Last November, the Irvine Museum donated its collection of California Impressionist paintings to U.C. Irvine, which plans to build a permanent museum somewhere on its crowded campus to house the estimated $17 million collection. And two Saturday nights ago, the Laguna Museum of Art (LAM) held its annual art auction, this year called “California Cool,” to raise funds for new exhibitions and educational programs to further its all-California art mission. Taking in more than $366,000 with both a silent and live auction—complete with absentee bids via phones—the museum declared success with about 86 of 100 artworks sold and heading to walls in undisclosed locations.
About 350 people attended the bash, including 26 of the artists whose work was up for sale. The live auction took place in LAM’s largest gallery, where two pieces featuring the color orange at its absolute best stood out, as if reclaiming the alternate skin tone of despots and their mouthpieces. Pierce Meehan’s vivid Orange County, made of EPS, teak, acrylic, tinted epoxy resin and fiberglas, sold for $5,500. Part of the Laguna-based artist’s Surf Panels series, even the beige portion and the bisecting line looked enticing. Solid and square, yet at the same time Orange County suggests longboards holding their position on huge waves in the glaring brightness of the late afternoon sun.
Orange glowed into the gallery via a 6-foot-tall but slender phallus of light by Peter Alexander. Born in Newport Beach in 1939, the artist pioneered luminous, resin-based geometric art in the mid-’60s. Associated with the Light & Space movement thought to have been inspired by the singular properties of Southern California light, his 8/19/15 (Orange Bar) has brought the prolific and highly successful artist back to urethane. It’s much safer to work with now than when he began using the medium. This slice of orange brought in $17,500 during the live auction—that sum alone should guarantee free entry to LAM on First Thursdays for years to come.
Longtime Laguna sculptor Cheryl Ekstrom, who passed away not long after giving up her Laguna Canyon studio and moving to eastern LA, was given the highest dollar valuation for her bronze sculpture Terra Aquarius. The tall, tree-rooted female figure bends in anguish while shielding her face with her hands, as if she’s bereft that women’s nature and nature herself are besieged. Terra Aquarius sold for $9,000 during the live auction, well under LAM’s $47,000 estimation; nevertheless, she persists: Three of Ekstrom’s outdoor pieces stand permanently in Laguna.
The day after the auction, museum lights pointed at spots devoid of everything but the picture hooks, along with larger pieces new owners hadn’t yet carted off. The few unsold works are available for purchase online through Feb. 12.
Art flew off the walls at LAM, but the Irvine Museum will continue to house the 1,200-piece collection until UCI builds its museum. With a 15-year deadline, Chancellor Gillman has said he’d like it up in 5. But where to put it on the overcrowded campus? The university’s original 1,000 acres, sold to the UC Regents in 1960 for $1 by the Irvine Co., have spread way beyond the original ring of buildings as far as the hospital in Orange. It opened during construction, and students encountered displaced rattlesnakes daily. In the 1980s, the surrounding fields were still home to bison herds and full-time cowboys, where two spectacular mesquite trees drew (mostly art and theater) students to hold all-night oil-drum circles. But painters weren’t much into landscapes during the decades of OC sprawl. The Irvine Museum opened in 1993 to display for free the family’s paintings of untouched California pre-1940. Somehow, it’s fitting those landscapes will be returning to the Irvine Ranch site, even though it only exists in the mind’s eye.
The new UCI museum is still in the dreaming phase, but the Orange County Museum of Art has already gotten an extension on its deadline for building a new facility on land donated by Segerstrom Center. According to a Los Angeles Times story in 2015, OCMA must now break ground by June 2017. When I went to see OCMA’S wondrous “Pop Art Design” exhibit, the young woman who took my money said the museum has exhibits planned through 2017 at the Newport location. Hope they make the looming deadline.
These buildings have $50 million-plus price tags, but as long as we can get in free let them raise funds and spend big. The Irvine Museum is free at all times; OCMA, every Friday; and LAM, the first Thursday of each month. The future UCI museum better keep up the tradition.
Lisa Black proofreads the dead-tree edition of the Weekly, and writes culture stories for her column Paint It Black.