The ambitious show not only celebrates the scores of artists who’ve lived, worked, and left an impression on the art landscape of the Central Coast; it also celebrates the museum that has, for five decades, put the works and the stories of those artists in the same room with locals and visitors.

To help tell the story, MMA’s executive director of the last four years, E. Michael Whittington, accompanied by the new communications director, Amanda Holder, conducts a walking tour of the seemingly empty museum. Little waves of eager energy poke through their polished professional demeanors. Maybe it’s because in addition to assembling the momentous, 18-months-in-the-making Made in Monterey exhibit and accommodating an inquisitive art neophyte on deadline, they’re hours away from the opening reception of the second component of MMA’s 50th anniversary – 50/fifty at La Mirada, a collection of 50 works which have been given or promised to the Museum.

“As visitors walk through, the main Work Gallery will pull them in,” Whittington says. Dimly lit, the spacious gallery looks empty from afar – it’s not. Paintings sit discreetly on the floor, leaning on the walls, easily overlooked from a distance. They surround the entire 1,800-square-foot floor space and include S.C. Yuan’s “The Sea,” Joan Savo’s portrait of her daughter, “Buff in Green Pants,” “IDRHA (Thrown Drapery)” by David Ligare and Edward Weston’s gelatin silver print “Monterey Cypress.” Walking by them is like walking across Monterey’s history.

“They’re going to be arranged in chronological order,” says Whittington. He pauses in front of a 4-foot painting, gilded by an ornate gold frame, of a redwood forest outcropping, the light spilling between the trunks. “Jules Tavernier, from France. He is almost singly responsible for bringing plein air painting here. It was a striking concept at the time – the artist would take his easel and go paint [the landscape] outside.

“We’ll show two Armin Hansen paintings in the Coburn Gallery – ‘Men of the Sea’ and ‘Nino.’ We removed a decade of grime; the varnish Armin used hasn’t held up well.” Among the biggest of the paintings in the room, the two Hansens will be hung with print details showing how they looked before the museum restored them.

Whittington talks briefly about the artist family of Bruton sisters and the modern floral paintings of Henrietta Shore with practiced ease.

“William Ritchel,” he continues, “painted near his magnificent castle in Carmel Highlands, which he built in the 1930s, by hand.” Like Robinson Jeffers? “Yes. They were contemporaries. This area, in the early [20th century], attracted artists, writers and Hollywood types.”

This would be a good time to mention the Monterey Art Colony, including the Carmel Art Colony – though, Monterey was first, Whittington offers, and he’s the guy who oversees the biggest repository of Monterey’s art history.

It was 1875. California had become a U.S. state, after Mexican rule, just 25 years earlier, so remnants of Spanish and Mexican culture and architecture still abounded. The Central Coast was fiercely beautiful but untamed – this was before the arrival of the railroad – and it was difficult to get to, much less traipse about in. But that didn’t stop itinerant French artist Jules Tavernier, on assignment for Harper’s Magazine, from forging through the Peninsula. What he saw stopped him; and he set up a home and studio in Monterey.

His bohemian artist friends visited him. They entertained with parties; they drank in the inspiring landscape; they painted the sumptuous sea and the enchanted forests. Those paintings, accompanied, perhaps, by breathless letters, made their way to the U.S. East Coast and to Europe, stirring more artists to come, including Raymond Yelland of the Hudson River school of artists, and former Tavernier student Charles Rollo Peters. They brought with them new styles of painting – Impressionism, post-Impressionism.

A confluence of events acted like a spark to this concentrated enclave of creative activity. First, the lavish Hotel Del Monte, built by Charles Crocker in 1880 and rebuilt after a fire razed it in 1887, was buzzing as a retreat. (The opulent building would go down in flames again in 1924, but was rebuilt and remains steadfast today at the Naval Postgraduate School.) Then, in 1906, the San Francisco earthquake struck, leveling the city and sending multitudes of artists packing. Many came here. More specifically, they came to Carmel, where the rents were cheap – thanks to rent control by the city’s visionary founders, Frank Devendorf and Frank Powers – and a robust art community was in full swing. These artists, along with Armin Hansen and E. Charles Fortune, showed and sold their work at the Hotel Del Monte’s newly opened gallery to the seriously moneyed crowd who, upon returning home, spread the news among their contemporaries about the untapped “find” in a place called Monterey. The rest is art history.

