It was a monumental year for the county art scene, with monumental crowds drawn to exhibits of ancient scrolls and human cadavers, a monumental controversy about a new North County monument, the long-awaited opening of Encinitas' Lux Art Institute, the ongoing remodeling of the Oceanside Museum of Art, and the debut of Richard Serra's monumental cube sculptures at the expanded contemporary art museum in San Diego.

Here's a look at some of some of the art happenings of 2007.

Exhibition news

North County's biggest art news in 2007 was the opening of the Lux Art Institute, a unique studio/gallery/educational center in the planning stages for nearly nine years. The hillside complex at 1550 S. El Camino Real features a live-in studio where artists in residence will create site-specific work in full view of the public. The 12,700-square-foot studio/museum/office building opened in November and fundraising is under way now for a 25,000-square-foot second phase.

Meanwhile, construction continued all year on the Oceanside Museum of Art. A major expansion project will transform the original 5,000-square-foot building (designed by architect Irving Gill in 1934) to a blocklong, 32,000-square-foot museum center. The remodeled project is scheduled to open in March of next year.

In other North County exhibition news, Carlsbad's Cannon Gallery offered diversity in 2007, with multi-artist juried exhibits, a focus on local women artists and a show of photos featuring decaying Nazi concentration camps. The Mingei International Museum -- North County opened exhibits of origami, paper hats, and kinetic toys; and the California Center for the Arts, Escondido Museum, debuted numerous exhibits by North County artists that emphasized the region's multicultural heritage.

Museum overview

The county's most notable exhibit in 2007 was the "Dead Sea Scrolls," which has drawn more than 400,000 visitors since it opened at the San Diego Natural History Museum in June. Heavy ticket demand led the museum to extend the exhibit by a week (it now closes Jan. 6).

The six-month, $6 million exhibit features 27 of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the books of Leviticus, Isaiah, Job and others. The scrolls, discovered in a Judean hillside in 1947 and considered the greatest archaeological find of the 20th century, are 2,000-year-old parchment and papyrus scrolls that contain portions of almost every book of the Hebrew Bible and the Apocrypha.

The San Diego Museum of Man capitalized on the Dead Sea Scrolls crowds by renaming its new antiquities exhibit. "Journey to the Copper Age: Archaeology in the Holy Land" opened in June and it features photographs and artifacts from ancient smelting sites in Israel and an ore site in Jordan. It runs through Monday.

In January, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, finished the expansion of its downtown location on Kettner Boulevard and began offering free admission to the downtown space for ages 25 and under.

Founded in 1941 in La Jolla, MOCA has operated a downtown gallery since the late 1980s. In 2004, the museum began renovating the Santa Fe Depot's 1915-era baggage area and began building a new three-story building designed by architect Richard Gluckman. The new buildings added 30,000 square feet of additional space to MOCA's downtown campus. Located steps from the Coaster train tracks, the new museum space is marked by six huge cube structures by sculptor Richard Serra. The museum also announced the acquisition of six new works by installation artist Robert Irwin, who's the subject of a major show now under way at its downtown location.

A unique sculptural exhibit that drew tens of thousands of visitors during the year was "Bodies: The Exhibition." The exhibit of skinned and posed human cadavers, along with hundreds of preserved and plasticized human organs, skin, bones and body parts, opened in May at the old Robinsons-May department store in La Jolla. Despite some controversy over the source of the bodies (some critics have suggested these may be the bodies of Chinese prisoners), the exhibit was so popular it has been extended through mid-January.

San Diego Museum of Art's exhibits ranged from the populist (portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz's personal photo collection) to the contemporary and avant-garde (the current "Animated Painting" show, featuring 14 contemporary animation artists, was named one of the top 10 U.S. museum exhibits of 2007 by ArtInfo.com). One of the art museum's most popular shows of the year was the ravishing summer exhibition "Waking Dreams: The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites From the Delaware Art Museum."

And the San Diego Museum of Man upgraded its evolution-themed "Footsteps Through Time" exhibit with some help from Carlsbad-based Invitrogen Corp. and a grant from the National Science Foundation. The exhibit's new interactive elements detail the scientific method, stem cells, mitochondrial DNA and animal cloning. The 7,000-square-foot "Footsteps Through Time" exhibit is the only comprehensive human evolution exhibit on the West Coast.

Public art controversies

While art displayed in museums is not immune to controversy, its ticket-buying audience is usually open-minded about art. But put the art out in the public eye and everyone's a critic.

That was the case in July when the village of Cardiff unveiled "The Magic Carpet Ride," a $92,000 bronze-and-granite sculpture of a teenage boy riding a surfboard by Riverside artist Matthew Antichevich.

From the moment of its unveiling, the sculpture was derided by surfers and the public, who described the figure's pose as awkward and effeminate. The figure has been trashed in online blogs and in newspaper letter submissions, and in August, pranksters even dressed the sculpture in a bikini and wrestler's mask. The final insult came in November, when the San Diego Architectural Foundation awarded an "Onion" to the controversial sculpture at its annual "Orchids and Onions" ceremony.

And Escondido artist Robert Ferguson courted controversy once again, when he displayed one of his paintings of a male nude outside his newly opened gallery on Grand Avenue this month. Two years ago, one of Ferguson's nude paintings was removed temporarily from a window display at Escondido's Distinction Gallery following complaints from passers-by. Ferguson says his paintings are discreet, but he will consider moving the nude paintings to interior walls of the gallery.

Other news

• With the rise of Internet commerce, many gallery owners have decided to reduce their overhead by closing their galleries and selling everything online. Other galleries moved from retail to wholesale operations to reduce overhead, like Escondido's Lillian Berkley Collection, which closed in January after eight years on Grand Avenue. And Encinitas' 101 Artists' Colony closed its doors in April. And San Diego's David Zapf Gallery, home to the work of many North County artists, closed last spring.

• Palomar College introduced a new director for its Boehm Gallery in February.

Joanna Bigfeather, an artist, curator and arts administrator, was hired to run the on-campus gallery. Bigfeather is the former director of the Institute of American Indian Art Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., and the American Indian Community House Gallery/Museum in New York City.

Bigfeather has written numerous books, catalogs and articles, has served as a juror for the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, and her artwork is in the collections of the Smithsonian, Heard Museum and Brooklyn Museum, among others. An American Indian of Western Cherokee and Mescalero Apache heritage, she lives on the La Jolla Indian Reservation in Pauma Valley.

• Bigfeather was one of many artists who lost their homes and art studios to the wildfires in October. Another was Fallbrook artist Madelynne Engle.