New Muni Director a Man With a Mission

Edward Leffingwell strides into the room in a hurry. He’s between meetings, following a bulging appointment book through the day, and he’s feeling harried.

Since he arrived from New York last July to become director of visual arts of the city’s Cultural Affairs Department and head of the Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park, the 47-year-old bachelor hasn’t stopped running from one meeting to another.

He bought a car and found an apartment in his first five days in Los Angeles, and he’s worked through about every weekend since then.

“There’s no separation between art and life,” he says with a laugh, commenting on both his schedule and his philosophy.

Indeed, Leffingwell hopes to pump new life into art at the Muni, with a high-gear program. “That’s what I came here to do,” he says, spilling off a list of nascent projects--a community outreach program, a joint show with artists from Los Angeles and Mexico City, an artist exchange program with Brazil, traveling exhibits that would promote Los Angeles art countrywide and abroad.

His first exhibition opened Tuesday. “One of a Kind,” serial imagery by Larry Bell, Eric Orr, Nicholas Wilder, John Coplans and others will run through Jan. 15. It will be the first show in what he hopes will be an annual series examining the principles of art-making. Next March he plans a photo exhibit focusing on the worldwide refugee problem.

Together the two shows represent disparate sides of Leffingwell’s personality--the worlds of academia and the street.

Says Alanna Heiss, Leffingwell’s director at his former post of chief curator and program director at PS 1, Institute of Art and Urban Resources in New York: “If you met him for drinks you might find yourself sitting in the Polo Lounge with champagne or on city steps with a bottle of Dos Equis beer.”

When asked about his political leanings, Leffingwell laughs and quotes a verse from an early Bob Dylan song, “I’m liberal to a degree. I want everybody to be free. But if you think I’d let Barry Goldwater move in next door and marry my daughter, you must think I’m crazy.”

What does that mean for art in Los Angeles? “I think he’ll be looking at a lot of California art that hasn’t been looked at,” Heiss says. “He’ll take an independent stance from other institutions. He’s not going to join a bandwagon.”

In Leffingwell’s view, his mandate is drawn from the partnership of art and life. On the intellectual level he worries that art in the United States is separate from popular culture. “We don’t have a Renaissance. Art history is a textbook history,” he says. Therefore, he feels, it is incumbent on galleries and museums to project contemporary art into the mainstream of everyday life through their support.

He also sees a need for a closer link-up between the city and its artists. At a refugee-assistance center he met a Salvadoran photographer who had negatives but no access to a darkroom. He didn’t know there were three photo facilities with darkrooms run by the city, Leffingwell points out.

But Leffingwell staves off any view of art-making in Los Angeles as regional art. “I’m not interested in people’s ideas about regionalism. I’m interested in artists who have ideas,” he says.

His taste in art is catholic. At PS 1, an abandoned school that became one of New York’s early alternative spaces, he oversaw projects in half a dozen disciplines from painting to video. At the University of Cincinnati, he earned an MA degree in art history, studying 19th-Century American portraiture and landscapes; during the ‘60s, he worked as an artist, producing minimalist paintings, assemblages and photo montages.

In the late ‘70s, Leffingwell spent a couple of years in Los Angeles. He worked with Abstract Expressionist sculptor, John Chamberlain, also here for a stint, doing free-form film scripts that were never produced and contributed to the Los Angeles Free Press, the predecessor of L.A. Weekly, writing about everything from tattoos to federal reforms of the penal codes, and scouting the city for the best burgers.

“I like L.A.,” he says with gusto. “The light, the food, the people.”

Then, suddenly, Leffingwell looks at his watch and leaps up to rush to his next appointment. Leaving the room as quickly as he entered, he calls over his shoulder, “seven days a week, no separation between life and art.”