Long Beach Press-Telegram (CA)-September 11, 2010

Author/Byline: Al Rudis Staff Writer Edition: MAINSection: NEWSPage: 1A

A young teacher at the Rhode Island School of Design was invited to exhibit one of his glass sculptures in a special show in 1971 at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

Maybe because he was so appreciative, Dale Chihuly and his collaborator, Jamie Carpenter, named their work “All the Way Out to Long Beach.”

“It was a very large installation,” said Sue Ann Robinson, who today is the director of collections for the museum. “It was five feet and black, and there was this light made with argon gas that coursed through it.”

Chihuly went on to become a living legend for his glass art, which is now often shown in huge, site-

specific shows all over the world.

The exhibition of glass art, which occurred only a year after a conference of national ceramic arts educators legitimized glass sculpture as worthy of being taught along with ceramics, symbolizes one of three main themes that have recurred throughout the history of the Long Beach Museum of Art, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary with a fundraising gala on Sept. 25.

“One of the things the museum was always open to was what artists were doing,” said Robinson in a phone interview last week. “They were actually looking at what the artists of the time were interested in producing.”

The second theme, said Robinson, was the museum’s inclusiveness.

“We didn’t draw a box around the word art and only put certain things in,” she said. “We collected and exhibited ceramics, painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography, video, wood and jewelry.”

Showcasing art produced in Southern California was the museum’s third major imperative. “Jerome Donson (an early museum director) and his staff started something called ‘The Arts of Southern California,”‘ Robinson said.

“The first one was in 1957, and they continued through 1966.

“After these came the Southern California Annuals, which were juried exhibitions. The jurors came from all over the country and were well recognized in their field, so the artists were getting a sort of national exposure.” The Annuals series continued into the early 1970s.

“Occasionally, the community raised the money to award purchase prizes, and the artist not only got exposure, but we would end up buying the work,” Robinson said. “We got quite a number of significant pieces of art from artists who are now really the old masters in Southern California.”

Museum started in home

An heiress, Elisabeth Milbank Anderson, built a summer house on Ocean Boulevard in 1912 that eventually became the museum. She was related to the co-founder of the Borden Co. and a founder of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad.

In 1926, the house became Club California Casa Real, a social, athletic and beach club, but in 1929 it went back to being a private home, owned by Thomas A. O’Donnell, an oilman who developed the Coalinga field in Fresno County. During World War II, the house became the Navy Chief Petty Officer’s Club.

By 1950, the city of Long Beach had the property and turned it into a cultural arts center. “At first, it was under the direction of the city librarian, Eleanor Geisser,” said Robinson, “and at various points it was a city department under either the library or parks and recreation department.

“People were giving artworks to the city, and there was an actual growing collection of art. Technically, if you’re a collection institution and not just an exhibition hall, you’re a museum, so they changed their name in 1957 to the Long Beach Museum of Art. All the employees were still city employees.”

Linda McCullough worked there but not as a city employee for a couple of months in the summer of 1964, between her junior and senior year at Cal State Long Beach.

“I was an art minor, and I’d always liked art,” she said in a phone interview last week. I loved to be around people who could create. So I helped staff the reception desk as a volunteer.

“The museum was still in the old Anderson house. There was no furniture in it, except upstairs, where there were offices. The walls had been covered up many years before. Many of the windows you couldn’t see out of. You could see the chimneys outside, but you couldn’t see any of the fireplaces inside.”

In 1986, a foundation of community art enthusiasts signed an agreement with the city to manage the museum, an arrangement that still exists today, and two children and many years later, McCullough joined the board of the foundation in time to be heavily involved in the capital campaign that from 1996 to 2001 raised the money to build the gallery where the art is shown today, to the west of the house.

“The carriage house is where the big gallery is now, and it was moved to the back of the house,” she said, “and there was a major restoration on the Anderson house.” The changes include the Claire Falkenstein sculpture fountain that is the outdoor centerpiece of the picturesque Claire’s restaurant that has become a popular wedding location.

The carriage house is now the museum’s educational center.

