Heidi Zuckerman took one look at the proposed lighting for the new $93 million Orange County Museum of Art and knew it had to go.
The planned florescent light was too theatrical and too harsh, so she insisted it be replaced by softer lighting that provides a better ambience.
“Art looks better in certain lights,” Zuckerman told the Business Journal on a recent tour. “That was the one thing I was willing to die on the hill for. You can only die on a hill once. It was very dramatic. I felt really strongly about it.”
Zuckerman took on the chief executive role at OCMA last Feb. 8, assuming a position vacated the prior year by Todd Smith, who left for a similar position at a museum in North Carolina.
Zuckerman is preparing the Costa Mesa museum for its grand 24-hour opening slated for next year, on Oct. 8. About $66 million of the $93 million required for the museum, located at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, has been raised to date.
The museum hosted a gala this past Oct. 8 that featured 280 guests partying on the unfinished rooftop of the museum. The event, which had a futuristic theme where some guests wore space-age type outfits, netted $1 million.
“The construction of the museum is progressing well and will make the opening date for October next year,” said Bob Olson, founder of Newport Beach’s R.D. Olson Development, the largest hotel developer on the West Coast over the past decade, and a newly appointed trustee on the OCMA board. “It will finish sooner so that we can get the art installed and prepare for opening to the public with private opening celebrations beforehand,” he said.
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Zuckerman, a native of New York, grew up in Palo Alto where she became a fan of artists like abstract expressionist Clyfford Still by visiting the San Francisco Museum of Arts. She became enchanted with Yves Klein Blue and the Hudson River School of painting, a style of American landscapes painted in the 19th century.
She saw the arts as an “idea of an alternate language using things to communicate that have more nuance than words.”
When she attended the University of Pennsylvania, she majored in European history to study art during modern revolutions, writing an undergrad thesis on the punk movement from 1975 to 1977 in the United Kingdom.
She also received her M.A. in Art History from CUNY Hunter College and is a graduate of Harvard Business School’s Executive Education, Women on Boards program.
Her résumé includes being a curator at the Jewish Museum in New York before becoming chair of the Curatorial Department at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive from 1999-2005.
Most recently, Zuckerman was the CEO and director at the Aspen Art Museum from 2005-2019, where she helped secure more than $130 million in investments and created a new museum building with Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban.
Olson said he became a trustee on the board because he knew Zuckerman from Aspen, where he has a home.
“Heidi has the experience of opening and running top-tier museums, she has the leadership skills to lead her team to make incredible things happen, and the art knowledge of the history of art and where the art world is going,” Olson said.
“She’s very respected in the art world.”
Loves Storytelling
Zuckerman, who has curated more than 200 exhibitions, declined to identify a favorite style.
“I’m more interested in why artists have done what they’ve done. I love the storytelling part of art.” Besides curating, she’s also a prolific book writer, saying she doesn’t remember the number of books she’s written. She’s most proud of her Conversations with Artists book series. In 2019, Zuckerman began a podcast, starting with the bicyclist Lance Armstrong, whom she considers a friend.
“He’s a great conversationalist,” she said. “He’s an art collector and he said to me that the reason that he likes art and artists are because they did what he did—take something that was nothing and made it into something.”
Museum History
The museum dates to 1962 when it opened as the Balboa Pavilion Gallery, created by 13 local women.
By 1977, it moved to a location in Newport Center, on land donated by Irvine Co. In 1997, it was remodeled and renamed the Orange County Museum of Art.
The museum is noted for its major holdings of California-centric art, highlighting such movements as early and mid-century modernism, Bay Area Figuration and pop art.
A who’s who of Orange County executives has served on its board over the years, including Donald Bren, owner of Irvine Co.
About a decade ago, the museum decided to sell the Newport Beach property and decamp for a larger facility at OC’s main arts hub in Costa Mesa. The museum sold the land in Newport Beach for an estimated $25 million, money which is going to the funding for the new project.
The project in Costa Mesa originally envisioned having 80 condos built over the museum; that version of the development was ultimately shelved.
Famous Architect
The museum broke ground in September 2019 on 1.6 acres of land donated by the Segerstrom family, whose various business interests built and own nearby South Coast Plaza, among other real estate holdings.
The 53,000-square-foot facility 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.
The museum will have about 25,000 square feet for exhibits, about the same size as New York’s Whitney Museum and double the size of the prior Newport Beach museum.
During a recent tour, Zuckerman described the museum as an “urban oasis” with “great energy.” She showed a window gallery next to a sidewalk where passersby can look at the art.
The museum has an atrium with glass skylights, a grand staircase and a rooftop mezzanine that can hold 1,000 people for events like fashion shows, weddings or conferences.
“One of the things that drew me to this building and this job is the idea that we could create this indoor outdoor space where people could feel comfortable with the movement of air,” Zuckerman said.
“There are opportunities to be innovative and think about how we present art.”
The Future
Since starting her current role in February, she’s been running mock shows at the museum’s temporary facility at the nearby South Coast Plaza Village in Santa Ana.
When the museum opens 11 months from now, a 24-hour festival will begin at 5 p.m. on Oct. 8. A full gala full of events to attract the public to its first day is scheduled, including yoga and movies in the middle of the night for insomniacs. The California Biennial 2022 will be the inaugural exhibition in the new home.
Lugano Diamonds a month ago donated $2.5 million to the museum, so it won’t charge admission for the first decade.
The free admission fits Zuckerman’s goal to make art accessible to everyone.
“Art can be fun and it’s not always serious,” she said.
“It’s not only a museum for the 21st century. It’s a cultural anchor for Orange County.”
OCMA’s New Board Members
The Orange County Museum of Art has long attracted local power brokers such as Donald Bren, Gilbert E. LeVasseur Jr. and Thomas Tierney.
Last month, it added eight new trustees to its board, which now totals 32. They are:
• Barbara Bluhm-Kaul, who along with her husband, Don Kaul, is annually named in ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors in the World. She is now a life trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she served as a docent educator for more than 35 years. She’s also a trustee of the Aspen Art Museum, where OCMA CEO Heidi Zuckerman served as CEO for more than a decade.
• Phillip J. Bond, chief credit officer at Farmers & Merchants Bank, which is financing the new museum.
• Idit Ferder, co-founder and COO of the luxury jewelry retailer Lugano Diamonds, which got a nearly $300 million investment in September after selling a stake in the Newport Beach business. Lugano donated $2.5 million to OCMA to ensure free admissions for the next decade.
• Sean Green, who in 2015 co-founded ARTERNAL to bring client relationship management (CRM) technology to the art world.
• Cheryl Kiddoo, a current trustee and former co-president of the San Jose Museum of Art, fundraising.
• Linda P. Maggard, an avid collector of contemporary art, has been a longtime member of Fellows of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, where she served as chair from 2015 to 2017.
• Robert Olson is founder of Newport Beach’s R.D. Olson Development, the largest hotel developer on the West Coast.
• Lucy Sun, a former managing director at Goldman Sachs, where she worked in the equity division for over two decades. She was a co-chair of the board of trustees at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. In 2014, Sun was appointed by Mayor Ed Lee to be a commissioner of Asian Art for the city of San Francisco.
