University Art Museum

Orange County wades into its second hundred years facing a summer that's filled with a wider range of arts and entertainment activities than ever. The Calendar staff of the Times Orange County Edition selects highlights among the hundreds of choices offered at the county's theaters, art museums, outdoor amphitheaters, concert halls, comedy clubs, movie theaters and elsewhere to stave off any summer doldrums that might dare to take roost.

Newport Harbor Art Museum associate curator Lucinda Barnes has submitted her resignation, citing personal reasons, effective in mid-October. Barnes will be the third key staff member to leave the museum since November, when director Kevin Consey resigned to become director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Chief curator Paul Schimmel left last month to become chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Diana du Pont, an art curator with a strong interest in photography and early 20th-Century and Latin American art, has become the curator of exhibitions at the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach. "She is a scholar with an extraordinarily gracious and winning personality who has a record of organizing fabulous exhibitions," said Constance Glenn, the museum's director. Du Pont, who was appointed after a national search, replaces Lucinda Barnes, who left Oct.

Los Angeles art collector Frederick R. Weisman has pledged $3 million to the University of Minnesota in the hopes that his alma mater's art museum will finally get a home of its own to be designed by Santa Monica-based architect Frank Gehry. "I went to the University of Minnesota and I was born in Minneapolis, so there's a lot of strong ties there," Weisman said. "Minnesota means a great deal to me, and the city of Minneapolis is important to me."

Well, out with the old year, in with the new. What's coming up on the visual arts scene in Orange County? Happily, some impressive-sounding shows--nearly all devoted to contemporary work--are on tap for the first six months of 1990. One important point to keep in mind: While it's great for our museums and galleries to host fine shows organized elsewhere, an institution's real prestige comes from having done the planning, thinking and legwork on its own.

Art Against AIDS, a campaign that has already raised $4.7 million for AIDS research, education and patient care through art auctions and other fund-raisers in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, returns to Los Angeles in September with a four-day auction featuring contemporary art from about 90 artists. Organizers of the Sept.

In his first West Coast museum show, British conceptual artist Richard Long today is scheduled to unveil the fruits of his just completed, 10-day residency at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. The artist, who began his residency Aug. 10, was still immersed in his work at press time, but museum director Hugh M. Davies told The Times what viewers could expect from the exhibit, which will be on display through Oct. 15.

For two months, artist Karen Kitchel braved fuel fumes, a scaffolding that shook with speeding cars and earthquakes, and the noise of rush-hour traffic to paint a mural of an idyllic setting that might be a commuter's dream of escape. The result is a 22x100-foot mural of a peaceful landscape on the wall of the northbound Hollywood Freeway at the Barham Boulevard exit. The life-sized depiction of a huge bluish/purple river surrounded by orange and red trees is entitled "Urban Eden."

The University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach is safely housed on the fifth floor of the library building and its reputation as a jewel in the state university system seems secure. But supporters of the museum fear that it is currently on very shaky ground. The Big One threatening the museum is a proposal to reduce by nearly half the museum's allotment from the university's general fund, which amounted to $530,748 in 1988-89. The proposed reduction of $250,000 is expected to abruptly decrease the staff, cut museum hours by as much as half, lower the number and budgets of exhibitions, jeopardize the museum's accreditation and its ability to win grants and maintain its collection and eliminate the possibility of new acquisitions.

The animals are restless in Richard Ross' "Museology" photographs. As occupants of natural history museums and taxidermy shops, the beasts are long dead, but life seems to twitch under their fur and feathers. It isn't physical life that's at issue, however, but the life of viewers' imaginations. Variously interpreted, Ross' color pictures can set off reactions ranging from indignation to glee.