Hilbert Museum of California Art

The Hilbert Museum of California Art is a U.S. museum located at Chapman University in Orange, California. The museum's collection consists of more than 1,000 paintings^[1] – primarily watercolors and oil paintings by artists of the California Scene Painting movement.

The Hilbert Museum of California Art

Established	2015
Location	167 N Atchison St., Orange, California
Coordinates	33.7890°N 117.8566°W / 33.7890; -117.8566
Type	Contemporary art museum
Visitors	30,000 in 2019
Director	Mary Platt
Website	www.hilbertmuseum.com

History

The Hilbert Museum of California Art, located in the historic district of Old Town Orange,^[2] opened in 2016.^[3] It was founded by Mark and Janet Hilbert with a gift of $10 million,^[4] including a collection of more than 1,000 paintings valued at more than $7 million in 2015.^[5] The collection consists mostly of works in oil and watercolor created between the 1930s and the 1970s by artists – including Millard Sheets, Emil Kosa Jr., Phil Dike, Milford Zornes and Rex Brandt – of the California Scene Painting movement, a form of American regionalist art depicting scenes of everyday life involving landscapes, places, and people of California.^[6] The museum also features regular exhibitions of works of American illustrators, as well as the motion-picture production art and animation art created by many of the California Scene artists, who found work in the movie studios during the Great Depression.

Expansion

The museum expanded from its original 7,500 square feet (700 m²) to 22,500 square feet (2,090 m²) and reopened in February 2024 after three years of construction.^[7] The price of the expansion was planned to be around $14 million, and the goal is to have 100,000 visitors per year by 2025.^[3]