Back at MMA Pacific, Whittington adds a more personal and recent back story.

“I was always interested in history and archaeology as a child,” he says. “So I went into a field that allowed me a lot of opportunities to explore ancient cultures and history. I worked in Latin America. I was at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina – pre-Columbian and African art. I’m an art historian by training. I came to the [MMA] in 2005 – it will be four years in May.”

He’s also worked at organizations in charge of contemporary art, and wielded his historian training in the realms of fundraising and outreach. “Everything in my past experience translates to my duties here,” he says.

The job requires that kind of all-in commitment. He heads a full-time-equivalent staff of 18, works with a governing board of 15, marshals a dedicated army of 150 volunteers and 1,439 members; and oversees an operating budget of $2.3 million. Throw in exhibitions, acquisitions, committees, two impressive facilities, and the position starts to look less enviable. That hasn’t stopped others from aspiring to it. In its history, the museum’s various board members have shuffled through a playing field of presidents and directors.

Some left their mark. Elise Jerram wrote in the Monterey Peninsula Herald (prior to the name change in 1990 to Monterey County Herald), that President Avery Tompkins paved the way for “an elegant building functionally designed for museum purposes,” presaging MMA’s art-sensitive, climate-controlled environment at La Mirada. According to an April 18, 1984 article in Coasting (a precursor to the Monterey County Weekly), June Braucht served 3 1/2 years in the ’70s, then stepped down. Three directors later, she was coaxed back for another six-year stint before retiring; she was followed by Tom Logan, who steered the ship for most of the ’80s and presided over the renovations at the Pacific Street building (which began in 1929 as a mortuary). Kate Dietterle played a key role in acquiring, naming and showing La Mirada to the public, and designed much of its rhododendron gardens.

Other directors barely left a trace.

Whittington looks poised to land in the company of the former. Under his leadership, the museum has landed significant grants from the James Irvine Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation; gotten board approval for the acquisition of seven significant works that fill gaps in the collection; crafted, with a broad coalition of people, a five-year strategic plan; and hired a top-rate staff, including a coup – bringing from New York’s Whitney Museum chief curator Marcelle Polednik, who went on to organize the extensive Seeing Ourselves exhibit of 150 iconic photographs from the George Eastman collection and Angela Strassheim’s solo show.

“We feel very strongly, as stewards, an obligation to not only present works that are historical, but to provide a showcase of work that’s created right now,” Whittington says. “We can’t be frozen in time. Balancing keeps the museum alive. This community is passionate about visual arts; people here talk about artists like people elsewhere talk about football players.”

That kind of passion was planted early on by the Monterey (and Carmel) Art Colonies, but partly harvested by an organization that would later – much later – become the Monterey Museum of Art.

May 11, 1909. The American Federation of Art was founded at a convocation at the National Academy of Arts to promote and disseminate art across the country. The pedigree and power of AFA members like The Smithsonian Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, American painter William Merrit Chase, and industrialist and banker Andrew W. Mellon ensured that its ambitious artistic vision would be properly fueled by money.

For the next few decades, AFA assembled traveling exhibits, hosted conferences on art and expanded nationally, first on the East Coast, then the West. Lured to Carmel by Hansen and Paul Whitman, the AFA chaptered the Monterey Peninsula branch of the AFA here in April 1959, with 17 local members. In 1961, things started to coalesce. The local chapter bought a 3,200 square-foot former schoolhouse in Carmel to hold meetings and workshops, helped launch the inaugural Artists Studio Tour, an event that still goes on today – while putting on art exhibits at Monterey Peninsula College’s Library Gallery and even the Salinas Valley Savings-Loan building.

