “more than a museum.” His goal was to create a lively urban cultural center that would educate the public about contemporary Latin American art. Putting the emphasis on education, enhancing art exhibitions with related programs and activities, keeping the museum open until 7 p.m. and providing lots of parking aren’t exactly radical ideas, but he is adamant about operating an institution for the convenience of the public, not the staff.

Although MoLAA isn’t on the art world’s radar, it has a large presence in the community. With a membership of about 3,500 and a $5 general admission charge, it has an annual attendance of about 50,000, including 10,000 students. Visitors come to the cafe, lectures, cabarets and performances of music and dance, as well as art exhibitions.

To Gumbiner, the emphasis on community service and fiscal responsibility doesn’t reflect a lack of respect for art or scholarship, but his approach to amassing artworks for the museum is highly unconventional. A passionate collector of Latin American art who can’t resist buying on impulse, he, with his staff, has worked out an unusually methodical plan to build a collection for the museum. The idea is to represent Latin American countries in proportion to their population.

“We have quite a few Mexican pieces because Mexico has 20 million people,” he says. “For some of the little Latin American countries, we might have three pieces.” That may sound crazy to specialists who emphasize quality above all else, but Gumbiner says he and his curators don’t buy inferior pieces just to fill gaps. They go for what they deem to be fine examples and sometimes wait several years to get what they want.

“I buy,” he says, “because I have to have that piece.”

The Gumbiner way

BY standards of contemporary art museums that focus on the U.S. and Europe or aim for a global view, MoLAA has a very conservative collection, largely composed of figurative paintings. Like the museum, it reflects the taste and convictions of an art-loving entrepreneur who is determined to “bring modern management techniques to the museum field,” as he puts it, and is accustomed to doing things his way.

“I really like to specialize,” he says. “I prefer to learn a lot about one particular thing rather than to learn a little bit about everything. That’s pretty much how this museum is set up.”

MoLAA calls itself “the only museum in the western United States that exclusively features contemporary Latin American fine art.” But it is hardly the only one working the territory. Many museums with broader purviews incorporate Latin American art in their exhibitions and collections. And several institutions around the U.S. focus on some aspect of Latin American art, including El Museo del Barrio in New York, the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago, the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque and the Museo de las Americas in Denver.

Alma Ruiz, a Latin American art specialist who is associate curator at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, has given much thought to the relevance of such specialized museums and concluded that Gumbiner’s makes a worthwhile contribution.

“Museums like MoLAA fill a niche for artists who would not be able to participate or be included at mainstream museums like MOCA or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,” she says. “They may not be completely mainstream, but they fulfill expectations for some people and provide a forum for artists who work in more traditional ways. We have all these parallel universes that fill needs, and they function really well. Sometimes they overlap, but they are all necessary.”

She praises MoLAA’s presentation of artists and its care for its audience. “Everything they publish is bilingual. I also appreciate that the museum is very inclusive. The fact that Dr. Gumbiner has gone around to every country and he really feels that the museum should represent all of Latin America is laudable. We lent them several works for their new exhibition. We really wanted to collaborate with them.”

The exhibition “La Presencia” goes well beyond traditional painting with sections on kinetic and conceptual art and “new trends,” including video and Mexican artist Fernanda Brunet’s “Volcano,” a large lumpy sculpture of fiberglass, wood, metal, flowers and bread dough. As Gumbiner says, MoLAA is a work in progress, but -- like its founder -- it has come a long way.

A native of Gary, Ind., Gumbiner reluctantly followed his physician father into medicine and got his degree at Indiana University School of Medicine. He moved to Southern California in 1949, completed his training at the former Orange County Hospital in Santa Ana and briefly worked in public medicine and group practice. He opened his own office in Lakewood in 1952, but found private practice boring. “And I never liked the idea of charging people to take care of them,” he says.

