Arts Center Panel Choices Designed to Add Diversity

In an effort to enhance its diversity, the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s board of directors elected a woman, a prominent member of the Jewish community and a local educator to its ranks, it was disclosed Thursday.

Identities of four new directors chosen at Thursday’s closed board meeting were expected to be announced at a press conference today, but several board members said they include Leonard Shane, chairman of the Huntington Beach-based Mercury Savings & Loan Assn. and a local philanthropist long active in community and Jewish causes.

Others elected to the board were Joan Beall, who is a local arts supporter and wife of Donald R. Beall, president of Rockwell International Corp.; John R. Miltner, vice chancellor for university advancement at UC Irvine, and Timm F. Crull, president and chief executive officer of the Los Angeles-based Carnation Co.

All four were elected unanimously at Thursday’s meeting, which was attended by about 40 members of the board of directors, several board members said.

The resignation of Harvey Stearn, president of the Mission Viejo Co.’s California division, from the Center’s board of directors was also expected to be formally announced today. Stearn, who is chairman of the California Arts Council, said recently that he left the board in May to devote more time to the state agency.

Donald W. Shaw, chairman of the board’s nominating committee, said the Shane appointment was an effort to get the kind of involvement that could have averted the Center’s controversial decision to hold its one-year anniversary bash on Oct. 3, the concluding evening of Yom Kippur, the holiest Jewish holiday.

“The decision (reflected) insensitivity on the part of the board,” said Shaw, who assumed his committee chairmanship May 13.

“The point is that if we had had a broader and more diversified board, it simply wouldn’t have happened. In my mind, (the schedule issue) had something to do with showing us the importance of diversity. My goal as nominating chairman is to develop a board that reflects this community.”

The board’s makeup is essential to shaping the Center’s public image, Shaw said, thereby affecting “the bottom line, fund-raising and selling tickets.” Previously, directors’ comments on the board’s composition have stressed its fund-raising clout, not social diversity.

Through the nominating committee, Shaw said, he will seek to add Latinos, blacks and Asians to the board and to increase the number of Jews and women. For now, however, he acknowledged that besides Shane, the four new directors do little to enhance the board’s ethnic diversity.

‘Just a Beginning’

“I know that, from the ethnic standpoint, this is just a beginning,” said Shaw, a Newport Beach-based building contractor who was one of the Center’s key fund-raisers.

“But there is a woman, and by having an educator on there, we are reaching out to a segment of the community that has not been represented until now. I’m not interested in having a token Jew or a token black, but we want a wide variety of people who have ability.”

Shaw added that the appointment of UCI’s Miltner also marks the first time that someone has been named to the board who has not given a major cash gift toward its construction.

“I do not want membership on this board to be a reward for financial support,” he said. “I’ve talked this over with a number of people on the board, and I believe they support me.”

Crull’s nomination also broke a board tradition, Shaw said, in that he does not live in Orange County but in San Marino in Los Angeles County.

Another board member, who asked not to be named, said that Crull would “bring the Center expertise in national and international corporate funding.” Carnation is a wholly owned subsidiary of S.A. Nestle, a Swiss corporation. Crull, according to Carnation spokesman Dick Kurd, has “a longstanding interest in the arts.”

Miltner, who lives in Dana Point, has been vice chancellor since March, 1983. In 1980-83, he served as director of development for the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He said Thursday that he hoped to use his expertise in marketing and development to help the Center.

Shane, who lives in Newport Beach, also serves on the board of the Orange County Philharmonic Society.

Beall, who lives in Corona del Mar, also serves on the board of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Shaw said.