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Photo by Robert Laprelle

Dear Laguna Art Museum supporters,
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I’m honored and delighted to be your museum’s new director.
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I’ve admired Laguna Art Museum since early in my career when I was a curator at the San Diego Museum of Art. Then, as now, Laguna was a museum that knew what it was doing. Its mission—to be a showcase for California art at its best—was focused. You could see that it took the mission seriously and was carrying it through in smart and creative ways. My move from San Diego to positions at Yale and then the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas took me further afield, but Laguna remained vivid in my memory.
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Museums take their character and quality from the communities that support them and which they serve. In a place whose very history has been shaped by artists, where art remains central to so many people’s lives, Laguna Art Museum has had every reason to flourish. I’ll do everything I can, with your help, to ensure that it continues to do so. While growing in national stature it will stay no less responsive to its own community. It has a fascinating past, a strong identity, and a clear direction for the future.
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The extraordinary range of exhibitions and programs described in this magazine is a testament to my gifted predecessor as director, Bolton Colburn, to the museum’s outstanding curators, Janet Blake and Grace Kook-Anderson, and to the staff as a whole. It’s typical of the commitment of the museum’s board that for most of last year Robert Hayden served as interim director, a full-time job and probably more. We all owe him a huge debt of gratitude for his time and energy—and no one more than I, given that he has handed things over in such good shape.
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This is a great year for California art, thanks to the multitude of fine exhibitions held under the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time banner, including Laguna Art Museum’s recent exhibition Best Kept Secret: UCI and the Development of Contemporary Art in Southern California, 1964-1971. I could hardly have hoped for a better moment to begin the professional and intellectual adventure that this new position will be for me.
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Malcolm Warner, PhD
Executive Director, Laguna Art Museum