Individual Artists Are Left Out in Cold by COMBO

Last year, an artist with a dream could apply for money from the county fund-raising arm, the Combined Arts and Education Council, also known as COMBO.

This year, there is no point in applying. Money once earmarked for the projects of individual artists is no longer there. And so far, no new money has surfaced to take its place.

Such a prospect could leave the talented but unaffiliated producers so necessary to the growth of San Diego’s artistic community without hope.

A three-year National Endowment for the Arts grant earmarked for individual artists’ projects ran out in December. The $150,000, distributed by COMBO, was supplemented by $300,000 from the city of San Diego. The city has since taken back its contribution and earmarked it for the newly formed Cultural Arts Commission.

Blaming a lack of sufficient funds to award individuals, Michael Lyon, director of community relations for COMBO, said his organization now funds projects for groups with at least two years’ tax status as nonprofit companies. The semiannual allocations, to be announced Monday, include more than $100,000 to 25 groups.

Lyon said he lobbied the city to take over the job of funding individual artists.

But the Cultural Arts Commission, which had considered setting up four support levels--three of them for arts organizations with budgets of $2 million-plus, $300,000 to $1,999,999 and less than $300,000--indefinitely postponed plans for the level that would have addressed the needs of the independents.

Victoria Hamilton, head of the Cultural Arts Commission, said the commission will process the newly released applications for organizations, due back March 17, before addressing the issue of individual artists.

“The commission has recommended designing a special-projects category which might be a challenge grant or a one-time-only funding program for individual artists,” Hamilton said. “We have not identified any sources of funding, and we don’t know what the program is going to look like yet.”

Lynn Schuette, artistic director of Sushi Gallery, who works largely with what she calls “generative” artists (because they generate original work), believes the commission will take care of individuals--eventually.

Schuette said she’s optimistic because people are at least aware that there’s a need to fund individuals--a concept, she said, that wasn’t around before the NEA, the city and COMBO began distributing these funds three years ago.

“There is a whole institution of never funding the generative artist,” she said. “The generative artist keeps an artistic community healthy. But they’ve always been left out in the cold.”

Bary Odom, the new costume director for United States International University, found designing costumes for the current USIU production of “My Fair Lady” a challenge--if a sumptuous one.

In his designs, Odom battles the temptation to imitate the lavish, lauded “My Fair Lady” costumes of Sir Cecil Beaton, the artist whose works are now on exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Art.

Odom, whose own designs are wonderfully lavish, said he’s admired Beaton ever since Beaton photographed the costumes Odom supervised for the film “Nijinsky.”

“He was wonderful, inspirational and eccentric, just like the characters in ‘My Fair Lady,’ ” Odom said.

Even more challenging than this job, he said, was the time he designed for Luciano Pavarotti.

“He was so big. By the time you have the barest costume on him, you have 25 yards.”

And the sweetest job?

Fitting Elizabeth Taylor for her first wedding to Richard Burton.

“She wore a very pretty lemon chiffon affair with tendrils of flowers and leaves,” Odom recalled. “She was a nice lady, and a beautiful bride.”

John Highkin, the director of “Conversations in Exile” at the Big Kitchen Dinner Theatre, has a hot date after his twice-extended show continues this weekend. The assistant director on the Old Globe Theatre productions of “Tea” and “There’s One in Every Marriage,” will fly to Seattle March 7 to become the assistant director to Daniel Sullivan, artistic director of the Seattle Repertory Theatre, on Sullivan’s adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s “The Servant of Two Masters.” Highkin, who made the acquaintance of Big Kitchen owner Judy Forman when he prepared food, briefly, in her not-so-big kitchen, was originally to start work in Seattle this Wednesday. But Sullivan, whose theater is represented by two smash-hit New York plays (“Eastern Standard” and “The Heidi Chronicles”), had to fly to New York to transfer “The Heidi Chronicles” from Off-Broadway to on.

PROGRAM NOTES: Glasnost may be an oft-heard expression at the upcoming Soviet Arts Festival, but the concept does not seem to have traveled to the Soviet satellite of Czechoslavakia. Renowned playwright Vaclav Havel was sentenced to nine months in prison for showing up at a rally to commemorate a student protester of the Soviet-led invasion of Prague in 1968. . . . “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You” comes to the Lyceum Space March 3-April 9 via Catfish productions, a local independent company. The Christopher Durang satire of Catholicism was banned in St. Louis because it upset the Archdiocese there. . . . One of the co-authors of “Tango/Orfeo,” the newly named third production of the La Jolla Playhouse season, is Jim Lewis, who finished his graduate work at UC San Diego. His co-author, Graciela Daniele, was the co-director and choreographer of “Blood Wedding,” which opened the Old Globe Theatre’s season last year. . . . Sledgehammer Theatre plans to be back in the old Re-In Carnation Building on April 20 for “Endgame.” The audience will not follow the production around in the chilly warehouse as it did in the last Sledgehammer production, “Blow Out the Sun,” said Scott Feldsher, the company’s artistic director. Samuel Beckett’s play will be performed in a different, warmer part of the theater, and the audience will even get to sit.