“That’s where all the fifth grade students in Long Beach and elsewhere come,” McCull- ough said. “We not only provide art education and art visits to the museum, but during that visit, the children craft something that relates to the type of art that’s up in the museum at that time.”

Robinson first heard of the Long Beach Museum when she was doing a national study of museum education in 1974 and 1975 that was eventually published by the University of California Press in Berkeley. “Everyone was aware that the museum had the video program,” she said.

Video art controversial

The video program, which she eventually became involved in after she joined the museum in 1989 to run its newly minted education program, lasted from 1974 to 1999 and brought the museum international recognition, along with local controversy.

“It was pretty difficult to understand for most people,” McCullough said, “but it was cutting-edge, interesting and controversial. They used to have shows that would last for like a month of nothing but video in the galleries. Of course, there were very few galleries, so that’s not saying much.

“There might be a projector showing some sort of video art against a screen on the wall, or it might be video art inside of something that was built to house the art. It might be six or seven video cameras going at once in a room, projecting all different kinds of things associated not only with images, but sound, too.”

“It wasn’t really a collection,” said Robinson of the video art.

“The museum did a number of things with video. One of them was exhibiting the video art. Secondly, we established an actual post-production facility. It started upstairs in the attic in the old house and then moved to the Video Station Annex, a city building next to the fire station on Second Street (in Belmont Shore).

“Artists applied for funding, which we raised, to help them produce new works. Or they could actually come without getting a grant and work with the equipment.

“Then we had a program that was designed to get video art out into the world, called Open Channels. We actually had agreements with various cable channels around the state to show video art produced here.

“We also introduced an educational program that was taught by video artists for youths from 12 to 18, and a lot of young people actually got their start in video by coming and spending eight weeks in the summer learning how to make video art, as opposed to doing television, which was a little different.

“Then two things happened. One was that artists began to be able to do their own post-production work on their computers. And the foundation endowments for media art dried up completely.

“We were concerned because we had 25 years’ worth of tapes, and we were not large enough to undertake conserving it. It really needs a full-time staff to do that. So we began looking for someone to partner with, and happily the Getty Research Institute saw the value of this collection.”

Today the “Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive” is housed at Getty Center atop the mountains of Los Angeles. It’s available to researchers and is starting to show up in Getty Center shows. “In 2008, there was a show called California Video,” said Robinson, “and about half the work in that exhibition was from Long Beach.”

The Long Beach Museum of Art was also one of the first museums to put on shows that exclusively focused on women artists. It’s continued to do so, right up to the current “A Light in the Shadow – Decades of Art by Women,” which runs through Jan. 2.

Perhaps the most dramatic moment in Robinson’s many years at the museum occurred in 2006. “We did an exhibition called ‘River of Destiny: the Life and Art of Binh Pho.’ He works in wood, turned (carved while turning on a lathe), carved, pierced, dyed and painted. He lives outside of Chicago and came to the opening here, and it was the same night as his father’s birthday, and his whole family came.

“At the opening reception, he was asked to say a few words, and first of all, he told his father happy birthday and how pleased he was that his whole family was here.

“Then he introduced the captain of the ship that actually got him out of Vietnam. He had been imprisoned by the Viet Cong in the early 1970s and failed at three or four attempts to escape. This ship captain was the one that managed to get him out, and he was at the opening. It sent shivers down everybody’s spine to realize what this artist had gone through.

“In the middle of September, we’re going to be opening an exhibition of a major gift to the museum by Dr. Irving Lipton, who has given the museum part of his beautiful and extraordinary collection of turned wood to the museum.

“We will also have an exhibition of work from wood from our permanent collection, alongside the Lipton gift, and the Binh Pho piece that we have will be there.

“His artwork, which is extraordinarily beautiful, actually tells the story of his escape and coming to this country.

“At the end of his talk at his opening, he jumped up and down and waved his arms and said, ‘Hooray for freedom!”‘

alrudis@yahoo.com

562-499-1255

Diandra Jay Staff Photographer

Linda McCullough has been involved with the Long Beach Museum of Art for more than thirty years. After volunteering during her college years when the museum was at the old Anderson house, she became involved in the campaign to build the gallery.

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