GETTY GIVES $2 MILLION TO 2 INSTITUTIONS

The J. Paul Getty Trust has awarded two Los Angeles cultural institutions gifts totaling $2 million, trust President Harold M. Williams said Friday.

The Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and the Southwest Museum each will receive $1 million over two years in unrestricted, unsolicited capital gifts. The awards will be formally announced today.

“Both institutions are growing in significant and important ways,” Williams said, “and make very valuable cultural and intellectual contributions to this community with museum programs that benefit the community at all ages.”

For three years the Getty Trust has supported visual arts-related institutions in the Los Angeles area “whose objectives complement our own,” Williams said. Awards are given exclusively to institutions undergoing capital campaigns.

The Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion--with a campus near USC, two others in the United States and one in Jerusalem--is a 109-year-old institute of higher learning. The college plans to add its $1-million gift to a $15-million fund to build its Cultural Center for American Jewish Life, slated to open here in 1990 on a 15-acre site in the Sepulveda Pass. Included in plans for the new center is an expanded Skirball Museum, now located on the campus.

“We are really very moved by this wonderful gift from the Getty Trust,” said Rabbi Lee T. Bycel, dean of administration of the institute’s Los Angeles campus.

Patrick T. Houlihan, director of the Southwest Museum in Highland Park, said the Getty gift will augment the museum’s $3.4-million endowment, which the museum hopes to increase over the next two years to more than $8 million.

Houlihan called the Getty grant a “kind of affirmation of the importance of the museum, the cultural mix of the community, and a strong statement in support of ethnic arts.”

The Southwest Museum’s holdings, according to Houlihan, comprise about 700,000 objects including artworks, artifacts, printed materials and photographs related primarily to North American Indians as well as Latino culture and western Americana.