Panel Takes Heat as City Arts Vote Looms Cultural Leaders Cry Foul on Funding Recommendations

On the eve of today’s City Council vote to allocate about $5.6 million among about 75 cultural institutions, a number of arts leaders and artists are accusing the members of a City Council committee of censorship.

The council members who make up the committee feel they have been unjustly accused and that they have instead been generous in approving all but one of the funding recommendations of the new Commission for Arts and Culture.

Meanwhile, members of the arts commission feel the council committee’s vote undermined the arts-allocations process that the commission painstakingly designed to be fair to all cultural groups.

Going into the meeting, commissioners are taking a wait-and-see attitude in hopes that the full council may alter some of the decisions made by the Public Services and Safety Committee on May 31.

The most hotly contested issue is the committee’s unanimous vote not to fund Installation, an avant-garde, experimental-art and performance gallery. Council members have said they were influenced by both Installation’s financial condition and one of two billboards it commissioned artists to paint downtown in April.

The billboard was an anti-racist slap at San Diego’s unwillingness to name the new convention center for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Installation, which has a $140,000 budget, had incurred a $12,000 debt, since reduced to $6,000.

Councilman Ron Roberts has drawn criticism in his personal belief that the city has no obligation to fund anyone putting art on billboards. Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Arts, said that there is room for artists to criticize the city and that billboards are perhaps less offensive when given to artists.

“I don’t like billboards per se, but if they exist, I much prefer artists using them,” Ollman said. “San Diego is a big city with broad shoulders and can handle internal criticism with a sense of humor.”

“Instead of supporting institutions or supporting the people who run them, the City Council seems to be getting involved in the way the art is presented, and that’s a terribly troubling prospect,” said Hugh Davies, director of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. “I am not qualified to make specific decisions about how they (council members) operate their affairs. And they are not qualified to make curatorial decisions.”

The feeling of council censorship has pervaded the arts community.

“I feel very strongly that the council should reconsider what they are doing,” said artist Anna O’Cain. “They’re focusing on what they don’t like. (Another artist) and I put on a children’s parade sponsored by Installation during Artwalk. Installation pulled 400 parents and their kids to that parade.”

The council members have been angered at the charges of censorship.

“It infuriates me to imply censorship,” said member Judy McCarty, who is on the Public Services and Safety Committee. “It’s not my motivation.”

Arts commission chairman Mickey Fredman “came in angry and got a response in kind,” McCarty said. “It was unfortunate.”

Perhaps the most serious issue to arts commissioners is the council committee’s vote to fund half a dozen organizations that the commission, for a variety of reasons, did not fund. The practical effect of that, said arts commissioner Ann MacCullough, was to undermine the funding process the commission had designed to be fair to all groups.

“I know that some of the council members are arts supporters,” said MacCullough, who was nominated by McCarty. “But it’s frustrating to me personally. I really feel the process has taken a beating. I’m just waiting to see what happens Thursday.”

Tom Corcoran, executive director of the San Diego Area Dance Alliance, praised 99.9% of what the City Council has done to date regarding arts funding. But he took issue with the council committee for approving funding for six organizations that are not recommended by the arts commission.

“What happens is whoever can twist arms the strongest and scream the loudest gets the money,” Corcoran said. “That’s not arts funding, that’s politics. We wouldn’t want to build our educational system on it, and we wouldn’t want to build art on it, either.”