From Canyon To Cove:

The arts did not escape the tumult of 2009, mainly as fallout continued from the global economic meltdown that sent many businesses and nonprofits scurrying for cover by cutting costs, downsizing and selling assets.

The year started with the shocking news that Laguna Playhouse would sell an adjacent property at 580 Broadway that had been purchased 11 years earlier to grow the theater. A few months later, the property was sold with proceeds going toward a campaign to “strengthen the playhouse,” officials said.

While Laguna Playhouse officially gave up its expansion plans, Laguna Art Museum reported a massive deficit in October, with more than $500,000 lost over the last fiscal year. Later that month, the James Irvine Foundation came to a partial rescue with an infusion of $375,000.

This must have been especially gut-wrenching for museum officials, coming only months after it was reported that a treasure trove of early plein air paintings — part of the museum’s original holdings — were sold at a “fire sale” price by the Orange County Museum of Art. Ironically, the 18 paintings became the property of a Laguna Beach resident who remains unnamed. News of the sale got regional coverage and brought up again for Lagunans the agony over the failed mid-1990s merger between the two museums, which resulted in the loss of those very paintings. Memories are still fresh over the aborted merger attempt and its fallout remains to this day.

One piece of artistic justice did come when a fugitive art thief was captured in Hawaii and $500,000 worth of paintings stolen in Laguna Beach in 1999 were recovered. Joseph Michael Killebrew apparently was not only an art thief but an art lover: He had kept the paintings on display in his home all that time, apparently unwilling to part with them.

Local sculptor Jon Seeman made art news when the City Council, rejecting the recommendation of the Arts Commission, declined to put his whale sculpture in front of the newly built Community/Senior Center on Third Street. The 18-foot-tall “Breeching Whale” was given a spot at Heisler Park instead, but critics still contend the whale would have been a suitable denizen of Third Street.

A mural at Thalia Street beach was at loggerheads as two muralists and their supporters competed for the right to paint on the beach wall, but the Arts Commission bowed out of this one.