After a decade of planning and a few controversies, the Orange County Museum of Art is a step closer to getting a new home.
A vacant lot at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa was the scene of a formal groundbreaking event last Friday, as the Business Journal went to press. Earlier this month, a fence was thrown up around the lot and grading began.
“The building is so striking—it’s already won an award and will win more,” Todd Smith, chief executive of the museum, said of OCMA’s forthcoming new home during an interview in his 12th-floor office overlooking the construction site.
“It’s a really smart building and it’s also a beautiful building. It completes the campus. It brings visual arts to an area that has been primarily performing arts.”
The project will cost an estimated $73 million, for which almost $50 million has been raised to date, according to Smith.
The museum, which is scheduled to open in fall 2021, is working with Farmers & Merchants Bank to finance the project.
The 1.6 acres of land for the project was donated by the Segerstrom family that built and owns nearby South Coast Plaza; Anton Segerstrom, son of the legendary and late Henry Segerstrom, is heading the fundraising committee.
“We’ve been successful in fundraising to date,” Smith said.
The museum has a set of naming opportunities for donors; it will be announcing specific gifts in the months to come, Smith said.
13 Women
The museum dates to 1962 when it opened as the Balboa Pavilion Gallery, created by 13 area women. By 1977, it moved to a location in Newport Center, on land donated by the Irvine Co. In 1997, it was remodeled and renamed the Orange County Museum of Art.
A who’s who of Orange County executives has served on its board over the years, including Donald Bren, owner of Irvine Co.
In the past decade, controversy erupted when the museum decided to sell the Newport Beach land and decamp for Costa Mesa.
A proposed 25-story residential tower at the Newport Beach location, called Museum House, was initially approved by the City Council then rescinded in 2017 after an uproar from opponents who collected thousands of signatures to oppose it. The controversy got so heated that it even caused Irvine Co. to sue project supporters for trespassing at its shopping centers.
The museum was ultimately able to sell the land to Santa Ana-based Nexus Development Corp. Last month, the Newport Beach City Council unanimously approved turning the old museum site into a six-story, high-end senior living facility with 90 dwellings and a 27-bed memory care unit.
The museum collected an estimated $25 million from the sale, which is going toward the new museum. The museum last year moved to a temporary location in South Coast Plaza Village in Santa Ana.
The project in Costa Mesa originally envisioned having 80 condos built over the museum; that version of the development was eventually shelved after opposition.
The prior controversies have been resolved, according to Smith, who took the job in 2014 after working at four other museums around the country, the most recent of which was the Tampa Museum of Art.
Smith pointed out that the Segerstrom Center and the nearby South Coast Repertory are attracting almost a million visitors annually.
“This is where we need to be—it makes all the sense in the world,” Smith said. “It’s one of the only places in the country that has an art museum and concert hall and repertory theater altogether on one campus.”
Smith said the museum will stay open late enough to accommodate people who want to see art before watching a performance.
Already Award Winner
The building was designed by Thom Mayne, who is famous for Diamond Ranch High School that is built on a hillside in Pomona. The school was cited by judges in 2005 when they awarded him the Pritzker Prize, a prestigious international architectural award.
Earlier this year, Architecture magazine gave his museum plan an award for projects yet to be built.
“This museum zooms in on the impact of art and architecture acting together,” wrote judge Claire Weisz in the magazine. “The design shows an evolution of the box, and it deflects to an important piece of artwork and to public space, rather than placing the art after the fact.”
The general contractor is Clark Construction Group LLC, which ranked No. 3 on this year’s Business Journal list of construction firms when it reported $783.4 million in revenue from OC operations in 2018.
The museum, which totals 52,000 square feet, will have about 25,000 square feet for exhibits, about the same size as New York’s old Whitney museum and double the size of the Newport Beach museum. It will also have 10,000 square feet for performance, education, and other uses.
It will have two full stories with a mezzanine, two large exhibition halls, a lobby, an education center, a café and a store. The top floor opens to an outdoor rooftop area where events with up to 1,000 people can take advantage of Southern California’s famous weather. A grand public stairs will connect with the Julianne and George Argyros Plaza, which opened in 2017 and is the most recent addition to the Segerstrom Center for the Arts.
“We really tried to have the design incorporate the openness of the Argyros Plaza. This project will stand apart,” Smith said.
Meetings With Art
Over the decades, the museum has hosted works from Picasso to Georgia O’Keefe.
The modern museum should be able to attract more international shows. For example, the museum would be a logical place to host an exhibition of famed British sculptor Henry Moore because the nearby Argyros Plaza has one of his works, Smith said.
“The great thing about this project is we will be able to bring major traveling exhibitions to Orange County because we’ll have a state-of-the art facility that will be able to accommodate all the concerns around humidity and temperature controls and security.”
Half of the exhibition space will be galleries dedicated to showcasing the museum’s collection, which is more than 3,500 pieces, mostly from artists in Southern California.
It has been collecting works from artists like Larry Bell, John McCracken and Robert Irwin who worked in Southern California after World War II. Such artists are gaining international acclaim for their experiments with light, space and new materials, Smith said.
It will also be hosting shows on architecture and fashion, as well as introducing new artists to the community.
The museum will be available for companies to rent for special events.
“We want people to use it. It’s the community’s building.”
