After five years in storage, the Millard Sheets mural “Pleasures Along the Beach” is again seeing the light of day.
The 1969 mural had been on the facade of a former Home Savings in Santa Monica for 50 years. In 2019, with the building facing demolition, the mural was painstakingly removed, in sections, and crated up.
Reassembled, it’s now been installed outside its new home, the Hilbert Museum of California Art in Orange.
When I visited in late January, at the museum’s invitation, the mural was in place but largely obscured behind three tiers of scaffolding.
“It’s been quite a project,” Brian Worley, the restoration artist, told me.
As careful readers will recall, I visited Worley last August as he made repairs to the mural. The Claremont artist had laid out the 41-foot-by-16-foot artwork on the expansive floor of what was once the Claremont High gym. There, I saw only enough of the mural to get a sense of it.
In Orange on Jan. 25, I met up with Worley and Mark Hilbert, the museum’s founder and namesake. Hilbert explained how he’d come to acquire the mural.
In Palm Springs, his wife, Janet, saw watercolor versions of several murals by Sheets, including “Pleasures Along the Beach,” which she’d liked best. Wouldn’t it be great, she suggested, if the real mural ever became available?
Hilbert phoned Tony Sheets, the artist’s son. Serendipitously, the mural was coming down imminently and needed a home.
Hilbert could provide one. The museum, which was established in 2016 and which is owned and operated by Chapman University, was starting a major expansion that is adding a second building, with a plaza in between.
Visually linking the two buildings, the mural is held aloft on a steel structure.
“This mural weighs 12 tons or thereabouts,” Worley said. “You need a lot of steel to support it.”
Anyone visiting the museum will walk under the mural. Orange’s Metrolink stop is within view of it. “I suspect this will become a…
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