Will OCMA Fit Into Center Expansion?

A tentative land deal that could pave the way for a major art museum in Costa Mesa has put pressure on the Orange County Museum of Art to decide soon whether it will vie, perhaps with world-class institutions, for a chance to build a new home near the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Charles D. Martin, president of the Newport Beach institution, said this week that trustees will accelerate their relocation talks in hopes of reaching a consensus this spring on how to expand in the next millennium.

Some museum board members--former Newport Harbor Art Museum and Laguna Art Museum trustees who united in 1996 to found the institution--are eager to move the museum from the old Newport Harbor building to a larger structure in the central county.

Among their long-range plans could be construction of a facility on part of a seven-acre site--at Town Center Drive and Avenue of the Arts--that Henry Segerstrom, co-managing partner of C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, has agreed “in principle” to donate for a new concert or multipurpose hall and possibly an art museum.

Though OCMA has long participated in discussions with center officials on such an expansion, center President Mark Chapin Johnson said this week that he would “hope to invite” prestigious institutions like Brentwood’s Getty Center or New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to independently build and operate a satellite on the land.

“Our vision is that the Orange County community is going to create a world-class arts complex of such significance,” he said, “that we are certainly optimistic that there would be a number of organizations interested in participating with us in that creation.”

Martin said he’s skeptical that any major museum outside the county would want to establish such a museum here. “That is a totally different twist than all the communications I’ve had with [Johnson] and the Segerstrom family,” he said.

“Anything is possible,” he added, “but it seems unlikely. Museums carry out their activities where their patron base is.”

*

In Southern California, the Laguna Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (formerly the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art), among others, initiated satellites beginning in the early ‘80s to maintain a presence during renovations and serve their larger communities. But no museums in the region operate outposts outside their home counties.

John Walsh, director of the Getty Center, declined to comment Tuesday on the feasibility of establishing an annex. “The idea of a new art museum in Orange County is great, and we wish them success,” he said.

A Metropolitan Museum of Art official said it’s doubtful his institution, which has a New York branch called the Cloisters that specializes in medieval art, would consider a western outpost.

“As nice as it is to be thought of as a West Coast venue, we’re focusing on our membership and merchandising operations in Southern California,” said Harold Holzer, vice president for communications at the Met, which has about 9,000 California members and three shops in Southern California--including one at South Coast Plaza--that sell reproductions and other merchandise.

Mimi Gaudieri, director of the American Assn. of Art Museum Directors in New York, said she knew of no situation similar to that envisioned by Johnson.

“You see collection sharing and long-term loans from collections,” she said. “But having a developer say he’d like to open up a branch [of a major museum]--I have not seen that.”

Ed Able, director of the American Assn. of Museums in Washington, said it’s “not out of the realm of possibility” that a major museum would open a Costa Mesa site.

“Today’s American museums are tremendously committed to giving more access to their collections to a broader public,” he said. “The American public has become a nation of museum-goers.”

But, he cautioned, “what is generally not well understood by those who wish to start a museum is the huge financial commitment they’re making, in many cases much more so than a performing arts organization.

“You have a huge facility and collections that have to be maintained. Care of the collection is a 365-days-a-year job.”

*

One California museum official who requested anonymity said he hopes the Costa Mesa arts complex doesn’t look too far for a mentor institution. Relying on East Coast institutions for cultural validation, he said, “perpetuates the suburban mentality and a colonial relationship to New York. It’s a lazy way to have culture without growing your own.”

He encouraged the center to instead consider a partnership with an L.A. institution, such as the Getty, the County Museum of Art, the Norton Simon Museum of Art or the Museum of Contemporary Art.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Keith McKeown, assistant vice president for communications and marketing, cited cost and difficulty of loaning objects as obstacles to such a venture. And the fact that his institution is, after all, chartered as a Los Angeles County museum.

While LACMA would “want to explore any opportunity to share the art we hold with the widest possible audience,” he said, the probability of creating a satellite at the center “would be very, very low.”

*

Two models have emerged in recent years for major art museum involvement--beyond the usual traveling exhibitions--with institutions in other cities. In one, either a municipal government or a corporation funds an ongoing relationship with a new satellite facility. In the other, institutions strike a long-term collection loan arrangement.

Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon M. Guggenheim Museum in New York, has furthered the worldwide influence--and income--of his institution by setting up Guggenheims in Venice, Berlin and, most recently, Bilbao, Spain.

In 1991, the Basque regional government in Spain approached the Guggenheim with an idea for putting Bilbao, an out-of-the-way industrial center, on the cultural map.

The government paid for construction of the $89-million Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, a Frank Gehry-designed building that opened to much fanfare last fall, and covers its operational costs. In exchange, Bilbao received access to the staff and collection of the Guggenheim, which retained creative control of the whole project.

Prominent corporation-backed satellites include the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, which opened at the cigarette maker’s behest at its downtown New York headquarters in 1983. Two years earlier, another longtime corporate sponsor, Champion International Corp., initiated the Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion at its Stamford, Conn., home office.

The second model for spreading the wealth of major museums’ permanent collections was originated by the San Jose Museum of Art in cooperation with the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

In 1992, a year after the San Jose museum opened a 45,000-square-foot wing that more than doubled its formerly cramped exhibition space, director Josi Callan came up with a plan to give her city-owned, privately run contemporary art institution more luster. Founded in 1969 in what had become the third-largest city in California, the museum had a low profile--and an eclectic collection of fewer than 1,000 works.

“The city had a lot of money at the time,” Callan said. “They’d talked about doing blockbusters, but my concern was that you don’t build a constituency that way.”

*

Instead, she knocked on the Whitney’s door because it has “the finest collection of 20th century American art in the country.” And since the Whitney had established satellites, Callan figured it might be willing to share its collection.

With holdings in excess of 10,000 works--98% of which are in storage at any given time--and a mandate to share them with the rest of the country, the New York museum agreed to an eight-year joint program underwritten by $3 million from the San Jose Redevelopment Agency.

Curators from both institutions worked on a series of four exhibitions of various facets of American art, each consisting of about 75 significant works by such A-list artists as Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol.

The Whitney also received $1.4 million in exhibition costs directly from the San Jose museum.

Although the final collaborative show isn’t scheduled to open until May 1999, Callan said the project has given her museum national visibility. “It has helped us develop a patron base and a constituency that we didn’t have before, and it attracted new money.”

OCMA officials, meanwhile, are confident they would be able to raise $60 million or more for a Costa Mesa museum, even as the Performing Arts Center tries to fetch some $100 million in a capital campaign to fund a second hall.

“There has been an enormous amount of [personal] wealth generated in the last five to 10 years by the county’s emerging corporate sector,” said President Martin, a venture capitalist by profession. “And by the great stock market that’s existed.”

And does OCMA meet Johnson’s criteria for a “world-class” museum at the arts center?

“Without question,” Martin said.