Spoiler Alert: The Real Housewives Are No Longer the OC's Buzziest Cultural Export
It’s one of California’s largest and wealthiest enclaves, but Orange County has never really been a destination for those in search of high culture (unless you consider a certain OG Bravo franchise to be a form of art). Los Angeles is replete with creative behemoths—LACMA, Broad, Dudamel—and San Diego has the sprawling Museum of Contemporary Art, enviably perched over the Pacific and stocked with Warhols and Saint Phalles.
“Orange County has 34 cities, yet we’ve been lacking a cultural anchor,” says Heidi Zuckerman, CEO and director of the Orange County Museum of Art, which will become the torchbearer of the region’s splashy artistic upgrade when its new 53,000-square-foot home opens this month on the campus of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa.
When the Segerstrom family donated the land for the performing arts complex in the 1980s, Henry Segerstrom, the late philanthropist, envisioned that the museum would one day be part of it. For the past 17 years OCMA, which was founded in 1962 by a group of 13 women as the Balboa Pavilion Gallery in Newport Beach, has dreamed of moving in. Now the institution finally has a flagship to showcase its 4,500-piece collection of Ruschas and Rauschenbergs. “San Francisco, which has only 875,000 people, has four world class museums. Orange County has 3.1 million, and this will be its first world class museum,” Zuckerman says. “It’s a game changer.”
This story appears in the October 2022 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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