By next fall, the Segerstrom Center for the Arts hopes to have a new plaza in place that will be more welcoming to the public, inviting them to sit under flowering pear trees, hang out at the planned outdoor cafe while listening to live jazz or picnic with their kids in shady green spaces.
In one way, the redesigned plaza is meant to serve as a sort of public square, not just for Costa Mesa, but for all of Orange County, say representatives of the Segerstrom Center. Along with two other initiatives – a Center for Dance and Innovation and a Center Without Boundaries, the center’s effort to expand its community outreach programs – the plaza also is meant to foster more connections to the community. They hope the redesigned plaza, with an outdoor stage, will cause people to come to free events and linger, even if they’re not planning – or able – to pay for a ticket for an orchestra concert inside.
Elsewhere in the United States, other cultural institutions, art and history museums and concert halls also are rethinking their community ties and how they use the space outside their four walls. In some cases, they’re remaking bland courtyards to create rare public gathering places. In other cases, such as at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, they’re trying to attract specific ethnic groups who haven’t traditionally been museum-goers.
“Expectations around what cultural institutions provide has changed radically over the last 15 to 20 years,” said Michael Maltzan, the Los Angeles architect behind the Segerstrom Center’s new plans.
“It used to be that a museum was a place that you paid your admission and went and saw the art and then left. Museums now are full-day destinations.”
PRIVATE SPACE IS THE NORM
Up the coast from Orange County, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History is planning its own inviting space for the public, though on a smaller scale than the Segerstrom Center.
When museum staff members started thinking about how to transform a drab courtyard in front of its entrance into something more lively, initially they pictured an extension of the museum itself, said Executive Director Nina Simon. After getting feedback from the community, that picture changed.
“‘We just need a town plaza. We need a public square,’” was the response, Simon said. The result is that the museum’s role will be more as a host, she said.
The museum hopes to have the $5 million project done by next summer. There will be two stages for performances. The ground floor of an adjacent office building will house seven “mini” restaurant kiosks and a bar. A back patio at the museum will be turned into a garden, with an interactive, xylophone-like musical installation. Plans are to have regular performances on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights in the courtyard. The music and performance will reflect the community and could range from mariachi singers to lectures to jazz.
“It’s been very well documented that there’s been a huge decrease in public space,” Simon said. “In America, we’ve gotten very used to the idea of privatized space.
“People are hungry for community, whether it’s a museum or a library or an arts center that provides it, they are absolutely seeking that.”
PUBLIC USE
Examples of this trend of museums and concert halls doing more than selling tickets are growing.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago hosts a farmers market on its plaza in the summer. Grand Rapids, Mich., built its new art museum, which opened in 2007, next to Rosa Parks Circle, the site of free lunchtime performances in the summer and ice skating in the winter.
When the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond expanded in 2010, it was left with less open area, which had been used by the public.
The expansion created a new entrance to the museum, filled with glass and light and more inviting, said Claudia Keenan, executive director of the museum’s foundation.
But, “What was in our outside space … was a parking lot.“ Not so welcoming.
The museum came up with a creative solution. It built a parking garage, but it’s so well hidden, under grass and ornamented with a waterfall, that the museum often has to point it out to visitors.
“It was a conscious decision to make the campus not just about the museum itself, but about the entire campus and make it open and welcoming,” Keenan said. “It’s absolutely about the visitor and how we engage with them,” even if that means people hang out at the museum’s campus without stepping inside the museum, which is free. Now, locals have been gathering on the green-topped parking garage for morning yoga sessions.
There are also groups of free-standing chairs outside for people to use when they want. The museum is discussing movies on the lawn and moving its jazz performances outside, too.
“The experience isn’t just within the four walls,” Keenan said. “We’re welcoming people to come and use (the campus) as they will.”
A DIVERSE AUDIENCE
Some institutions are reaching out to broader audiences through programs outside the museum exhibits.
The Bowers Museum, with its charming mission revival-style building, is a popular place for Latina girls to have their quinceañera photos taken. But, said Emily Mahon of the museum, “if you talk to a huge percentage of those people, none of them have come into the Bowers.”
“Santa Ana is one of the largest, if not the largest, Latino population in California. Also in Orange County, we have a large Asian population,” said Mahon, senior director of education for the museum. But the museum didn’t see that reflected in its visitors. “We really wanted to make sure we were reaching those all around us.”
So, with the help of a $1.2 million grant from the James Irvine Foundation, a philanthropic organization for California, the museum set out to reach two ethnic groups – Asian and Latino adults and senior citizens. Under the three-year grant, which ends in December 2016, the Bowers holds art classes and leads hands-on art projects at the museum and local Asian and Latino senior centers. The museum provided translators for Vietnamese and Chinese speakers for exhibit tours and hosted a Pacific Islands dance class for seniors.
“What we wanted to do was become a part of the community that we were serving,“ Mahon said.
A MORE INVITING PLAZA
Though they didn’t name specific ethnic groups, leaders of the Segerstrom Center said they also had Orange County’s changing demographics in mind when forming the plans for the new centers and redesigned plaza.
Demographics have certainly shifted in Orange County. In 1990, Latinos made up 23 percent of Orange County’s population. They now account for more than a third. The proportion of Asian people has grown, too. In 1990, Asians and Pacific Islanders, who were counted together in that year’s U.S. census, accounted for 10 percent of Orange County’s population. In 2013, Asian Americans alone made up 19 percent of the county.
Free performances on the new plaza, plus expanded dance education and community outreach off campus, are all in all meant to make the Segerstrom Center more inclusive, according to the center’s announcement. Terrence W. Dwyer, the center’s president, said the plans also will help build future audiences.
“You need to find a way to engage all communities,” Dwyer said. “What is valuable to different neighborhoods, different families … some of them will absolutely want to attend the things in our halls.” Others will be drawn to free performances on the plaza. “We are finding new ways to engage our neighbors.”
The makeup of potential visitors to cultural institutions is likely to become more diverse in age, ethnicity and economic status, Maltzan said. And those institutions are seeing their roles change – from presenting art or performance to being centers of cultural and community life.
With shady areas and especially an outdoor cafe, the idea is to give people a reason to stay and visit throughout the day, from lunchtime at the cafe to free evening performances, Maltzan explained. Making the wide-open plaza, which can be uncomfortable on windy, hot afternoons, more comfortable was the goal. The designs do that by breaking the space down into a more “human” scale he said, with the stage and green spaces.
EFFECTIVENESS
Making a “town square” or public space isn’t always a clear path for a museum or cultural institution, said Elena Madison of the Project for Public Spaces. The New York City nonprofit organization worked with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts on its plans and works with cities and cultural institutions to create public spaces.
There can be a tension between having a reputation for world-class arts and being a place that serves the community, Madison said.
“It’s not necessarily compartmentalizing, but seeing the arts mission and curation as a particular task as different from programming for the community,” she said. “A lot of the art institutions around the country are both reinventing and trying to balance these two missions.”
Museums and cultural institutions also have been designed without public space in mind in some cases, “as an island rather than an anchor,” said Cynthia Nikitin, senior vice president of Project for Public Spaces.
“Space restriction is an impetus,” she said. There is “the expense of new building and expansion … vs. looking at your totally unused parking lot.”
But people want those public squares, especially in a digitally wired world, said Maltzan, the architect behind the Segerstrom Center’s plans.
“As much as we’re connected digitally and as much as we’re connected virtually online,” Maltzan said, “there is also an increasing desire … to have very physical and authentic experiences at culture centers.”
Contact the writer: aboessenkool@ocregister.com
