Executive Director’s Message

Summer 2013

Malcolm Warner, Executive Director

Dear Friends of Laguna Art Museum,
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Laguna Art Museum is a museum of California art, the whole of California art, and nothing but California art. In our collection and our program of exhibitions, we have no limitations of period or style. We own what may be the earliest oil painting made in the state, Ferdinand Deppe’s San Gabriel Mission of 1832, and contemporary works as recent as 2012. We show the full kaleidoscope of different styles and movements that make California art so rich and interesting.
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To get a sense of the diversity, you only have to compare two new acquisitions we now proudly hold in our collection, a naturalistic William Wendt landscape and a totally abstract composition by Sam Francis. We embrace the phenomenal range of materials and media in which California artists have worked, from oil-on-canvas to ceramic, resin, and plastic, from paintings and sculpture to photographs, films, videos, and installations.
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For the past fourteen years, the museum has worked with the Laguna Plein Air Painters Association to present an annual plein air painting invitational. As you may have read in the newspapers, from now on the invitational becomes purely a LPAPA event, and the participating artists’ works will be displayed at the refurbished Aliso Creek Inn. We wish LPAPA every success in their new venue, and feel sure that the invitational will continue to enjoy the tremendous community support it has gathered over the years.
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The reason we felt this change would be good for the museum goes back to our identity as a showcase for California art in all its marvelous diversity. We’re formulating a new Fall event, Art & Nature, in which we’ll look at the big picture of art’s engagement with the natural world. Artists have responded to nature in so many different ways, not only through landscape painting but also through still-life, scientific illustration, garden design, Land Art, and many other artistic forms. They have been inspired by curiosity, love, and awe, by the microscopic and the astronomical, by scientific research and issues of environment and conservation.
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Both a conference and a festival, Art & Nature will bring California artists of all kinds together with art historians, cultural historians, scientists, environmentalists, geographers, and other thinkers to share ideas and information about art in its engagement with nature. There will be works of art commissioned and created specially for the event; related exhibitions and selections from the museum’s collection; lectures and panel discussions; artists’ talks and performances; and children’s programs.
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In 1929, when the Laguna Beach Art Association built an art gallery to show and sell their work, they chose a commanding location on the coastline close to the natural wonders they loved to paint. The present museum occupies the same site. There could be no more appropriate venue in which to explore the art-nature connection. Art & Nature may start in a relatively modest way this year, but we believe it has tremendous growth potential as an annual event going into the future.
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Sincerely,

Malcolm Warner
Executive Director

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Malcolm Warner, PhD
Executive Director, Laguna Art Museum