1990 ORANGE COUNTY : Depth of Commitment to Be Measured : ART

For county museums, the ‘90s are likely to involve addressing a diverse set of issues. Staff members at Newport Harbor Art Museum, the Laguna Art Museum and the Bowers Museum were asked to comment on a grab bag of prognostications about the upcoming decade:

It seems possible that increasing gridlock on the freeways and harried two-career households may put a damper on the frequency of family museum treks. On the other hand, when they do make the trip, visitors are likely to expect more in the way of a “full” cultural and educational experience.

The influx of Asian and Latino residents in Orange County is likely to cause museum leaders to ponder how to reach audiences who may have different expectations and leisure habits.

At the same time, museums will have to continue to come up with new ways of introducing children to the arts, essentially doing the job that was once a province of the family (now often too busy or unknowledgeable to supervise this area of a child’s development) and the public schools, which continue to view the arts as a “frill.”

Fund-raising is a big unknown: Will Orange County be willing and able to keep all its cultural institutions afloat?

Finally, the ‘90s may be the decade when “global awareness”--of major, environmental problems as well as political issues--becomes a foundation of museum programming. More than ever, the role of a museum will be to keep our heads out of the sand and our minds on the big issues facing the planet, no matter how materially satisfying the “good life” of Orange County may be.

At the Newport Harbor Art Museum, outgoing curator Paul Schimmel said: “If not wanting to fight the traffic is an ongoing and increasing reality, then our audience will rely on artistic venues in Orange County more than (those in) Los Angeles or San Diego.”

“We’ll no longer be a 45-minutes to one-hour experience,” he said. “ . . .We will move from being part of a package of things to see in Newport . . . to being a destination.”

Schimmel added that the museum is “increasingly playing a more significant role in terms of art education in the county.” Making adults of varied backgrounds feel welcome at the museum “begins through the children,” Schimmel said. “They bring their parents in.”

At the Laguna Art Museum, Director Charles Desmarais said the gridlock issue and the changing ethnic makeup of Orange County residents partly motivate his hopes of creating another satellite museum site in the South County, to complement the one at South Coast Plaza.

In regard to fund-raising, Desmarais said: “In the last 10 years, this county has done a tremendous job of setting into place a cultural foundation. . . . The challenge for the next 10 years will be to build our endowments.”

At the Bowers Museum, acting Director Josie de Falla suggested that there will be new “issues of how (minority) cultures are presently treated in the U.S.”

“The museum can even (present) some of the solutions other cultures have developed for handling these issues, to provide a framework for the difficulties involved in creating a utopian society.”

De Falla said fund-raising in the ‘90s is likely to involve “the education of new corporate owners as to philanthropic possibilities” in the arts. The key to reaching heads of foreign-owned U.S. businesses may involve exhibitions relating to the cultures of their native countries.

In terms of global awareness, De Falla said, the museum might create exhibits dealing with such big-ticket ideas as “the nature of ritualized war” as well as “smaller issues, like the way other cultures deal with medicine and their relationships with nature.

“When we look at the information Voyager is bringing back on our place in the universe (we realize) our smallness on one hand and our power on the other hand,” De Falla said. “The ultimate goal of museums is to be able to portray that ultimate contradiction.”