Arts Fair Aims to Boost Valley Image : Critics Get a Cultural Shock

Luke Bandle, director of this year’s Pacific Rim Arts Festival at Warner Center Park, thinks the San Fernando Valley is a victim of its image.

“A lot of people I know think the Valley is full of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who drive huge Cadillacs with personalized license plates,” she said. “That’s ridiculous, of course. . . . I think it’s time we advertised some cultural and artistic diversity.”

Over the weekend, some of that diversity appeared in Woodland Hills as a loose network of performers and craftsmen set up shop for the two-day festival.

Representing cultures from 29 countries, the participants ranged from Australian weavers to vendors hawking Southeast Asian food. In a tent at the eastern end of the park, a series of singing and dancing groups performed everything from American Bluegrass to traditional Philippine dances. The Korean consulate provided tourist literature, and several martial arts groups gave exhibitions.

Local Sponsors

Bandle said the festival was the first of its kind in the Valley as well as the beginning of what could be an annual tradition. Although many of the participants came from outside the Valley, local sponsors included the Lockheed Corp., which donated $9,000.

The festival was created jointly by the city parks department and by a Valley-based arts group called the Cultural Foundation to draw attention to a massive cultural arts drive to be launched by the foundation this fall.

If successful, the drive will help finance a complex of theaters in Warner Center Park and a larger group of cultural buildings in the Sepulveda Basin. Drawings of plans for the cultural centers were prominently displayed in a booth at the center of the fair.

There were also booths selling bonsai plant arrangements and limestone replicas of Mayan temple carvings. A small children’s fair was set up at the eastern end of the park with various carnival rides.

Bandle said she was not disappointed by the small size of the crowd. “What we wanted this year was recognition,” she said. “Next year we’ll be bigger.”