In the late ’60s to early ’70s, the burgeoning chapter changed its name to the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, moved to a permanent home at 559 Pacific St. in Monterey, opened with regular hours to the public, further streamlined its name to the Monterey Museum of Art, and earned accreditation to the American Association of Museums (the only art museum between San Jose and Santa Barbara to do so to this day). The maturing organization was looking more and more like the operation we know today.

“Two galleries will be devoted (in the Made in Monterey exhibition) to photography,” Whittington says. “Some of the most important in Monterey: the Group f64, headed by [Ansel] Adams, [Edward] Weston and [Imogen] Cunningham. They were at the vanguard of photography, from mere documentary to fine art, using black-and-white, natural and man-made forms for abstraction, and close cropping.

“Upstairs, this gallery will be dark,” says Whittington, continuing the tour on the top floor in the John H. Marble Gallery. There is nothing in the room, but he paints a vivid picture. “The Nocturne [night or veiled light] paintings inside will be illuminated and the sound will draw you in. Robert Danziger created a sound sculpture; you’ll hear the sea, the bells of a church – inspired by the Carmel Mission – horses, footsteps. It’s all designed to carry the experience forward.

“If you wait long enough, you’ll hear the sound of a baby crying. That was inspired by Charles Rollo Peters’ ‘Castro Adobe,’” says Whittington, referring to the 1902 Nocturne painting downstairs, a night scene on a sagging little dwelling, coolly reflected by a pond in front, with one window aglow with light. Whittington describes it as “moody” and “romantic.”

“It’s on a natural promontory, with a view of the ships in the [Monterey] harbor,” he says, then mentions casually that it’s La Mirada. Say what? Even Holder seems surprised. This quaint, sad, adobe fixer-upper is the precursor to today’s 8,000 square-foot, three-acre, rose-and-rhododendron-garden-lined slice of paradise known as La Mirada? How?

The answer starts in 1836, the date of the earliest legal documentation of the house that would later become a small palace of art. It names as the owner the widow of a soldier named Jose Antonio Castro. After a succession of owners, screenwriter and author Gouverneur Morris, a great grandson of the Revolutionary War scion, took possession in the 1920s and rebuilt it for his wife, Irene. Together they would host Hollywood and literary celebrities including Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, Sinclair Lewis and his wife Dorothy Thompson (though she would write to H.L. Mencken of her stay that the Peninsula was “full of cypresses, polo ponies and morons. We shake its dust from our feet in a few days”).

Frank and Zizi Work were the last private inhabitants of the prized property; Frank deeded it, and most of the antique furnishings seen there today – the triple-tiered Sheraton table, Bavarian china patterns, V’soske rugs – to the Monterey Museum of Art in 1983. In the ’90s, when local benefactors Jane and Justin Dart donated to the museum an abundance of Hansen works, there wasn’t enough room to exhibit them. So Jane started raising money for an expansion, the renowned architect Charles M. Moore, who did his Princeton masters thesis on Monterey adobes, was tapped to design and build it, and the soaring Dart Wing was built. The story of the innovative and historical building is told in a richly detailed museum booklet, The Story of La Mirada.

But La Mirada – Spanish for “the view” – is best experienced, as in the Gouverneur Morris days, with flowing wine and in crowds during one of the quarterly Arts Lounge parties put on by the museum’s Young Contemporaries group, or at an opening reception. Speaking of which…

“We have to go now,” Holder says apologetically. Then, cheerily: “I have to kick you out.” The museum’s Chief Curator Marcelle Polednik, Assistant Curator Helaine Glick, and Executive Assistant Cynthia Biediger have arrived to whisk Whittington and Holder away to La Mirada, where the 50/fifty opening reception awaits.

