Centers Strive to Make Artworks a Community Affair

What can Huntington Beach expect from its first community arts center, scheduled to open at 538 Main St. in 1990?

Naida Osline, the city’s cultural affairs supervisor who will be the center’s first director, said the 10,500-square-foot building--on which the city will spend $1 million in an effort to provide a “cultural magnet” for the downtown redevelopment district--will offer contemporary art, videos and performance art. Adventuresome stuff.

Such plans appear to belie the notion of a community art center as a place that the serious gallery- and museum-goer conveniently can ignore: a repository for pedantic realist art and half-baked efforts of local amateurs, with a room or two for pottery and macrame classes.

But how true is that stereotype in Orange County? Who’s in charge of our visual art centers, and how do these directors and curators reconcile their own tastes with the perceived needs and wants of their communities?

Unlike art museums, community art centers generally don’t have permanent collections, nor are they primarily concerned with creating exhibitions that reflect curatorial taste and areas of research. Instead, the goal is to reach the broadest possible audience--an approach that, not coincidentally, also provides a lifeline to the city budget allocations that keep these places afloat. Monthly visitor totals are the major “evidence” to city councils that the centers are doing their jobs.

Along with exhibitions and classes (ranging from art appreciation to arts and crafts), the centers offer special programs for children, even social events. Maintaining a good relationship with the community also means allowing local groups (art-connected or not) to use the centers for their own meetings and workshops, gratis or for low rents.

City-supported community art centers in Orange County include the Irvine Fine Arts Center, the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton, Mills House Art Gallery in Garden Grove (closed for renovation until May 1989) and the Brea Civic and Cultural Center.

Other nonprofit art centers, such as the Anaheim Cultural Arts Center and the La Habra Art Assn., are privately staffed and operated (although housed in city-donated spaces) and show only the work of their own members.

Community art centers situated in park-like residential areas (like the Muckenthaler, housed in a converted mansion) are the legacy of another era, when the “uplifting” ambiance of art was supposed to be separate from the hustle-bustle of daily life.

In recent years the trend has been to bring art to the people, whether they are congregating in shopping centers, civic centers or newly refurbished downtown districts. But being on the beaten track is not an automatic guarantee of success: In the hectic ‘80s, a cornucopia of other available leisure activities and shrinking hours of leisure time no longer permit the centers to maintain a passive, low profile.

Talks with staff at three of the larger and better-known centers suggests that there are several ways to serve up art to a broad public--and several publics to be served. The quality of the art in these centers varies, as well as the attitude with which it is shown. But the attempt to create snappy shows on a shoestring budget with a limited staff poses a challenge to curatorial ingenuity, no matter who’s in charge.

Today, we’ll look at the Irvine Fine Arts Center and the Muckenthaler Cultural Center; on Monday, we’ll see how Brea takes a markedly different approach to making art palatable to the public.

“I WANT VIEWERS to embrace a lot of things,” says Dorrit Fitzgerald, 37, the curator of the eight-year-old Irvine Fine Arts Center at Yale and Walnut avenues. “I came from a very, very traditional training and crossed a great bridge into the contemporary art world. It’s hard to cross that bridge without a lot of help. . . .

“Probably if I owned my own gallery I would show nothing figurative, nothing that had to do with pattern and decoration.” But at the center, she feels “like I’m on a mission. . . . It doesn’t feel like a personal compromise.”

The center operates on an annual budget of $527,000 from the city, supplemented slightly by private contributions and, this year, a state grant. The bulk of the money is gobbled up by salaries, administrative costs and expenses relating to operating and staffing the art and craft studios. Fitzgerald gets about $15,000 for the four or five exhibits she has been mounting in recent years (after a heavier schedule proved too much to handle).

One exhibit is always planned around “a nationality” (like the China exhibit last year), while another is intended for children (next spring, there’ll be an introduction to the Inuit and Eskimo peoples of Alaska). A third is the annual “New Juice in Orange County” show of work by little-known local artists (this year’s edition ends Tuesday), and a fourth is the Irvine Creative Arts Guild exhibit of traditional work by its members.

After five years of organizing exhibitions for the center, Fitzgerald, who has an M.A. degree in art from UC Irvine, has learned to look for art that has “educational value.” She likes to choose pieces that enlarge a viewer’s notion of what contemporary art can be--that it needn’t be framed or on a pedestal or in a traditional medium to be meaningful and evocative. And she tries to get viewers who don’t like a particular piece to understand why they don’t.

Interpretive panels on the walls, group discussions, lecture programs, special children’s tours and programs in the schools all are intended to contribute to the educational effort.

“New Juice” tends to be the most controversial exhibition. This year one visitor took offense at a painting of what he took to be an image of a dead infant Jesus. Ritual objects have offended viewers in other shows with supposed sexual content and a work with a hostile view of the police was the object of comment last year.

Usually, such problems lead to “interesting conversations,” says Amy Aspell, 46, the center’s new director. “They ask: ‘Why is this art?’ ”

Fitzgerald remarks humorously that people “don’t seem to mind getting upset.” She adds that the mayor “has become publicly supportive of controversial art.”

Indeed, after a rocky period several years ago, support from the city is now readily forthcoming. “The finance commission showed a high degree of understanding of the program,” Aspell says. “ . . . Now funding is approved by the City Council before quite a lot of other programs.”

