Bolton Colburn moves from Laguna Art Museum to, yes, surfing

 

It's certainly one of the more interesting career moves we've seen recently. Bolton Colburn, who recently stepped down as the head of the Laguna Art Museum after 14 years, has been named the executive director of the Surfing Heritage Foundation.

In his new role, Colburn will oversee an organization whose goal is to "preserve, present, and promote surfing's heritage," according to the group. The Surfing Heritage Foundation, which is based in San Clemente, said it has a collection of 500 surfboards, 250,000 photographs and an archive of various surfing memorabilia.

When Colburn resigned last year from the Laguna Art Museum, he told The Times that he was aiming to pursue "ideas I'd like to accomplish in the sphere of visual art," possibly involving writing projects and exhibitions.

His new job arguably represents a departure from his stated goals. The Surfing Heritage Foundation said in a release Tuesday that Colburn will help the organization raise its profile in the museum world, among other objectives.

In his personal life, Colburn has been an avid surfer, according to the foundation. During his tenure at the Laguna museum, he even helped to oversee the 2002 exhibition "Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing."

Colburn has spent most of his career in the world of art museums, including positions at the Orange County Museum of Art and the former La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. In November, the Laguna Art Museum named Malcolm Warner as its new executive director.

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Surfing Heritage Foundation wants to collect oral histories of wave riders

-- David Ng

Photo: Surfers off of Dana Point, taken by early surf photographer, Doc Ball, in 1939. Credit: Surfing Heritage Foundation

 

PST, A to Z: ‘The Radicalization of a ‘50s Housewife,’ ‘Best Kept Secret’

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report.

When the University Art Galleries at UC Irvine decided to call their Pacific Standard Time contribution “The Radicalization of a ‘50s Housewife,” they weren’t kidding. In 1951, when she was just 20, Barbara T. Smith became not just a housewife, but an archetype of conventional American femininity. She had graced the society pages as a young woman, and she and her family seemed to live a charmed life in a Greene & Greene house in Pasadena prominent enough to be featured in the Independent Star News in 1964. (See Holly Myers’ feature story.)

The exhibition's cache of such newspaper and magazine clippings, featuring a smiling, perfectly coiffed young Smith, are jarring in relation to the rest of the show. There are some early works, but most of the space is devoted to documentation from “Birthdaze,” a performance Smith gave at Tortue Gallery in 1981, on the occasion of her 50th birthday. Organized in three parts, it dramatized her rejection of the conventional gender roles she had modeled so perfectly, and her exploration of a new paradigm for relationships between the sexes.

In the first part, which took place outdoors on the gallery’s patio, Smith, wearing a wig, high heels, and a typical 1950s dress, fled the advances of two crass young men (played by Kim Jones and a pants-less Paul McCarthy). In the second, “liberated” part, she donned men’s clothing and returned riding a motorcycle, but was still torn between two different male figures (former lover, the macho Dick Kilgroe, and friend and something of a father figure, Allan Kaprow). The show consists largely of a series of black-and-white photos of the event, furniture and clothing used in the performance, and a re-creation of the room in which, in the final section, Smith and Victor Henderson engaged in a Tantric sex ritual inside the gallery. A video of a similar ritual, which also ran during the performance, plays on a monitor, giving us some sense of the goings-on, which were, to say the least, real.

Malcolm Warner of Kimbell to run Laguna Art Museum

The Laguna Art Museum has announced the hiring of a new director: Malcolm Warner, currently deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. He will start his new job on Jan. 3, after relocating to California with his wife and two teenage children.

The Kimbell has often been described as a gem of a museum, boasting a small selection of masterpieces throughout the ages. While the Laguna Art Museum has a less prestigious collection, Warner also called it "a gem — a small institution with a great history, a youthful attitude, and the clear mission of showcasing the best of California art, past and present."

Bolton Colburn, who left the Laguna Art Museum in May, had served as the director since 1997 and worked in other capacities at the museum before that. “In many respects we’re looking for somebody with qualities similar to Bolton," Robert Hayden III, president of the museum’s board and head of the search committee, told the L.A. Times upon Colburn's resignation. "We like the idea of an art scholar running the museum."

Warner brings with him a serious academic pedigree: he earned his Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, writing his dissertation on the pre-raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. He is currently preparing a comprehensive catalogue, known as a catalogue raisonné, of the artist’s works.

His early jobs as a curator included time at the San Diego Museum of Art and the Yale Center for British Art. But it was at the Kimbell over the last decade where he most distinguished himself, as a curator and then deputy director. "The Mirror and the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso," was named exhibition of the year in 2007 by Apollo magazine Another show that he organized, "Butchers, Dragons, Gods & Skeletons" made Time magazine’s “Top Ten Exhibitions” of 2009.

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A long lost native son

-- Jori Finkel

Image: Malcolm Warner, the new director of the Laguna Art Museum. Credit: Courtesy of the Kimbell Art Museum.