L.A. Artists Give Arts Endowment Vote of Approval

Performance artist Rachel Rosenthal was too far down on the list to address the City Council on behalf of a new Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts, but it didn’t matter. Outside chambers with a cluster of grinning artists listening in, she got her say: “Maybe I’ll stay in Los Angeles after all.”

However she soon dropped the maybe . Rosenthal decided she was staying.

“We were beginning to think this city was inhospitable to artists, but this vote will stop the flow,” said Rosenthal, who has not performed in the city since the Los Angeles Festival in September, 1987. “It will make the city much better than it is.”

The council’s 12-1 vote Tuesday afternoon granted the initial and key approval for establishing the endowment that could generate another $20 million for local arts organizations and artists. Overall, that will boost city arts funding to $24.4 million--or more than five times the $4.4 million the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, which is responsible for arts funding, now receives.

The additional funding will come from a 1% fee from private development projects, excluding residential dwellings, over $500,000, which is estimated to bring in $10 million; 1% of the cost of all city capital improvements from municipal buildings to street and road improvements, expected to bring $5 million; and $5 million from the city’s budget equivalent to an amount based on 1% of the 12% hotel tax.

With final approval expected next week and full implementation scheduled for the new fiscal year beginning next July, the vote has the potential of raising Los Angeles from 13th to fourth among 16 major U.S. cities in per-capita spending on the arts. Los Angeles currently spends $1.53 per person for the arts; under the new funding program the figure will rise to $7.39--behind Pittsburgh ($17.03 per person) San Francisco ($12.68) and New York ($8.87). Some of the new funding will be available in January.

“In one fell swoop, it puts our city on a par with others,” said Peter Hemmings, executive director of Los Angeles Music Center Opera.

For some, the council vote was the most significant marker on Los Angeles’ cultural scene since the Music Center opened in December, 1964. “I truly believe this will have a greater impact on the growth of theater in this town than anything we’ve seen in the last 20 years,” said Laura Zucker, producing director of the Back Alley Theatre in Van Nuys. “I believe it will catapult us into the 21st Century.”

Ernest Fleischmann, executive vice president and managing director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, said the council action was “long, long triple overdue. . . . It is important not only to organizations but also to audiences. . . . We must do a lot to make the arts more accessible, and to bring the various cultures in the city closer together.”

At the Museum of Contemporary Art--which was built in part with funds from the Bunker Hill redevelopment project--director Richard Koshalek said he hoped that money “will be directed toward funding programs and assisting artists with their work and projects. . . . We have built over the last number of years sufficient (museum) space and what’s desperately needed now is increased support for programming of the highest quality.”

While the council rejected the 1% fee on residences that would have brought an additional $5 million to the endowment and put Los Angeles’s per-capita spending just ahead of New York, no artists at City Hall on Tuesday were complaining. Rushing off to her studio for a rehearsal, Bella Lewitzky, choreographer of the internationally recognized Los Angeles company that bears her name, brushed aside any negatives: “I was delighted this got through. The bottom line is that this is the first time the city has really supported the arts.”

As the lead-off witness for the arts, Lewitzky was “tired of L.A. bashing,” citing the joke that asks the difference between Los Angeles and yogurt, with the answer being “yogurt has culture.” Aside from being able to “change that perception” by a vote for the endowment, Lewitzky pointed to the artworks of Latino schoolchildren on City Hall walls and said that through art what is fast becoming the “multicultural majority” can be heard.

If the vote was historic for the Los Angeles arts community, so were the grass-roots efforts and the standing-room-only presence of more than 300 Los Angeles artists. There were names like actors Marla Gibbs and Rene Auberjonois who spoke for the endowment, and those whom the larger audience does not know, like Squid Lipton III, an electric dulcimer player and his wife, vocalist Linda Keller, who are part of a San Fernando Valley musical ensemble called High Risk Group. As Keller was expressing a mix of delight and surprise at the outcome, she was also nursing her 3-week-old daughter, Frankie.

For five hours the artists waited patiently without lunch, heeding advice from their organizers not to groan or otherwise show displeasure, and not to applaud. When the final vote came in at 2:40 p.m., there was a restrained spurt of applause, prompting Council President John Ferraro to jest he’d have to have guards usher the “rowdies” out.

“The thing that was most heartening to me,” said Terry Wolverton, executive director of the Woman’s Building downtown, “is that this is really the first time the arts community has united behind a common goal. Often in the past everyone was trying to fight each other for little crumbs of the pie. Now everybody was united behind demands for a bigger pie.”

The politicians themselves took note of the changed arts scene. Councilman Joel Wachs, who spearheaded the endowment project, said so many artists had never showed up at a council meeting. And Councilman Michael Woo, mentioning that the vote was appropriately coming on the 25th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, noted that while “government leaders are discovering the arts, the artists are discovering the political process.”

Two key issues of concern remain. They involve the importance of funding ethnic, emerging and avant-garde artists or, as Councilwoman Ruth Galanter called them, “artistic oddballs who may in fact be the Impressionists of tomorrow,” and the necessity for politicians keeping their distance from the funding process, as Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky noted to applause from the audience. In the past, recommendations by artistic panels have been changed in Mayor Tom Bradley’s office and the council.

In one amendment the council unanimously endorsed promoting through the endowment the city’s “multicultural ethnic heritage” through the arts and funding “those who might not be part of the established arts community.”

The council also voted 10-3 that all arts funding go through the Department of Cultural Affairs rather than through a private nonprofit group as originally proposed. A spokesman for Wachs suggested this happened because the council has “a high degree of confidence” in the new cultural affairs chief, Adolfo V. (Al) Nodal, and also because the council did not want to give away its prerogatives.

“We’ll all be watching very closely to see how the funds are dispersed,” said Alan Pulner, a performance artist and painter. “I hope they’ll be dispersed among emerging artists who don’t have access to large funding sources.”

“My concerns rest with how they’ll spend the money, what panelists and advisory boards are chosen,” said L . A . Theatre Works’ Susan Loewenberg. “If they give money only to the major institutions, it won’t mean very much. . . . I don’t mean the Music Center and other major institutions shouldn’t get their fair share, but it’s vitally important that it also go to producers of new and original work that represents what is special for and about Los Angeles culture, with proper representation of our multiethnic culture. And it should be about excellence.”

Bill Bushnell, artistic producing director of the Los Angeles Theatre Center, which came into being with the help of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, worries what will happen “if city funding gets tight. How protected are these funds in a tight economy?”

Bushnell is also concerned about political interference and ignoring the judgements of artistic panels. “It wasn’t very significant (before) because not a lot of money was at stake. But now there will be significant money,” he said.

Still, arts leaders were aware that the endowment money could bring jobs. Gema Sandoval, director of Plaza de la Raza, told council members that artists want jobs. Later, Lula Washington, artistic director of Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Theatre, said she would like “to put my dancers on full-time salary so they don’t have to go out and do other jobs. I think that would greatly improve the quality of work.”

Rand Steiger, a composer-percussionist with California E.A.R. Unit, a contemporary music group, said of the council vote: “I think it sends an important message, both to artists in the city and outside, about our self-confidence.”

Sylvie Drake, Zan Dubin, John Henken, Barbara Isenberg and Lewis Segal contributed to this story.