LOOKING BACK

Young Chang

By the 1960s, Newport Beach was settled and thriving enough to think

about some of the more peaceful things in life.

Like art.

Nine women banded together to start the Newport Harbor Art Museum in

1961. Today that effort lives on in a reincarnated form as the Orange

County Museum of Art, which was created when the Newport Harbor and

Laguna art museums merged in 1996.

The artistically pioneering women of the ‘60s included Dorothy

Ahmanson; Flo Stoddard, wife to former mayor James B. Stoddard; Betty

Winckler, who served as the first Newport Habor Art Museum president; and

the wife of artist Rex Brandt.

Until the museum found a permanent home in Newport Center in 1977, it

moved around. The earliest exhibits were held in the lobby of City Hall

-- where various exhibits continue to hang today for public viewing.

For a while the works were hung on the second floor of the Balboa

Pavilion.

“We were just so sad the day they were carrying the pictures out of

the museum,” said Gay Wassall-Kelly, a longtime Newport Beach resident,

of when the museum moved out of the Pavilion. “We were kind of sad

because it had brought a little culture down here to Balboa.”

She remembers her parents visiting the Pavilion gallery “all the

time.” It was filled with local art, watercolors, oils, acrylics and even

pen and ink works.

Wassall-Kelly remembers the combined effect of art and a view that

clearly showed the bay.

The museum later moved to the abandoned press room of the Daily Pilot.

In 1977, the museum found its permanent home in Newport Center near

Fashion Island. At the time, museum leaders thought the spot would be

home for good, but soon it became apparent that art was gaining

popularity and Newport Beach was drawing in more people, James Felton’s

“Newport Beach, The First Century, 1888-1988” tells us.

In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, there was talk of the museum moving

to a 10-acre lot donated by the Irvine Co. at MacArthur Boulevard and

Pacific Coast Highway, but the move never happened.

Joining with the Laguna Art Museum in the mid-1990s transformed the

Newport Harbor Art Museum into the Orange County Museum of Art -- a

venue which, of late, offers everything from Karaoke-pod exhibits to very

contemporary photos by photographer Richard Ross.

* Do you know of a person, place or event that deserves a historical

Look Back? Let us know. Contact Young Chang by fax at (949) 646-4170;

e-mail at young.chang@latimes.com; or mail her at c/o Daily Pilot, 330 W.

Bay St., Costa Mesa, CA 92627.