Why Laguna Art Museum Is Worth The Trip

Laguna Art Museum
Latest and Greatest: New Work at Laguna Art Museum
Fred Tomaselli: Second Nature
Christian Sampson: Ocean Ions
Video by L.A. Art Documents / www.laartdocuments.com
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Welcome to another LA Art Documents video highlighting cultural institutions and art museums beyond the borders of Los Angeles. Here we explore the Laguna Art Museum, a dynamic center of artistic expression in the beautiful community of Laguna Beach, California.
The museum is nestled along the gorgeous beach waterfront, next to Heisler Park, which offers an ambling walkway full of crowd-pleasing scenic vistas, natural tidepools, and public art sculptures. Inside, the Laguna Art Museum contains three floors with plenty of nicely lit gallery spaces. The museum regularly displays highlights from its permanent collection of over thirty-five hundred works along with various rotating temporary exhibitions. It also contains a family-friendly interactive STUDIO/Lab creative space for making art, hands-on programming, and learning experiences.
The Laguna Art Museum was founded in 1918 by local artists as the Laguna Beach Art Association with the original and ongoing mission “to advance the knowledge of and interest in Art, and to create a spirit of cooperation and fellowship between the painter and the public.” The original gallery space was custom-built in 1929 by prominent Los Angeles architect Myron Hunt, known for his work on places like the Ambassador Hotel, the Huntington Mansion and Library, and the Rose Bowl.
By the 1970s, its permanent collection of donated works and loan exhibitions grew, becoming the Laguna Beach Museum of Art. In 1986 it changed its name to Laguna Art Museum and gave the building a physical expansion to become the institution it is today.
In 2013, the museum established a program called Art + Nature, an annual event with special exhibitions and programming. The rest of our tour explores two solo shows from the Art + Nature series by Fred Tomaselli and Christian Sampson.
Tomaselli is an internationally recognized multimedia painter known for his unique collaged images composed of animals, insects, flowers, human anatomy, and newspaper headlines to create wildly inventive and hallucinatory visuals.
Christian Sampson’s work hovers between painting and sculpture, using the elements of color and light to respond site-specifically to architectural spaces.
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