Bank Will Close Doors of Gallery

COSTA MESA —  BankAmerica Gallery will close Aug. 11, the final day of its current exhibition, “Hockney & Diebenkorn: A Print Survey from BankAmerica Corporation Art Collection.”

The building that houses the gallery is owned by San Francisco-based BankAmerica Corp., which is negotiating to lease it to Unocal Corp. for a subsidiary, 76 Products Co. Earlier this month, BankAmerica employees were told the building must be vacated by Sept. 1, gallery coordinator Karen Brown said Thursday.

She said the bank’s corporate art program is “exploring options” to find another Southern California location for exhibitions of the corporate collection, which now includes more than 22,000 works of contemporary art.

But whether that site would be in Orange, San Diego or Los Angeles county is not known at present. One concern, Brown said, is that a new gallery be “proximate and easily accessible to bank employees.”

The 9,000-square-foot ground-floor gallery opened in 1989 in what was then the Orange County headquarters of Security Pacific Bank. When BankAmerica acquired Security Pacific--and its art collection--in 1992, the site became one of several galleries operated by the banking giant.