AT THE GALLERIES:Museum hit high notes

This year was a pretty good one at the galleries in Laguna Beach. On any given stroll about the town, or First Thursday’s Art Walk, you could always find something interesting, something moving or thought-provoking or both, so a few highlights from the last year seem to be in order.

Highest praise goes to the Laguna Art Museum for two provocative and risk-taking shows from the past year.

Top on the list is “Oscene: Contemporary Art and Culture in OC,” which is still up through Jan. 21. This amazing exhibit really showed why it’s possible for Laguna Beach to thrive as a home for so many galleries. There is a truly incredible range of styles in the small space of the museum. If you can’t find something that appeals to you there, then you had best stick with posters of Monet’s water lilies.

Each wall shows such eclecticism that it’s almost too much — there’s nothing to hold it all together other than the arbitrary county line. But it does give you a taste of what’s being done by artists right now on the West Coast.

“Pervasion” (which ran from June through September) opened some new ground, expanding and creating new intersections between art and commerce. It featured a huge selection of works by Gary Baseman and Tim Biskup. This included sculpture, drawings, paintings and even toys by the artists you could take home with you.

LAM gets praise for this exhibit not just for the quality, but for the flirtation with “the sell” that the Museum engaged in while the exhibit was up — the way, at Disneyland, exits from the rides go through the gift shops. It was a visually wild exhibit that showed what is perhaps the future of “fine art,” for better or worse.

Taken together, a visitor to Laguna Beach might get the feeling that contemporary art is alive and well here, in spite of the plein air attitude that hangs about the place. The coastline must seem vaguely familiar to anyone who visits, since a version of it is available 24 hours a day on TV. Lovely landscapes are readily available on PCH. But how cool is it that you’re just as likely to find a provocative abstraction?

Which brings us to the art galleries themselves. I’d like to single out the “Summer Abstraction” show at Peter Blake last July. I’m not sure I had a full sense of how difficult hanging a group show was until I saw the gallery owner agonizing over where to place each piece (think of placing the works in “Oscene”). The “Summer Abstraction” show was a thoughtful, interesting collection of artists — but really I single it out because it was beautiful.

A show can tell a story, or be a set of examples of an idea, or it can simply be a cross section of work represented by the gallery. “Summer Abstraction” was really a collection of beautifully executed abstractions.

“Small Treasures” (up through the end of the month at William Merrill Gallery) gets praise for similar reasons. The show brings together around 20 different artists, each “speaking” to the other on the walls in interesting ways.

And William Merrill also had my favorite artist of the past year, sculptor Cybele Rowe. Although her show was back in February, a few of Rowe’s pieces are in the “Small Treasures” show.

It was, however, a real experience to view her huge, single-piece organic works next to each other. Rowe’s work reveals a truly feminine perspective, an original voice, speaking through the texture, form and glazing of simple clay.

The rarest thing for a reviewer to experience is surprise. It’s a terrible thing to say, but focusing so frequently in the same area (be it books, film, or art) makes you impervious to the commonplace. I can say that this past year, the galleries surprised me, fascinated me, and moved me. That’s what art is all about.