Laguna Art Museum

Art that once belonged to the Laguna Art Museum has come home, but not back to the museum. The Orange County Museum of Art quietly sold 18 pieces of California Impressionist paintings to a Laguna Beach collector, whose name is not being made public. The works were acquired by OCMA in what many in Laguna considered, and still consider, a misbegotten attempt to merge the Laguna and Newport Harbor museums, which eventually cost LAM part of its permanent collection. “Laguna owned all of them pre-merger,” said Bolton Colburn , director of the Laguna Museum.

Artist and designer Isamu Noguchi was a busy man in the early 1980s. Born in Los Angeles in 1904, he had won a Guggenheim award as a young man, catapulting him into the arts stratosphere. He spent many years working in Japan and Europe, ascending to the rank of an international artist. Noguchi was part of the early modernist and environmental movements, having worked as an assistant to famed modernist Constantin Brancusi in Paris, and was also a close friend of American visionary Buckminster Fuller, who created the geodesic dome.

Laguna Art Museum will pay tribute to its major donors in an eclectic exhibition opening Sunday. ?Collecting California: Selections from Laguna Art Museum? encompasses 83 works of art from the 1830s to 2007, all of it donated ? or funded by donations. The show is the second in a ?bracketed? set of exhibitions intended to reestablish the museum?s reputation as a repository for important California art, said museum Director Bolton Colburn. The exhibitions were funded by a grant obtained in 2005.

Former Laguna Art Museum executive director Bolton Colburn hasn't traded his business attire for Hawaiian shirts just yet, but he is poised to make a splash in the world of surf culture. Colburn has been hired as executive director by the Surfing Heritage Foundation with an ambitious goal to take the 11-year-old organization from a San Clemente industrial park to an urban coastal center and significantly raise its profile. "It's my dream job," said Colburn, a former competitive surfer who was a U.S. amateur surfing champion in the late 1970s.

Between May 2011 and January 2012, Robert Hayden III wore four hats at the Laguna Art Museum. During that seven-month stretch before Malcolm Warner settled in at LAM's helm, Hayden served as its interim director, its interim director of development and head of the search committee for a new executive director. While he juggled those challenges, Hayden said he continued in his normal role of presiding over the museum's Board of Trustees. And he even managed to moonlight in the evenings in his regular job as chief financial officer for his family-run firm, Placentia-based Industrial Metal Finishing Inc. All that work culminated in his being honored with the Arts Leadership award at Sunday's Art Star Awards in Laguna Beach, presented by the Laguna Beach Alliance for the Arts and hosted by [seven-degrees]

Fans of dance will be able to see it from several different perspectives in a show coming to the Laguna Art Museum next week. The show, choreographed by three UC Irvine graduate students, includes three dance pieces that will provide as a preview for the Laguna Dance Festival, which is from Sept. 7 to 9. Jennifer Lott, Jessie Ryan and Saleemah E. Knight will showcase their works in a different setting than normal dance performances. All three choreographers are students of Jodie Gates, the founder of the Laguna Dance Festival.

All three floors of Laguna Art Museum will be chock-a-block with art from all mediums and eras when the museum opens three concurrent exhibitions on Sunday, preceded by a gala opening night preview party from 7 to 9 p.m. Saturday. The spring shows — "Extract: Developing Exhibitions Inspired by the Collection;" "Landscape and Figuration from the Collection;" and "Brad Coleman: Reproductions" — include minimalist modern art, impressionistic landscapes, Depression-era works, precisely rendered drawings and paintings and a rare showing of a sand installation by Laddie John Dill.

Laguna Art Museum is exhibiting "The OsCene: Contemporary Art and Culture in OC," "Jody Zellen: Other Places," "The Many Faces of Roger Armstrong" and "Surf Culture Redux" through Feb. 27. "The OsCene: Contemporary Art and Culture in Orange County," exhibit involves diverse media including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, multi-media, video/film. Sound/music, architecture and tattoo art. Additional lectures, panels, film screenings and music performances are scheduled throughout the exhibit.