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About Us

Laguna Art Museum is proud to continue the tradition of the Laguna Beach Art Association, which was founded in 1918 by American artists who had discovered the town at the turn of the twentieth century and transformed it into a vibrant arts community. The association built a gallery on Cliff Drive in 1929, and that original gallery is part of today’s Laguna Art Museum, the museum’s largest gallery. The mission of Laguna Art Museum is to continue and amplify scholarly research and exhibitions that expand the knowledge and appreciation of historical, modern, and contemporary California art.
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General Introduction

The museum focuses on the cultural heritage of our huge, diverse and powerful state, and on the unique history and accomplishments of Laguna Beach, a community of the American West located on the shore of southern California, about fifty miles below the city of Los Angeles. As cultural theorists often enjoy pointing out, Southern California, with its motion picture, television, and aerospace industries, is the mecca of artificial culture. In this “here-today-gone tomorrow” culture, our history has traditionally been trivialized and discarded, leaving a great deal of the past for us to excavate. Laguna Beach and Laguna Art Museum have stood at the center of another sort of culture. From the turn of the century through the 1930s, Laguna Beach was home to one of the most significant artists’ colonies on the Pacific Coast. Laguna Art Museum has not only been the focal point of this art colony but, instrumental in uncovering its history as well. Along with its counterpart, the Oakland Museum of California Art in northern California, it has been at the forefront of a trend among California museums to focus on regional art history.
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The museum’s exhibitions, catalogs, and educational activities illustrate an ongoing examination of California art, which includes historical and contemporary art as well as unconventional, but regionally important influences, such as car and surf culture. Through collections, publications, and research on the art of California, Laguna Art Museum promotes understanding of the role of California art and artists in the development of the visual arts nationally and internationally.