In the light of late afternoon, walking toward La Mirada – past the willow-lined edge of Lake El Estero – feels like a procession of a fortunate society. Once past the Florence Yoch-designed open courtyard and the glimpses of Old World stateliness of the Gouverneur Morris Room on the left and the sitting room on the right, visitors cross a threshold into the clean and modern zone of Charles M. Moore’s Dart Wing. It’s an ideal venue for contemporary art installations like the organic and abstract objects of Christel Dillbohner’s 2008 Skimming the Surface, or the intimate and unsettling photographs of Strassheim.

Currently it’s filled with a medley of dressed-up, silver-haired patrons: Friends of the Museum members, donors and volunteers – a familial crowd in which everyone knows practically everyone else. Like Craig Johnson. He’s an affable kind of guy, to-the-point but gracious; not someone you would think of as the president of the museum’s all-volunteer board of trustees and a donor.

“Compared to San Francisco,” he says, “we don’t have the resources they do, so we have to be more focused and dynamic. Mike and Marcelle have done a terrific job of that; they have great contacts in the art world. I think people will be excited by Made in Monterey. They’ll see things they haven’t seen before.”

Another reception attendee gives a different perspective. Local artist Johnny Apodaca, also represented in 50/fifty, serves as a bridge between the plein air tradition of Monterey’s past (“at the turn of the century,” he says, “you weren’t considered an artist until you came to Monterey”) to abstract expressionism, which he’s recently returned to.

“It’s an honor to be included in this show,” he says. “The Monterey Museum of Art is a treasure, a jewel to the community: It’s who we are. The new staff is taking us into the 21st century, and they have incredible honor for the past.”

One indication that an organization is creating something special can be gauged in the number of dedicated volunteers it can corral. Take Betty Mahieu, a sweet and spry elderly lady who’s lived on the Peninsula since 1993, and has been an MMA volunteer since.

“I love museums,” she says, sitting in the Dart Gallery. “I started as a docent at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in 1965. But it’s like a family here. You can have that feeling at a smaller museum. Art piques my curiosity; I’m a terrible snoop.”

But perhaps the most significant person in a museum is the patron – the person who walks through that door to see art, and represents the community in which the museum lives. One such local patron is Chris Essert. A gray-haired, moustachioed man, he rides his bicycle everywhere across the county (sometimes hopping a ride on the bus), wears an overstuffed backpack and t-shirts, and often looks disheveled from his journeys. But wherever there’s art in the county, he is there. Including La Mirada’s 50/fifty.

As the reception winds down, Essert talks knowledgeably about MMA’s collection, about an upcoming show that highlights the interconnectedness between New York and San Francisco; he recalls attending an Asian art exhibit that MMA put on 25 years ago. “They’ve brought their best foot forward on this one,” he says. “I’m really impressed. I don’t know of any other collections like theirs. Santa Cruz has the Museum of Art and History, but nothing as extensive. As far as I’m concerned, these guys are the premier museum in the tri-county area.”

It’s the end of the night at La Mirada. 50/Fifty looks poised for success, judging by the appreciative crowd. In the refined atmosphere of the drawing room, the conversations buzz at an easy and energetic level. Whittington, Polednik, Holder and director of development Robin Venuti assemble in a close circle. This core group is largely responsible now for steering the next phase of the museum’s future, an unwieldy task considering the shake-up the economic contraction has caused in public and private cash flow. But for the moment, they look relieved and comfortable. The opening reception for 50/fifty ended just minutes ago; Made in Monterey is three weeks away. And few but these four and a dedicated staff know the work that has gone into it all. Or the work that is to come.

MADE IN MONTEREY is previewed 6-8pm Wednesday, April 15, and 5-7pm Thursday, April 16 (during Art After Hours), and opens 11am-5pm Saturday, April 18. Monterey Museum of Art-Pacific, 559 Pacific St., Monterey. Wed preview: $10/non-member, free/member; Thu and Sat: free admission; regular museum admission (includes both locations): $5/general, $2.50/student and military with ID. 372-5477, http://www.montereyart.org. Regular hours are 11am-5pm Wed-Sat, 1-4pm Sun.