After two years as
Executive Director at
Laguna Art Museum
Julie Perlin Lee
Shares Insights about
Herself and the Museum.
Visiting museums on the East Coast when I was young ignited my passion to work in the arts. Before coming to Laguna, I worked at Catalina Museum in Avalon and Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. I have degrees in Art History and Exhibition Design and love to visit museums of all types and sizes. I am fascinated with our human obsession to collect and to create. I live in Laguna Beach with my husband David Michael Lee who is an artist, curator and art professor and we have two kids. When I am not at the museum, I am visiting artists in their studios, traveling or in my garden.
Julie Perlin Lee behind the scenes at LAM
This summer marks the 105th year since Laguna Art Museum’s founding artists established a permanent center for art and artists. The museum has about 5000 examples of California art from all time periods and in all media that it places on rotating view. We present 8-12 exhibitions a year and hundreds of public programs which are all designed to embody the California experience. This is the throughline in all our work and allows us to mount exhibitions that are vastly different from each other. For example, we just opened Joseph Kleitsch: Abroad and At Home in Old Laguna that chronicles the artistic career of the Hungarian immigrant artist noted for documenting Laguna as it developed in the 1920s from a spacious seaside village into a modern city. It is the largest assemblage of his work ever exhibited. At the same time, visitors can engross themselves in Conceptual and Pop Art in the exhibition Southern California Contemporary Art: Gifts from the Stuart and Judith Vida-Spence Collection.
A wonderful perk of working at the museum is being steps from the beach and our location in a city registered as a Historical National Landscape. This environment also informs much of our programming. This is most visible in November when we host Art & Nature — a series of events that includes a commissioned work of art installed on the beach, a keynote speaker, a family festival, lectures and films that focus on the cross-sections between art, science and environment.
Julie Lee with local artist, Chuck Arnoldi
We are especially proud of our outreach to children. This takes many forms, including a curriculum-based School Art Program with local schools, Family Art Night with the Boys & Girls Club, monthly Storytime Saturday and our LAB @ LAM, which is a special space for kids to enjoy and learn about art. We recently were selected by the State of California to teach the language of art to students in under-served communities by developing a curriculum to fit the needs of participating school districts
Joseph Kleitsch: Abroad and At Home in Old Laguna
Laguna Art Museum is located at 307 Cliff Dr., Laguna Beach, CA 92651
(949) 494-8971 www.lagunaartmusuem.org
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