The University of California, Irvine has officially acquired the Orange County Museum of Art, which will henceforth be known as the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art.
The university will now oversee the museum’s 54,000 sq. ft, $98m building, designed by Thom Mayne of the architecture firm Morphosis—inaugurated in 2022—as well as its permanent collection of more than 9,000 objects. The museum’s new name reflects the support of university patrons Jack and Shanaz Langson. Going forward it will also present works from the university’s Gerald E. Buck Collection and Irvine Museum Collection.
The former Orange County Museum of Art is located around six miles north of UCI’s campus. The university’s 9,000-sq.-ft Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute & Museum of California Art is located in an office building about halfway between the university campus and the museum. A planned shuttle service will allow students, faculty and staff to travel between the two art spaces and the campus.
As part of the university’s acquisition of the museum, the latter’s staff have now become UC Irvine employees and all planned programming through 2026 will remain in place as the merger unfolds. The university is also searching for a new executive director to succeed Heidi Zuckerman, who will leave when her contract ends in December after nearly five years in the role.
“UC Irvine is committed to ensuring that the region benefits from a world-class art museum that enriches the cultural fabric of Orange County, advances groundbreaking scholarship, nurtures the next generation of creators and thinkers, and inspires curiosity and connection across diverse audiences,” Howard Gillman, the university’s chancellor, said in a statement.
News of UC Irvine’s possible takeover of the museum first came to light last June, not long after the announcement that Zuckerman would depart. The takeover of the nearby museum fulfils a nearly decade-old desire for a university museum at UC Irvine to house its extensive collections—including the early Californian art it received in 2016 when the Irvine Museum dissolved; and the collection of more than 3,000 works amassed by Gerald Buck, a real estate developer, which it acquired following his death in 2013.
There are precedents for this type of merger between a university and an art museum in Southern California. In 2013 the chronically underfunded Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena merged with the University of Southern California. The museum was then able to close for more than a year to undergo an extensive renovation and retrofit of its 1929 building, which was based on a traditional Chinese palace. The Hammer Museum’s continued existence is also the result of a merger. In 1990 the museum’s founder, Armand Hammer, died shortly after it opened, leaving its future uncertain. The museum’s leaders looked to their neighbour in Westwood, the University of California, Los Angeles, which took over the institution in 1994.
