| The Hilbert Museum of California Art | |
| Established: | 2015 |
| Location: | 167 N Atchison St., Orange, California |
| Type: | Contemporary art museum |
| Visitors: | 30,000 in 2019 |
| Director: | Mary Platt |
| Coordinates: | 33.789°N -117.8566°W |
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, 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.
The museum expanded from its original to 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.