Brody Grants Help Keep Artists on the Go

Sometimes, without the practical, there can be no sublime.

Manazar Gamboa, a Los Angeles writer and poet, travels 120 miles a day to teach creative writing to children in juvenile halls across the county. Without a car, he can’t get to work to earn the money he needs to pursue his own currently less lucrative Muse.

Recently, however, Gamboa’s green 1963 Dodge had to be replaced. Only a $2,500 unrestricted fellowship from the Brody Arts Fund, awarded in December, allowed him to do that.

“This grant was very important,” said Gamboa, beaming with appreciation. “I was able to get another car.”

Gamboa, now working on a series of short stories, was one of 40 1987 Brody Arts Fund grant recipients honored Thursday at a reception at the Music Center.

The Brody Arts Fund is an endowment established in 1984 by the California Community Foundation, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, to support emerging ethnic artists and art groups in Los Angeles County.

Nineteen literary and media artists and 21 nonprofit performing and visual arts organizations won a total of $100,000 last month in its third round of grants.

Each artist was awarded $2,500.

Organizational grants ranged from $1,500, given to the Toei-Kai classical Japanese music troupe, to $5,000, awarded to the Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Theatre, a predominantly black company.

“As Pope John Paul said (during his visit here last year), Los Angeles is a mosaic of the world,” Caroline Leonetti Ahmanson, a member of the California Community Foundation’s board of governors said Thursday. “We are the future; we are tomorrow.”

Through its Expansion Arts Program, the NEA has given $100,000 to the Brody Arts Fund annually since 1985 and plans to give that amount again this year. (The NEA defines expansion arts as those rooted in urban, rural, ethnic or tribal communities.)

The California Community Foundation must match these funds 2 to 1 with private dollars to create a permanent endowment of $800,000, thought it hopes to have about $1.2 million in the endowment by 1989.

The fund was named after the late Sidney F. Brody, a Los Angeles businessman and arts patron and former board chairman of the foundation, an umbrella organization for about 190 philanthropic funds. It was Brody who proposed that a grant structure for emerging arts groups and artists exist within cities’ community foundations.

Grant programs modeled after the prototype Brody Arts Fund now exist in 20 other American cities, Ahmanson said Thursday.

Hanay Geiogamah, director of the American Indian Registry for the Performing Arts, expressed appreciation for Brody’s idea and the community foundation’s efforts, as well as for a $3,000 grant, because, he said, grants given to emerging ethnic arts groups by the state of California are so small that “it’s almost impossible to do anything substantial with them.”

Geiogamah was referring to a grant program for emerging ethnic arts groups administered by the California Arts Council, the state’s arts agency. The council’s multicultural “entry” grants are $2,000 each for three consecutive years. “People keeping saying the future of arts in California will be in the ethnic community, but you can’t move up the professional scale with that kind of funding. It’s a pernicious cycle,” Geiogamah said.

While Brody organizational grants are annually given to arts groups (with budgets no larger than $100,000), working in a range of artistic disciplines, individual fellowships are given on a rotating basis. Visual artists will get grants in the next round.

Here is a list of 1987 Brody Arts Fund grant recipients:

ORGANIZATIONAL GRANTS:

American Indian Registry for the Performing Arts, $3,000.

Carson Community Symphony Assn., $2,500.

COMA (California Outside Music Assn.), $2,000.

Floricanto Dance Theatre, $2,000.

Gay and Lesbian Media Coalition, $3,000.

Great Leap, Inc., $5,000.

INCA, the Peruvian Music and Dance Ensemble, $2,500.

The International Assn. of Jazz Appreciation, $2,000.

Kanya Sanjo V Kabuki Dance Troupe, $2,000.

Korean Classical Music and Dance Company, $2,000.

Korean Philharmonic Orchestra, $2,000.

Koto String Society, $2,000.

L.A. Artcore, $2,000.

L.A. Poverty Department, $3,000.

Lola Montes and Her Spanish Dancers, $2,000.

Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Theatre, $5,000.

Pacific Asian American Women Writers-West, $2,000.

Repertory Dance Theatre of Los Angeles, $2,500.

Southeast Symphony Assn., $3,000.

Toei-Kai, $1,500.

The Young Saints Scholarship Foundation, $1,500.

FELLOWSHIPS ($2,500 each.)

LITERATURE:

Linda Frye Burnham

Michelle Clinton

Anne Finger

Manazar Gamboa

Leland Hickman

Velina Hasu Houston

Momoko Iko

Lynn Manning

Marlane Meyer

Wakako Yamauchi

MEDIA:

Jon Arvanites

Nancy O’Mullane Clark

Arthur Dong

John Esaki

Gary Glassman

Alexis Krasilovsky

Alile Sharon Larkin

Robert Nakamura

Art Nomura