OCMA and UC Irvine Consider a Merger
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| Alexis Smith, Valedictorian, 1994. Orange County Museum of Art |
In the Los Angeles Times, Jessica Gelt reports that the Orange County Museum of Art and UC Irvine have signed a "nonbonding letter of intent" to merge OCMA with Irvine's Langson Institute and Museum of California Art. If the deal is approved, UC Irvine would scrap its long-deferred plan to build an art museum on campus. Collection and programming would move to OCMA's building in Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Cosa Mesa. Both OCMA and the Langson are currently looking for a new director. A merger would entail recruiting a director for the combined institution.
Pro: Orange County has five art museums focusing on California art (Hilbert, Bowers, OCMA, Langson IMCA, and Laguna). That's insane. One less OC museum wouldn't be a bad idea. That's especially true given that UC Irvine's building plans seem to be going nowhere fast. The combined Langson-OCMA would be the GOAT of OC museums, with a virtually complete history of 20th and 21st-century California art, OCMA's ambitious exhibition program, and one of the few high-profile locations in a suburban county.
Con: OCMA's 25,000-sf of exhibition space is none too large already. The merger would downsize both institutions' available space, existing and hoped-for. OCMA is 5 miles from UC Irvine, defeating one purpose of a university museum—to make it easy for students to encounter art.
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| Alexis Smith, Danger, Curves Ahead, 1982. Buck Collection at UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art, UC Irvine |
Comments
In 2009, OCMA deaccessioned 18 California impressionist paintings that once belonged to Laguna. The sale was justified as the works no longer fit within OCMA's collection scope. (https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/tn-dpt-xpm-2009-06-19-cpt-ourlaguna061909-story.html) A merger with the UCI Langson IMCA would bring a boat-load of California impressionist paintings back to OCMA through UCI's Irvine Museum collection, which UCI is contractually required to keep on view.
There's contemporary inserted into a part of the Huntington's former residence of its founder. Uh, can't an area originally devoted to mainly early British art stand on its own or be left alone?
Sure will be a joke if LACMA slots bits of contemporary art into the Geffen/Zumthor. After all, they're already doing that in the Resnick and, of course, the Broad buildings. I vaguely recall even contemporary art being installed in the Bruce Goff/Joe Price building for Japanese art. New art from a person based in, say, Japan means it must be relevant to ancient Japanese art, correct? Or does a person's place-of-birth necessarily mean he or she therefore can't hang with the big names in modern/contemporary art? In the *Broad* wing.
I sure hope regionalism isn't applied to the modern/contemporary art from South American artists that was recently acquired by LACMA.