Joan Gladstone was accepted into Boston University’s School of Fine Arts but switched majors to focus on public relations and communications.
The move paid off. She counted a 30-year career running PR and crisis communications firm Gladstone International, whose clients included the County of Orange in the lead-up to its 1994 bankruptcy.
Gladstone, a Business Journal Women in Business Award winner in 1997, closed her business in 2019 to return full-time to the art world.
That shift is also working out, with the Laguna Beach artist’s contemporary oil paintings featured in several area art shows in recent years. One of her biggest exhibits, an 18-piece collection celebrating next year’s 100th anniversary of America’s “Mother Road,” Route 66, opened this month at Chapman University’s Hilbert Museum of California Art.
Her work is “vibrant and colorful and uplifting, but it’s also done with impeccable craft and vision—she can pick out ordinary objects, roadside views, etc. and make them into something that lingers in the memory,” says Mary Platt, director of the museum in Orange (who, like Gladstone, pivoted from a career in communications to the art world).
Gladstone’s exhibit runs through May 2026. It is one of three new exhibits at the museum (whose work is featured in our annual OC500 directory), along with collections by Emigdio Vasquez and Ralph Allen Massey.
The 144-bed, 350K-sq.-ft. UCI Health—Irvine hospital that just opened along Jamboree Road brings a host of new offerings to OC, including a surgical “megafloor” that’s the size of three football fields, the area’s first adult bone marrow/stem cell transplant and cellular therapy program, and the first all-electric in-hospital kitchen in the state.
The hospital also doubles as one of the area’s larger art galleries, with 600 pieces by California artists, 100 of which are original commissioned works.
“With themes ranging from Southern California landscapes to local and regional events, the art is both familiar and a ‘positive distraction’ for patients as they recover and heal,” UCI representatives say.
Area artists with works at the hospital include Gil Dellinger, a Laguna Woods resident who also teaches at the Laguna College of Art and Design, Costa Mesa’s Jeff Horn, professor emeritus of Drawing and Painting at Irvine Valley College, and Laguna Beach’s Michael Obermeyer, who had art displayed at the Hilbert Museum in 2024, and who now serves as president of the California Art Club.
A new Scrooge is coming to town.
South Coast Repertory announced last week that it had commissioned award-winning playwright Amy Freed to write a new adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” with Artistic Director David Ivers set to direct.
The development is supported by Julianne and George Argyros and the Argyros Family Foundation, with their gift made in honor of the production’s 40th anniversary.
The premiere date for the new adaptation hasn’t been announced. SCR will continue producing its current version in the interim.
