Major gift fuels new curator role at Laguna Art Museum
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Following the largest donation it has received in its history, Laguna Art Museum plans to add a curatorial role that its leaders say will strengthen exhibits and deepen interpretation of its permanent collection.
The Anna Hills Curator, named after one of the founders of the arts institution, will be an endowed position after the museum was the beneficiary of a $3-million philanthropic gift from the Quilter family of Laguna Beach.
“People may be unaware that art enthusiasts often entrust the precious collections they accumulate over a lifetime to the Laguna Art Museum to protect for perpetuity and use for future exhibitions and education,” Joe Hanauer, chairman of the museum’s board of trustees, said in a statement. “The museum benefits regularly from the thoughtful art contributions from collectors throughout the country. This gift from the Quilter family helps ensure the care and application of these works towards the museum’s mission will be wonderfully enhanced.”
Julie Perlin Lee, the museum’s executive director, said conversations had been ongoing for some time regarding how best to support its long-term stability.
“It’s not that we haven’t curated from our collection, but we haven’t done it enough,” Perlin Lee said. “This is the missing piece, and we’ve known it’s the missing piece. When the Quilters started talking to us about the possibility of how they could support us in a meaningful way, the answer was clear.
“To give the position the Anna Hills name is even more amazing. Anna Hills, she’s our hero, right? She was a dynamo woman in this town. The museum, really, in large part, was able to be created because of her, as a fundraiser. She just got things done. She knew how to work in the community, and she was an artist herself, and so she was a tireless supporter of the museum.”
The museum is currently showcasing the work of one of the town’s plein air painting pioneers in Frank Cuprien, whose love of the sea is made clear from the many oil paintings hung on the walls depicting the Pacific coastline.
The exhibit also offers footage of Cuprien presenting a painting to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during a visit to California in 1938. Additional literature shares stories about his personal life, including “The Viking,” the seaside structure he lived in that served as both a gathering place and a work studio in Laguna Beach.
Further, a display case offers a look at pictures of Cuprien and the log book of the Laguna Beach Art Assn., which provides insights into the art colony in its early days a century ago. The log book, part of the museum’s archival collection, was assembled by LBAA member Ann Mason. It includes clippings, handwritten notes and photographs pertaining to artists in the community as early as the 1920s.
“It’s a real treasure because it’s full of original, tiny paintings,” Perlin Lee said. “We have it open to the Cuprien page because there’s a very cool picture of ‘The Viking’ on it, and we wanted to show that. Just kind of showing the care of documentation of the artist community at that time, it’s a very cool historic piece.”
The museum coupled the “Frank Cuprien: For the Love of the Sea” exhibit, which runs through Sept. 7, with an abstract look at landscapes through the elements of light and space in the acrylic paintings found in “Andy Moses: Into the Light.” Both shows opened March 21.
Victoria Gerard, deputy director of the museum, noted that while the museum is taking the time to pay homage to a founder while simultaneously featuring the work of a contemporary artist, the two together can help the average person connect to abstraction in art.
“We have a very clear narrative tie that we can talk about and program around between Andy’s work and Cuprien’s to kind of get people familiar with the idea of, like, something that’s more figurative or representational, and then how you can transition into abstract presentation of this very same coastline and light effect,” Gerard said.
“Andy wasn’t necessarily painting Laguna, but the reaction, he tells a story of kind of coming up on his surfboard, you’ve got water in your eyes, and the light is, you know, glimmering like diamonds,” she continued. “That’s definitely something that was experienced by Cuprien, in his own way, when he was painting these scenes, so it’s another step for us to make it accessible — to make the contemporary abstraction accessible — by people connecting with the imagery in here, as well.”
