Craft, Folk Museum Goes to May Co.

Free rent isn’t the only reason Patrick Ela is happy about temporarily moving the Craft and Folk Art Museum’s operations into the nearby May Co. store. More gallery space is another.

And Ela, the museum’s director, already has big plans on how to use the space.

The craft institution will move down Wilshire Boulevard to the department store (four blocks west at Fairfax Avenue) while awaiting construction of its new home, part of a multi-use complex. The complex is scheduled to open in 1992.

Meantime, the May Co. location, with 2,500 square feet available for gallery use, will provide 500 square feet more than the original museum, said Ela, who wants to use the extra space to show correlation between traditional and contemporary craft and folk art.

The objects that traditional and industrial societies produce may appear to be unrelated, he said, but they definitely are not.

“We live in an industrial society and probably go to a nice craft show or a department store to get clothing or our vessels to drink from. A person living in a traditional society in Turkey or Brazil or Italy deals with those issues and needs in a totally different way, but they are the same issues. One of the most frustrating things is that we haven’t been able to do concurrent shows in each discipline to illustrate and explore those relationships.”

While still presenting changing exhibitions, Ela also plans to feature the museum’s permanent collection in the temporary site. He hopes to make more people aware that the museum is a collecting institution and to encourage donations of objects, largely because the new complex is to have 15,000 square feet for galleries.

“There are a lot of collections we have not acquired or accepted because we have not had the capability to deal with them,” Ela said.

GRANTS: Three Southern California museums have received grants for special exhibitions from the National Endowment for the Humanities. They are: the Museum of Contemporary Art ($300,000), the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County ($200,000) and UCLA’s Museum of Cultural History ($300,000). . . . Astro Artz, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit arts organization that publishes High Performance magazine of experimental art, has received a $40,000 gift from the James Irvine Foundation. The funds will be used to buy a new desktop publishing system.

CALLING ALL DOCENTS: The Southwest Museum is seeking English-speaking and bilingual volunteers for its docent training program. Weekday and weekend training sessions, both beginning this September, are available. Docents conduct tours for students and special interest groups. To enlist, call Barbara Arvi at (213) 221-2164.

PROVOCATIVE READING: A book that reportedly shocked the European architectural community in 1896 with an impassioned plea for a “modern” style suited to contemporary needs and ideas has been published by the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in the first English translation in nearly 90 years.

Otto Wagner’s “Modern Architecture,” (originally “Moderne Architektur”) proclaimed the dawning of an era and helped shape its development. It is being distributed by University of Chicago Press.