ART : From ‘Swan Lake’ to Santana, It’s a New Season : Museums to Offer a Low-Key Slate of Exhibits This Fall

With a dearth of major exhibitions or positively-must-see shows, the fall art scene in the county is curiously low key.

The major offering at the Newport Harbor Art Museum is a permanent-collection show (Oct. 6 to Jan. 1), a museum’s way of filling up the galleries when nothing else is scheduled. Still, some prime acquisitions will be on view for the first time. Among them are works by Ed Keinholz, Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode and Bill Viola (“The Theater of Memory,” a video installation that fancifully re-creates the workings of the brain).

At the Laguna Art Museum things are hopping; they just don’t look terribly enthralling. “EVERYDAYLAND: Imagined Genre Scene Painting in Southern California” (to Oct. 23) may be the best of the lot. The premise is that certain painters choose to render scenes from daily life in unrealistic, subjective ways--not exactly news, but maybe an eye-opener for viewers who wonder whether contemporary art can have relevance in their lives. Included in the show is work by Douglas Bond, D.J. Hall, F. Scott Hess, Gretchen Lanes, Bobby Ross, Jon Swihart, Barbara Thomason and the county’s own Frank Dixon.

The prime offering at the museum’s South Coast Plaza satellite (Oct. 20 to Jan. 8) is “The Hirsh Collection: Part II,” the second installment of prescient purchases by the late Pauline Hirsh, who acquired works of many important California artists early in their careers. The show includes pieces by Alexis Smith, DeWain Valentine and Allan McCollum.

At the Modern Museum of Art in Santa Ana, “Mano a Mano”--abstract and figurative work by 16 Mexican-American and Latin American painters from the Bay Area--has the earmarks of an invigorating show. Organized by the Art Museum of Santa Cruz County and the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery at UC Santa Cruz, the exhibit includes work by such individualistic painters as Beatrice Hablig, Manuel Villamor, Peter Rodriguez and Rupert Garcia (Oct. 8 to Jan. 5).

Jack Ox’s “visual language for music” is the subject of an exhibit at the Fine Arts Gallery at UC Irvine (Oct. 8 to Nov. 5). Ox, an American woman who lives in Cologne, selected Anton Bruckner’s Third Symphony as the inspiration for a recent series of layered paintings that incorporate the architecture and surrounding Alpine landscape of Vienna, where the composer lived. Variously arranged and colored fiberglass strips relate to the melody and rhythm of the score, parts of which the artist hand-paints on each work.

The Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach has spruced up its formerly spotty exhibition roster this fall with three substantial shows. Top picks are “The Lorrin & Deane Wong Collection” (Oct. 11 to Nov. 18)--which includes work by a wide cross-segment of Americans and Europeans, including Donald Judd, Ed Moses, Christian Boltanski and Marina Abramovic--and “Sabina Ott,” drawings and paintings by the young Los Angeles artist that mingle objects from diverse sources, leaving the resolution of disparate images up to the viewer (Nov. 22 to Dec. 30).

The biggest source of fresh new work this fall will probably be “Photography: Inside Out,” a series of exhibitions honoring the 150th anniversary of photography and the Orange County Centennial. The obvious route--of extending soggy tributes to community shutterbugs--was avoided. Instead, all but one of these shows (a historical exhibit at the Bowers Mobile Museum) were handed to knowledgeable and opinionated guest curators.

Already on view are Charles Desmarais’ “Suburban Visions, Middle Class Dreams” at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton (to Sept. 25) and Mark Johnstone’s “Bare Facts, Sly Humor,” at the Irvine Fine Arts Center (to Oct. 20).

Next in the series (Sept. 15 to Oct. 9), Orange Coast College photography instructor John Upton curates “New Photography in Orange County” at Rancho Santiago College. Giving himself a broad definition of the county photographer--those who live, work or maintain a studio in the county--Upton has selected the work of 10 artists, including Susan Rankaitis, Eileen Cowin, Arthur Taussig, Laurie Brown, Jerry Burchfield and Mark Chamberlain.

“Re: Presentation-Conception/Perception” at the Fullerton Museum Center (Oct. 15 to Dec. 18) is the handiwork of Howard Spector, former director of the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies. The show emphasizes non-traditional photo formats, including sculptural pieces, multiple-image works, installations and slide projections, with a crew of mostly little-known California and out-of-state artists.

At Chapman College (Oct. 25 to Dec. 2), “New From Tokyo: 11 Japanese Photographers” will offer black-and-white and color prints ranging from “straight” images to conceptually oriented work, selected by Mayumi Shinohara, a free-lance curator in Japan.

Finally, for those who like their art with a patina of age, the Bowers Museum has dug out of its storage a group of early 20th-Century landscapes, still lifes and portraits by the likes of Childe Hassam, William Joseph McCloskey, Guy Rose, William Wendt and Edgar Alwyn Payne (Oct. 14 to Dec. 31).