Fitzgerald feels the city has allowed the center’s staff “a lot of latitude and independence” in creating the exhibition program. “They’ve just trusted us to make professional decisions.”

One of Aspell’s chief goals is to find more private support for the center, which receives regular, if modest, outside funding only from the Christmas bazaar held by the Holiday Fair Committee, an independent group, and from the Irvine Creative Arts Guild. (This year’s funding coup was an $8,500 California Arts Council grant to create an art program for hearing-impaired public school students.)

Fitzgerald has coaxed donations and “in-kind” services (like printing) from local businesses for specific exhibitions, but so far her efforts have netted “at most” $500 from a single company.

Other key aims include production of a brochure to alert the community to the center’s presence. Situated on what used to be a dead-end street, the center is still, as Fitzgerald says, “out of the way, not in the industrial-complex stream.”

Monthly attendance is about 2,000, which includes people enrolled in art and craft classes and attending special events as well as those who come specifically to see the exhibitions, on view 60 hours a week, including four evenings.

Surveys that Fitzgerald took in 1985 and 1986 revealed that the vast majority of viewers rate their art knowledge as “fair” to “excellent”; have at least a B.A.; live within a 15-mile radius of the center, and have never been there before.

That last item is pleasing to Fitzgerald. “Each show brings in 65% new people,” she says. “I always think: What kind of new group can I reach? Whom haven’t I tapped yet?”

AT THE MUCKENTHALER, which has weathered numerous changes of staff and general focus during its two decades of operation at 1201 W. Malvern Ave. in Fullerton, current thinking about exhibitions emphasizes contemporary art and tries to attract art-educated viewers as well as those with little background in the field.

“There’s a banquet full of wonderful art in Los Angeles,” says curator Norman Lloyd, 30. “And a lot of people are not familiar with it. We want to bring it to this area and also represent local artists.”

A staff member for 8 1/2 years, Lloyd , who earned his B.A. in sculpture from Cal State Fullerton. said he believes in showing art that “entertains yet makes you confront your own prejudices.” Lloyd is trying to develop closer relationships with museums and collectors so that future Muckenthaler shows can benefit from first-rate loans. Yet he realizes those shows will have to “appease the crowd and go assertively in the middle.”

As director Judy Peterson points out, there is a limit to what the center’s board of directors and eight-member program committee will accept. “They are a very conservative group,” says Peterson, 37. “We have to be sure of their feelings. . . . We try to get together on an exhibition schedule that will be challenging but sort of safe, too. It’s a city facility, and we have the City Council and the rest of the city to also consider.”

Sexual references in art have been problematic from time to time (a sculpture of a nude male figure in a recent show drew some critical comments that the staff heard “on the grapevine”) and Lloyd says political art would be hard to present unless it represented a “full spectrum” of beliefs.

The city supplies about half the annual $400,000 budget for the center; the other $200,000 comes from about 500 memberships, grants, in-kind donations and concessions at the adjoining outdoor Theater on the Green, which presents light summer fare.

As is the case in Irvine, most of the budget goes for salaries and administrative costs. Four exhibits (down from a total of eight, which had proven unwieldy) are mounted each year for $5,000 each--not a princely sum, considering that printing costs for the invitations (“our biggest P.R. tool,” Peterson says) can gobble up as much as $2,000 per show.

“The commission and City Council are very supportive,” Peterson says. “(The center) is a great place for them to bring dignitaries. But . . . to (justify) why the fire chief can’t have a new fire truck (with the Muckenthaler allocation), we walk this fine line of what to do.”

“We’ve been looking at thematic shows because they (can be both) approachable and challenging,” Lloyd says, noting an upcoming ceramic show and a recent exhibit of work in wood displaying both traditional and contemporary themes and styles. “Orange County Collects,” due in the spring, is expected to be the next “experimental” show.

Meanwhile, plans are afoot to set aside a portion of the basement area--also used for meetings and lecture classes (studio classes are held in a small adjacent building)--for additional exhibits of “possibly more challenging work” by local artists.

Lloyd and Peterson are aware that they reach audiences as diverse as local college students, visitors from Los Angeles, retirees and “every fifth grader in Fullerton.” But they’ve “almost given up trying to predict” which segment of the public will be attracted by which shows.

The annual National Watercolor Society exhibit can be counted on to bring in a crowd of 6,000 to 7,000. But although craft shows are usually very popular, an exhibit last spring of contemporary trends in glass brought in only 4,000 visitors--while some 7,000 people came this summer to see painting and sculpture by some well-known artists in “Trompe L’Oeil: The Magic of Deception.”

The staff does worry, however, that visitors are put off by the looming presence of the 63-year-old mansion--and that some of those who never drop in are simply unaware of its regally out-of-the-way existence.

“It’s not very approachable,” Peterson says, gleefully recalling her own first impressions of “a threatening big building on a hill with a big giant door that kinda creaks and a person staring at me behind a wood desk.”

Within the year, the Muckenthaler will be warmed by a new entryway, part of the $500,000 initial phase of an extensive renovation that eventually will add gallery space, classrooms and enlarged administrative quarters.

The project will be funded by private donations and matching funds from the city--additional proof, if any is needed, that attempting a more sophisticated approach can be compatible with civic support.