Millard Sheets’ glass mural Pleasures Along the Beach (1969) adorns the façade of the Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University in Orange, CA. Its brightly colored California scene, portraying sunbathers, birds and sailboats, beckons visitors to the newly expanded 22,000-square-foot museum.

While the Hilbert Museum has many art pieces on display and in its collection, museum co-founder Mark Hilbert is always “on the hunt” for new works. Recent acquisitions include paintings by Chicano artist Alfredo Ramos Martínez, early drawings by Richard Diebenkorn and Diego Rivera and a 2012 drawing of a woman wearing a Luchadora (Mexican wrestler’s) mask by Chicana artist Judithe Hernández, who addresses colonialism and sexism in her work.

Within the museum’s two buildings and 26 galleries, 300 treasures from the permanent collection and temporary exhibitions are housed, many of them visual narratives of California life from the late 19th century to the present. “There are so many gems of storytelling here,” says Hilbert, admiring Bradford Salamon’s 2016 painting Monday Night at the Crab Cooker, which captures Hilbert, curator Gordon McClelland and the artist enjoying a meal at a popular local restaurant. “The stories depicted in the California scene paintings are about California life, about the artists and the lives they led, and feature people in towns, cities, harbors, houses and ranches. They are inspired by such American scene painters as Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood and Edward Hopper.”

Fletcher Martin, Bucolic, 1938.

The museum’s permanent collection documents 150 years of California art and life. One of the earliest paintings, Looking up Broadway in Los Angeles (1913) by John Robson, provides a look at Downtown LA with “Red Car” electric trains, automobiles, fashionably dressed people and movie palaces. Frank Ashley’s The Barefoot Sixties (1968) features hippies in a San Francisco cafe, and Frank Romero’s Closing of Whittier Blvd. (1990) depicts a feud between police and the local lowriders during the 1970s in East LA. Other highlights on display include Fletcher Martin’s Bucolic (1938), which shows a quiet, reflective couple seated on the ground, its style evoking Mexican muralism, and Phil Dike’s Sunday Afternoon in the Plaza de Los Angeles (1939), a lavish painting of people enjoying themselves in a downtown park, just before World War II.

Three inaugural exhibitions feature scenes and styles prevalent in 20th-century California. The Millard Sheets display comprises 40 of his colorful works, another gallery of Emigdio Vasquez’s work presents mid-century social realism art of Orange County Chicano life, while “A Matter of Style: Modernism in California Art” showcases 50 abstract and semi-abstract works by a variety of artists, including Helen Lundeberg and Stanton Macdonald-Wright.

Hilbert and his wife Janet, a co-founder, have been collecting California art for more than three decades. When they purchased a 1950 watercolor in 1992, they didn’t realize that it would be the genesis of a major museum. They fell in love with the landscape and began studying the painting’s origins, meeting with art historians, and traveling to Europe to understand the styles and forms of work by the Old Masters. With their new passion for art, the Hilberts acquired additional California scene paintings and began acquiring narrative art with a figurative California style, becoming the defining feature of the future Hilbert Museum.

Frank Romero, Closing of Whittier Blvd., 1990.

As their collection grew and museums around the country began borrowing their paintings, the Hilberts decided to create their own museum. They approached Chapman University in 2014, proposing to donate $3 million in paintings and $3 million for the museum building. The original 7,500-square-foot institution opened in 2016 in Old Towne, Orange Historic District.

Dedicated to engaging and inspiring visitors of all ages, and advancing appreciation of California through art, the Hilbert Collection has grown to more than 5,000 works, including Disney production art and paintings by Mary Blair, Rex Brandt, Sandow Birk, David Hockney and numerous others.

With the museum’s collection growing and thousands of visitors every month, the Hilberts realized three years ago expansion was a must. After two years of design and construction, and a grand opening this past February, visitors from SoCal and beyond are now charmed by the venue’s many illuminating scenes of our Golden State in the refurbished museum.