New Orange County Museum of Art rolls out red carpet for everyone

It’s the last piece of a cultural arts puzzle. It’s the maturation of a longtime local institution.

But mostly, the new Orange County Museum of Art is a place its supporters hope will be a center of activity, inspiration and community once it opens Saturday at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa.

The distinctive, $94 million building, formed by a collection of inviting open spaces and intriguing combinations of angles and curves, is a temple to visual and multimedia arts of all types.

OCMA Chief Curator Courtenay Finn considers the museum a work of art that will house other works of art; architect Thom Mayne considers it a place of learning. Both descriptions bolster Director Heidi Zuckerman’s conviction that the museum is open to discovery and interpretation, and no one should stay away because he feels intimidated.

“You don’t need to know anything about art to come,” she says.

Although Orange County is home to art collectors and connoisseurs — a group of them founded the museum that became OCMA and is honored in one of its opening exhibits — they’re only a fraction of the people who live here. OCMA officials wanted to create a museum that puts out a welcome mat for everyone.

Mayne, who along with his Los Angeles-based architectural company, Morphosis, designed the new building, said the intention was to create an open, transparent, inviting space that offers possibilities or helps people look at things in a new way.

Low walls that serve as seating can be found outside the museum. A rooftop piazza is lined with Palo Brea and Cathedral Live Oak trees that Mayne said will grow significantly taller, creating a sort of secret garden in the sky.

A sweeping, open-air staircase falls away from the piazza and a largerthan-life sculpture by Los Angeles-born artist Sandford Biggers, offering a place to sit and relax that’s akin to Rome’s Spanish Steps.

From the street level, the “window gallery” that faces the Avenue of the Arts gives passersby a taste of what’s inside. Zuckerman said she loved it when the other evening a couple of people walking their dogs waved to a group of donors getting an early look inside.

The current display is by Oakland artist Alicia Mccarthy, who painted wide, overlapping vertical and horizontal stripes in vibrant shades directly onto the wall.

Wandering through the building gives opportunities for discovery at every turn: On the lower level, one open, high-ceiling gallery flows into another; an upper level catwalk offers views of the art displayed below; unexpected windows show the undulations and angles of the building’s white terra cotta facade, complicating the perception of being indoors versus outdoors.

Mayne said that over the 14 years it took to get to this point, he never worried the project wouldn’t get done, and now he hopes people will think of OCMA as a gathering place, like a modern town square.

The museum is “not something that’s this isolated, kind of ‘elitist’ thing,” Mayne said. “It’s something that’s about the community, and it’s about engagement, and it’s trying to be very overt about that.”

That openness and accessibility are everything OCMA’S home at Fashion Island was not. The old museum had half the exhibit space of the new 53,000-square-foot building.

It didn’t have much parking; even the entrance was hard to find, said Richard Stein, CEO of the independent nonprofit arts council Arts Orange County.

“They’e moving from what has been a largely invisible location for most of their history,” he said, “to a highly visible, prominent location that is already visited by hundreds of thousands of people annually.”

In case there was still any doubt about whom the new OCMA is for, Zuckerman hopes to lay that to rest.

The museum will offer free admission for the next 10 years, paid for by a $2.5 million gift from Newport Beach business Lugano Diamonds.

To Zuckerman, “Access to art is a basic human right — it’s not a privilege.”

The architects who captured that in the building’s design “understood that what we wanted in a building most of all is an invitation, a beckoning to the entire community to come inside and to experience what it is that we have to offer,” she said.

Zuckerman has kept that in mind at every step, even as she hires staff, looking for people who are “empathetic towards humanity” and can use not just conversation but body language to make museum visitors feel they belong there.

Filling an empty niche on the Segerstrom arts campus, the museum represents a sort of completion for both institutions.

When Zuckerman joined OCMA in February 2021, as it was approaching its 60th anniversary, “people told me that the museum was kind of like a perpetual startup,” she said, but the move to the Segerstrom campus positions it as a permanent, sustainable institution.

It’s the first time OCMA will have the space to display regular exhibitions of art from its permanent collection of 4,500 works alongside temporary shows, Finn said.

“We’re able to pull works out of storage and tell stories around them and really showcase the breadth and depth of the collection,” she said, “something that the museum hasn’t been able to do before.”

Zuckerman and others in the Orange County arts community say the museum’s new location offers a variety of opportunities for collaboration that will benefit everyone.

Pacific Chorale singers will perform alongside OCMA exhibits during an eclectic 24-hour opening celebration, and more performing and visual arts crossovers are anticipated.

The Pacific Symphony Orchestra performs regularly at the neighboring Segerstrom Concert Hall and looks forward to collaborating with OCMA, symphony CEO John Forsyte recently said.

“There is a strong interest in interdisciplinary work wherein visual arts and graphics impact the experience of those listening to the orchestra,” he said, and that multisensory element should only elevate the orchestra’s performances.

And the museum’s new location means visitors to the Segerstrom campus can find more to occupy them and extend their experience of the arts by popping into the museum before a theater or symphony performance or grabbing a coffee afterward and lingering in one of several public spaces.

“By having that constellation of venues together, you can have more than that 90-minute experience,” said Tyler Stallings, director of Orange Coast College’s Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion.

However long people who visit OCMA decide to stay, museum leaders hope their visit will provide food for thought and reflection — that’s evidenced by a sign posted on the wall by the firstfloor galleries.

The sign suggests questions visitors can ask themselves about their experience, such as “What am I observing?” “What surprises me?”

And finally, there is “Do I care?”

As to that last question, Zuckerman, her staff and OCMA supporters are hoping they’ve given people many reasons to answer yes.

Artist Fred Eversley is seen through one of his parabolic lenses at the museum. Eversley was a pioneer of the Light and Space movement in art. He is one of five inaugural exhibitions at new location for OCMA.

PHOTOS BY PAUL BERSEBACH — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Visitors look at exhibits during a media preview at the Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa on Wednesday. The 53,000-square-foot facility is opening at its new home on the campus of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts.