McGee Likely 1st Curator of New Museum

Mike McGee, programs coordinator at the Laguna Art Museum, is likely to become senior curator of the new Modern Museum of Art in Santa Ana later this month.

Modern Museum co-director Ann Resnik said Tuesday that the prospects of hiring McGee look “very good. All aspects of his contract have been negotiated.”

She would not discuss salary proposals.

McGee has administered the education and exhibition programs at Laguna Beach since January, 1986. The Modern Museum opens Saturday.

“I like the people (at the Modern Museum), and I like starting things,” McGee said. “I like what (Resnik and co-director Robert Abbott) are going to try and do.”

At Laguna Beach, McGee said he believes he’s “learned as much as I can, and I’ve done what I’ve set out to do--administer, organize and develop the educational programs here.”

McGee said that as senior curator at the Modern Museum, he would be working “with the assumption there will be guest curators coming in to work on specific shows.”

Meanwhile, the search for a Laguna Art Museum curator, begun last spring, has netted more than 70 applicants. The winning candidate, to be chosen from three finalists, will be announced “within the next two weeks,” museum director William Otton said, adding that “Mike elected not to apply.”

The museum has not had a curator since Bob McDonald (now director of the De Saisset Museum in Santa Clara) was fired in June, 1985.

Sue Winter, hired fresh out of the Museum Studies Program at Cal State Long Beach, is the museum’s new registrar. Dinah McClintock, who was assistant education coordinator at the Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles, will start Oct. 1 as full-time curator of education.