Bowers Museum
Belltower Entrance
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| Established | 1936 |
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| Location | 2002 N. Main St, Santa Ana, California |
| Coordinates | 33°45′48″N 117°52′06″W / 33.7633562°N 117.86820520000003°W |
| Type | Art museum, cultural art |
| Director | Peter C. Keller |
| Website | http://www.bowers.org/ |
The Bowers Museum is a museum in Orange County, California. The museum's permanent collection includes more than 100,000 objects, and features notable strengths in the areas of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, Native American art, the art of Asia, Africa, and Oceania, and California plein-air painting.The Bowers organizes and hosts special exhibitions from institutions throughout the world, and travels exhibitions nationally and internationally. The museum has a second campus two blocks south of the main site, Kidseum, a children's museum with a focus on art and archaeology. The Bowers Museum and Kidseum are located in Santa Ana four miles south of Disneyland.
Ada Elvira Bowers and her husband, Charles W. Bowers, a late 19th-century Orange County citrus grower and land developer, donated the land on which the museum stands to the city of Santa Ana as well as $100,000 to build the museum. The building was completed in 1932 but was not fully operational for almost four years due to the economic downturn of the Great Depression. The Charles W. Bowers Memorial Museum finally opened its doors in 1936 as a city-run museum in a Mission Revival-style building devoted to the history of Orange County. The museum went through its first renovation beginning in 1973 adding a 12,500 square feet wing that brought the museum to 24,000 square feet. The expansion was kicked off by earlier bequests from Evelyna Nunn Miller and Nan Preble, with additional funding coming from a countywide drive, the Museum Foundation, and the city of Santa Ana.
In 1985 the Santa Ana City Council formed the Charles W. Bowers Museum Corporation to form a new governing board to run the museum and to handle fundraising. In 1986 a city study panel recommended an expansion in order to make the Bowers one of the region's top cultural centers and the anchor of a planned future arts district for Santa Ana. The museum became institutionally severed from city governance in this year, becoming its own nonprofit corporation. Many of the museum's galleries went dark in preparation for the renovation, finally closing in January 1989. The expansion plan included renovation of the original 1932 structure; a $6-million west wing addition adding over 51,000 square feet of space; and plans to demolish the 1974 addition.
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