Video Observer: Museum with the World’s Largest Collections of California Narrative Art to Open in Orange

Hilbert Museum Exterior

Recently, I had a unique opportunity to tour the spaciously reimagined new home of one of the world’s largest collections of California narrative art with art collector and philanthropist Mark Hilbert. Founded in 2016, the Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University holds the distinction of being the only museum in the world committed to tracing the rich, iconic history of the Golden State from the late 1800s to the present through works by leading California artists and Hollywood studio artists and animators. Touring the museum before it opened, I learned that it will debut with nine new exhibitions featuring Millard Sheets, Mary Blair, Norman Rockwell, and acclaimed Chicano artist Emigdio Vasquez, as well as vintage radios, Navajo weavings and examples of California modernism.

“We will be the biggest art museum in Orange County,” said founder Mark Hilbert, who, with his wife, gifted the couple’s extensive collection to Chapman University to make it available for public viewing. “It is a museum of a lot of artwork that we’ve collected over a fifty-year period. We’re exhibiting a variety of exhibitions so that there will be a lot of art from the last one hundred and twenty-five to thirty years, starting from early work to contemporary art. There will be some illustrative art. We also have some Norman Rockwell paintings. In addition, we’ve got a show on Navajo women weavers featuring eye dazzler blankets. Then there’s a variety of shows and collections, including California Scene paintings, which feature narrative scenes of California life from the 1930s to the present, as well as exhibitions dedicated to animation and cinema arts, where we’re going to feature Mary Blair, who was one of the most important artists at Disney.”

Mark Hilbert next to vintage radios from the Hilbert Collection

Meeting with Mark Hilbert and Bob Ochsner outside the museum, we watched as construction workers made finishing touches on Millard Sheets’ 40-by16-foot “Pleasures Along the Beach” glass-tile mosaic. Rescued and moved from a former Home Savings Bank building on Wilshire Blvd. in Santa Monica in 2019, this mosaic has been meticulously reassembled, tile by tile. In the institution’s outdoor courtyard, Hilbert pointed out a lot of different drought-resistant California Native plants, including a California Oak tree. The native gardens are intended to create a new front door to the museum. Two expanded gallery buildings, constructed by architectural firm Johnston Marklee, surround the courtyard, offering a total of 26 galleries for rotating displays and exhibitions, plus a café, community room for lectures, classes and events, and research libraries.

Hilbert first led us into an exhibit titled California Art from The Hilbert Permanent Collection that expanded across eight galleries in the museum’s North Wing. The wide variety of oil and watercolor paintings, prints, and drawings extended from the late 1800s, through the Depression-era rise of the California regionalist Scene Painting style, to the works of contemporary artists. The galleries were organized chronologically, with each section covering a ten to twenty-year span. One of the paintings Hilbert pointed out within this exhibit featured a young woman in an egg race at Fullerton High School. Featured artists in this exhibit’s opening round include Emil Kosa Jr., David Hockney, Phil Dike, Sueo Serisawa, Vanessa Helder, Rex Brandt, Serena Potter, Francis de Erdely, Frank Romero, Jesse Arms Botke, Edgar Payne, Burr Singer, Wayne Thiebaud, among others.

Hilbert Museum outdoor courtyard

Next, we looked at Hilbert’s personal collection of old radios in the Founders Gallery of American Design. This collection included Bakelite, plastic shelves, and tabletop radios from the 1930s to the 1950s, all of which will be a part of the exhibit Art of the Airwaves: Radios from the Hilbert Collection, curated by Clark Silva.

Hilbert said, “When I was kid, my parents had an appliance store in Pasadena, and my job was to take the radios out of the box, put a price tag on them, and put the radios up on the shelf for sale. For some reason, I started looking at the designs of these and recognizing how interesting they are. As it turns out, there were 10,000 radio manufacturers during that time in the Forties and Fifties, and in order to differentiate themselves from the other radios, they hired the very best designers in America to make them. So I’ve been collecting these for the last thirty years.”

There were two other shows also located in the museum’s Founders Gallery. Eye Dazzlers: Marvels of Navajo Weaving from the Hilbert Collection, curated by Mary Platt, featured “eye dazzler” blankets woven by Navajo women, which were known for their vibrant colors, intricate patterns, and bold, geometric forms. Meanwhile, Same Place, Another Time: Views of Orange County, curated by Gordon McClelland, showcased contemporary paintings of Orange County that reflected the cultural and historical shifts that occurred throughout California from the 1930s to today.

Off the Founders Gallery, we saw two exhibitions curated by the museum’s director, Mary Platt. One show featured the original paintings, drawings, and prints of Norman Rockwell, selected from the Hilbert Collection and on loan from the Bank of America Collection, while another show presented the works of Disney artist Mary Blair, encompassing both Blair’s Alice in Wonderland movie concept art and original Alice art by other Disney illustrators created for picture books, record albums, and advertising.

In the museum’s South Wing Galleries, located in a building across the courtyard, Hilbert showed us through the space that will soon be the café and lobby. He explained that there were three exhibits planned for the South Wing Galleries and walked us through them. Millard Sheets, curated by Jean Stern, highlighted 40 original paintings from the multi-talented painter, muralist, mosaicist, designer, and teacher. A Matter of Style: Modernism in California Art, curated by Gordon McClelland, included a selection of works by California artists Agnes Pelton, Roger Kuntz, Helen Lundeberg, Conrad Buff, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, Susan Hertel, Keith Crown and others.

“The museum is located in what’s called the Cypress Barrio, and there was a famous artist named Emigdio Vasquez, who started his career capturing scenes of everyday life in Orange’s historic Cypress Street Barrio,” explained Hilbert as we walked through Emigdio Vasquez: Works from the Fred Ortiz Collection, an exhibition curated by Ortiz, Vasquez’s longtime friend and local resident. Many Fullerton residents may be familiar with Vasquez’s work through the murals at Lemon Park, Fullerton College, Fullerton Museum Center Auditorium, Cal State Fullerton, and Maple Elementary School. This exhibit featured many of the acclaimed Chicano artists, muralists, and teachers’ social-realist paintings.

Approved_HMCA_Rendering (Photo Credit Johnston Marklee)

The expanded Hilbert Museum and nine new exhibitions will be open from 10 am to 5 pm Tuesdays through Saturdays starting February 23, 2024, and closed on Sundays and Mondays. Admission to the museum is free for everyone, continuing a promise that Mark and Janet Hilbert made when the original museum debuted in 2016 to keep their collection as accessible to the public as possible. Advance online reservations are recommended. For further information, please visit https://hilbertmuseum.org.