THE YEAR OF THE MULTICULTURAL

This has been a year marked by turbulence and change on California’s arts-politics landscape: the resignation of the director of the California Arts Council; the realization that tightened budgets might be the rule rather than the exception; skirmishes over the location of a council satellite office in Southern California. Still, the majority of the attention was captured by the “minority” issue.

Out of that issue emerged the part-watchdog, part-policy-making board of artists and arts administrators, known as the Multicultural Advisory Panel to the California Arts Council.

The 15 panelists, unpaid except for expenses, include a Native-American visual artist who teaches at UC Davis, a Los Angeles black film artist and an Asian-American musician from San Francisco, as well as administrators from institutions such as Everybody’s Creative Art Center in Oakland and Plaza de la Raza here. Excepting actress Carmen Zapata and perhaps Mary Jane Hewitt, co-director of the Museum of African-American Art on Crenshaw Boulevard, their names are not well known.

Now the multicultural panel, whatever individual changes are made along the way, promises to become a fixture on California’s arts-politics scene for the foreseeable future.

Although the members have been acting as a unit for just seven months, the panel’s work--indeed, the very fact of its existence--has eclipsed other council activities in 1985.

This rather hastily formed body managed this summer to overturn proposed spending policies for the special budget line on ethnic-minority or multicultural programs, then won unanimous approval from the council for its own substitute package. (Multicultural is the preferred term these days because, as Hewitt notes, minority “infers inferiority.”)

In the process, the multicultural panel has had to overcome some internal conflicts involving the ticklish issue of geography (which also has an impact the state’s broader constituency whether it’s arts budgeting or water rights)--the conflict between North and South, between Northern Californians and Southern Californians, over who gets what.

“We’re trying to heal that breach,” Hewitt said in an interview recently. “We can’t afford to be at each other’s throats. We’ve got to learn to speak with one voice because we don’t have that kind of strength.”

Initiated with the advice and consent of Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the key Ways and Means subcommittee which funds the arts council, the panel obviously has political clout. Waters also helped choose some of the key members, who in turn, with a formal request from the arts council, brought in others.

In a sense the multicultural panel became inevitable after the National Endowment for the Arts deferred California’s basic operating grant last February. Although the state eventually got its money, the NEA’s sharp criticism aroused concern in Sacramento. The endowment had cited the CAC’s “insufficient programming for the state’s large and growing ethnic groups” and also pointed to “the (across-the-board) need for more substantive and qualitative contact between the council and its artists and arts organizations.”

In its design for spending this fiscal year’s appropriation of $164,000 for separate multicultural activities (along with a specially earmarked NEA matching grant bringing the total to about $200,000), the panel is convening a two-day conference the weekend of March 16. It will be held at the scenic state facility at Asilomar in Pacific Grove. Participants, some of whom will be on travel “scholarships,” are expected to reflect a broad tapestry of multicultural artists and arts administrators from a variety of disciplines and strata of organizations. They include representatives of groups that have already received CAC funding (under its artistic-and-administrative-development program) and those which need to learn how to qualify.

Most of the current fiscal 1985-86 special multicultural funding will go toward technical assistance through the newly formed (and multicultural) California Consortium for Expansion Arts, based at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco. Mission director Oscar Maciel is a key spokesman on the multicultural panel.

“Four years ago, sitting there on Subcommittee Four on state administration, Ways and Means, I discovered that the California Arts Council did not have any serious multicultural participation,” Waters noted in a recent interview. “I am very supportive of the arts. I worked very hard to expand its funding. And it was absolutely ludicrous for me to be in a position where I could help and not bring to their attention a big missing component.

“I am convinced,” the legislator continued, “that there may not have been any overt attempt to keep multiculturals out, but there was no creative activity to make sure they were included.”

“Many multicultural organizations,” Waters noted, “were not in a funding attitude. They didn’t have proposals (for funding) and shied away from bureaucracy. Others didn’t understand how to fight for their own best interests. They just assumed that if they just sent in their proposals, everybody would see what great things they were doing. They didn’t approach it as a highly competitive activity.” So, Waters took it upon herself to bring the matter to the art council’s attention “and in the absence of the council’s ability to be creative, I just sat down and forged a way to make it happen.”

Originally Waters proposed to the council staff that this year’s multicultural budget be spent on test programs in Los Angeles County. She believed that there had been an imbalance, to the detriment of Southern California, in arts funding. However, when a highly organized group of multicultural organizations in Northern California balked at the test program in the South, Waters backed away. “Fair is fair,” Waters said easily. “While I’m a Southern California legislator, I want to be fair, I want to take care of the needs of the state. . . .”

Waters also backed away from the location fight for the Southern California office, opting to leave it where it was in the Van Nuys State Office Building instead of moving it closer to downtown. That issue aroused a hornet’s nest last spring between then-director Marilyn Ryan and herself. Ryan won key support from State Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Van Nuys), Waters’ counterpart on the Senate Finance subcommittee dealing with the CAC.

“I decided not to get into a big hassle with him,” Waters noted. “Even though it’s (Van Nuys) not the best location, I can let that ride. You have to decide how many fights you can fight. The most important priority was to get the multicultural community organized so that they are a force to be dealt with, and give them the money by which they can develop their technical-assistance expertise, and then where the office is becomes less important.

“There’s just so much time you can give between South Africa and everything else. And Van Nuys is not South Africa,” Waters said.

In the new year, multicultural matters once again loom as a major focus. There are reports that for the arts council seat recently vacated by Ann Getty, Gov. George Deukmejian is giving serious consideration to finding a male Latino from Northern California who is, of course, Republican. (At the moment, six of the 10 members are female and only two are Northern Californians. Council members also include one black and one Latino.)

There is some concern that in the ongoing battle for limited dollars, there might be increasing tension between the so-called prominent organizations (those whose annual budgets are more than $1 million) and the multiculturals. But on both sides there is a concerted effort to avoid internal battles within the state’s arts community and simply try to enhance the size of the overall budgetary pie rather than quarrel over individual slices.

On a much smaller scale, the multicultural panel itself will have to do that too. It has just run out of expense money.