Praise for New Director : Art: Former colleagues of the Laguna museum’s incoming leader, Naomi Vine, applaud her dedication and qualifications.

LAGUNA BEACH —  Naomi Vine, named the new director of the Laguna Art Museum on Tuesday, will come to Orange County from New York City in March with an impressive academic, museum and management background--and a chorus of arts people singing her praises.

Des Moines Art Center director Michael Danoff was director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago during Vine’s six-year tenure as its director of education in the 1980s. He recently called her senior citizen’s educational program “a national model,” citing its “intensity of training and exposure” to art.

Marilyn Hoffman, director of the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, N.H., remembers Vine’s work as a consultant on a $5-million capital campaign in the early ‘90s. Part of Vine’s job was to interview community members about their image of the museum.

“If you are Mr. and Mrs. Big Bucks, you are interviewed for every capital campaign,” Hoffman noted last week. “People came to us and said this was the best interview, by far. (Vine) has a way of getting people to warm up to her.”

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Elizabeth Barrett, development associate of the Parsons Dance Company--a modern dance troupe in New York City that Vine has been managing on an interim basis--said she finds Vine “incredibly qualified. She has shown incredible dedication, even though (due to the interim nature of the job) she knew she’d only be there for a few months.”

Vine’s other arts positions have ranged from teaching art history (at the University of Wisconsin) to serving as associate director for programs and curatorial affairs at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. She has done fund-raising work for the American Craft Museum, where she was chief development officer, as well as for clients of C.W. Shaver and Co., a New York management and fund-raising consulting firm.

Her grounding in art history at the University of Chicago--her master’s thesis was on “Art and Language: An Analytical History of Concept )Art”; her doctoral dissertation was on the late all-black paintings of abstract artist Ad Reinhardt--is coupled with a solid business background.

She completed the summer course of the Museum Management Institute at UC Berkeley and earned an MBA in 1992 from Emory University in Atlanta, where she was a member of the Beta Kappa Sigma honor society and wrote her thesis on “Financial Management Systems for Nonprofit Arts Organizations.”

In the June, 1993, issue of Art in America magazine, she reviewed “The Economics of Art Museums,” a report from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her review addressed such delicate issues as the marketing of art from both an art historian’s and a businesswoman’s perspective. (Traditionally, art historians have bristled at using the language and tools of marketing.)

“Museum professionals must assert their own authority as specialists who know best what to do,” she wrote, in regard to expertise “which the public does not already have but might well find valuable. . . . But if museums seriously intend to attract larger and more demographically diverse crowds, they will have to offer something that this broader public wants. . . .

“Ironically, in the business world, marketing is seen as the most humanistic of economic endeavors because its practitioners are concerned with insuring that customers are happy and satisfied.”

On the phone Wednesday, she was asked about that last statement, which might seem to disregard the deliberately provocative, unsettling nature of contemporary art.

“It’s the museum,” she answered, “that needs to think a little more about the visitors and what they expect, whether they’re equipped with what they need . . . so they can have the experience intended for them. If you don’t have the basic educational tools, it’s difficult to see what the message is.”

Although there is “no typical museum visitor,” Vine said, “if a museum functions as I hope it would, the ideal is someone of any age, sociological background and level of familiarity of works. (The museum would) provide a spectrum of information for every level of interest.”

A Seattle native, Vine--who said Tuesday that she used to visit Laguna Beach as a child, en route to calling on cousins in San Diego--was the first choice of the Laguna museum’s seven-member search committee and the unanimous choice of the museum board to replace former director Charles Desmarais, who was dismissed 10 months ago. Board president Teri Kennady said Tuesday that Vine “has met 34 board members’ needs and expectations of what a director should be.”

Vine, 45, accepted a three-year contract offer at a salary that has not been disclosed. Desmarais, who was making $88,000, currently is teaching art history at Cal State Fullerton and serving as consulting director of the Robert Gumbiner Foundation for the Arts in Long Beach.

* Times staff writer Zan Dubin contributed to this report.