Gumbiner began taking management courses and developing a group practice. In 1962, he converted his practice to a nonprofit corporation that became FHP International Corp., a pioneering prepaid health plan that grew into a managed care giant with more than 1 million members. His empire brought him a fortune, but he was edged out in 1995. The museum has been his major project since.

Gumbiner says collecting is in his blood. He began collecting various things in his youth and took several art courses in college. When he acquired a bit of disposable income, he began to buy pre-Columbian and contemporary art, but he fell in love with Latin American art in the 1960s while doing volunteer work in Ecuador. Impressed by the works of artists such as painter Eduardo Kingman and fascinated by how little known they were outside the region, he developed a plan to travel throughout Latin America and seek out accomplished artists.

“They are not known here, but they are mature masters,” he says. “You have to go there to find them.” He stays closer to home these days, but he has vivid memories of his collecting trips.

“I traveled to all these countries and collected from dealers and artists,” he says. “First I would go to the local museum and ask the director and curator who the prominent artists and dealers are, then I would get ahold of them. If you go to a country and put the word out that you are buying, people come out of the woodwork. It’s not a problem. You go to bed and wake up the next morning and someone says, ‘Senor, you should come down to the ballroom.’ You go and there are six dealers with stuff all over the place.

“I used to travel with two curators,” he says. “We would decide what we needed for the collection. Then we would look at the price. If we all agreed, we would buy it. I don’t buy big expensive pieces. I find pieces by artists who are well known in their own countries whose work is conservatively priced. To buy a really good piece of contemporary art in the U.S. you are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not a million. But you can buy a very good piece of art in Latin America for $40,000 or $50,000. A lot of things are going for $10,000 or $20,000 or even less.”

The ad hoc operation has evolved into a more conventional arrangement in a museum that has a full-time staff of 30. One of the traveling curators, Cynthia MacMullin, is the museum’s director of exhibitions. Gregorio Luke, a Mexico-born expert in Mexican art and former consul of cultural affairs at the Consulate General of Mexico in Los Angeles, is the museum’s director. Alex Slato, a Venezuelan who was formerly an art dealer and auctioneer, is associate director. Idurre Alonso, an art historian from Spain, is curator.

Then and now

PIECE by piece, the collection filled Gumbiner’s home, an adjacent house and several storerooms. In 1980 his company bought the defunct Hippodrome Roller Rink. Built in 1929 on the site of a former silent movie studio, its primary assets were hardwood floors and vaulted ceilings. Gumbiner transformed the historic building into the FHP Long Beach Senior Medical Center and included a gallery to display his collection. The goal, he has said, was to provide a soothing environment for patients and show how businesses could support the arts.

In 1995, when he was ousted as chairman of the board at FHP, he decided to turn the Long Beach building into a museum. It opened in 1996 with a show of 60 paintings in a 2,500-square-foot exhibition space. Over the years, MoLAA has expanded its exhibition space and added a multipurpose facility and a sculpture garden that doubles as an outdoor performance and special events space for weddings, private parties and corporate events as well as its own evenings of flamenco, tango, comedy, magic and jazz.

In its newly enlarged quarters, the museum will operate on about $4 million a year -- a fraction of, say, LACMA’s $44-million annual operating budget. MoLAA has no endowment, but that will change, Gumbiner says, “when I pass away.” The museum has received many gifts of art in the last few years. The rest of the permanent collection is owned by the Robert Gumbiner Foundation and will be bequeathed to the museum.

“I have always felt that anyone who collects art should share it,” Gumbiner says. “I am hoping that through MoLAA the people of the United States can learn more about their neighbors to the south because it is only through communication, education and knowledge that we can have peace in this world, cooperation and prosperity.”

But that isn’t all that’s on his mind. He pulls out his list of questions and rattles off answers:

“Art is a terrible investment.” “Collectors should buy what they like.”

And that said, he takes off for a meeting of the museum’s construction committee.

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suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com

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Museum of Latin American Art

Where: 628 Alamitos Ave., Long Beach

When: 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday

Price: $3 to $5

Contact: (562) 437-1689, www.molaa.org