A few keystrokes about OC arts organizations, Part I

I’m a bad blogger. I rarely update this site. Why? Because people should be beating a path begging me to write for them. I should not exert one iota of energy in that nasty business of self-promotion.

But until then…

The Muckenthaler Cultural Center. Someone owns the copyright to this image. Tell them to call me and I’ll put their name.

Here’s a piece for Voice of OC about a Fullerton arts organization, the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, doing its best to stay relevant in the time of the plague. The story speaks for itself, but I thought I’d share one look behind the mysterious curtain of journalism for all those who have spent many a sleepless night wondering what spirits we conjure to achieve such magical works of letters.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I always wind up with a a ridiculous amount of information that I could never possibly fit into a story. Hour-long interviews that I might use one quote from, all kinds of research that doesn’t fit, ideas that seem sound in the moment but wind up with me falling down rabbit holes and not seeing the light of day for hours.

One of those rabbit holes this time concerned an arts institution that never started in Fullerton, but came really close: The Norton Simon Museum. Simon’s food empire was based in Fullerton and by 1960, he had accumulated one of the world’s finest private art exhibitions.

He wanted to house it in a museum in Fullerton, and was even willing to to give the city $250,000 and his team would lead the way toward building it.But the city couldn’t get a school district to swap an adjoining piece of land to the Hunt library that Simon had already built. Long story short: the pooch done got screwed and Simon’s art eventually wound up in Pasadena.

Fullerton also passed on the Nixon library and I thought I’d heard at one point that it also could have landed Walt Disney’s little amusement park, but I’ve since checked and can find nothing that would lead me to believe that is true.

But I do know that the city nearly lost the Hunt library but Arts OC partnered with a couple of other groups and wound up saving that architecturally significant building.

http://The Hunt Library inFullerton. Designed by the same architect who envisioned San Francisco’s TransAmerica Building and the original UCI Campus. Photo by Julie Leopo, for Voice of OC./

And just why was I expending any energy on Norton Simon’s art for a story about the Muck? Because on the same day that a Simon spokesperson first pitched the idea of a museum to the Fullerton City Council, Adella Muckenthalar, the matriarch of the clan, was also at the meeting saying she wanted to give the family’s grounds to the city as an arts museum.

Apparently the two were not connected. But I wonder…