The expansion was kicked off by earlier bequests from Evylena Nunn Miller and Nan Preble, with additional funding coming from a countywide drive, the Museum Foundation, and the city of Santa Ana.

[10] 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.

[15] In February 1990, the Bowers' board president announced a new direction for the museum's collection and programming as "the cultural arts of the Pacific Rim".

[18] Since then, the museum's collections, programs, and exhibitions have continued to feature Orange County history, but now reflect the demographics of larger Southern California by celebrating its diverse cultural makeup, with major emphasis on the fine arts of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific Rim.

The Bowers serves more than 80,000 school children annually through docent guided tours, community outreach programs, and participatory art classes.

"Spirits and Headhunters: Art of the Pacific Islands" highlights masterworks from the three cultural regions of Oceania: Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia.

Included are larger-than-life masks, finely crafted feast bowls, objects associated with the secretive Sepik River men's house, shell and feather currency, magic figures and tools of the shaman, objects related to seagoing trade routes, personal adornments, and weapons of warfare.

The works portray the evolution of Chinese technology, art, and culture, and showcase examples of bronze vessels, mirrors, polychrome potteries, sculptures, porcelains, paintings, ivory carvings, and robes.

The exhibition also includes objects depicting imagery from daily life that show the intensity of West Mexican figurative work and that are naturalistic in form like the famously plump Colima dogs.

The museum board's chair, Anne Shih, who emigrated to the United States from her native Taiwan in 1979, has developed key contacts with Chinese cultural authorities that have given rise to several exhibitions, beginning with "Secret World of the Forbidden City: Splendor From China's Imperial Palace" (2000), an unprecedented exhibit of 350 treasures from China's Imperial Palace that included statues, pottery, paintings and other pieces, as well as recreations of rooms in the Imperial Palace.

[31] Considered one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century, the tomb complex featuring thousands of terra cotta warriors provided a deeper knowledge of the historical site and showcased 120 sets of objects, with 14 life-size figures.

This international exhibition featured 120 bronze, jade, and gold objects from the village of Sanxingdui, and its highly sophisticated culture unlike any other in China.

This exhibition of antiquities, coins, prints, drawings, and modern ephemera delved into the reality of the Queen of Sheba by including archaeological evidence from the ancient kingdom of Saba in modern-day Yemen.

Midway through its run, about 70 protesters gathered outside the Bowers to complain that the show failed to address the fraught history of Chinese domination of Tibet since the 1950s, including its crushing of a 1959 uprising and ban of the Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhism's spiritual leader.

[38] "The Baroque World of Fernando Botero" (2009) included more than 100 works of art dating from the 1950s to the present and compiled from the artist's personal collection—many of which had never been seen in public.

The Colombian artist, Fernando Botero's unique style is recognized and renowned worldwide for its voluminous forms and sensuous figures.

Discovered in the late 20th century in Ethiopia, Lucy is the oldest and most complete adult fossil of a human ancestor that has been found in Africa to date.

Organized by the Bowers and drawn from the permanent collection, the exhibition included pottery, wicker objects, beaded items, textiles, and sculpture.

"[41] "The Virgin of Guadalupe: Images in Colonial Mexico" (2016) presented sixty works of art, including paintings, sculpture, engravings, silver, textiles, and other devotional objects from both privately and publicly held Mexican collections.

This was the first exhibition presented at a museum in the United States that focused on the depiction of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Colonial art.

It took a holistic view of the religious and social aspects related to the Virgin, showing how she has become a unifying symbol for the people of Mexico and the Americas.

Acting on evidence gathered during a five-year undercover probe, investigators seized artifacts which had allegedly been illegally excavated from sites across Southeast Asia and the Americas, smuggled into Los Angeles and donated to the museums.

The museums' exhibitions, programming, and operations are member supported and funded through contributions from individuals, corporations, and foundations.