Peninsula Art Center Seeks Transfusion of New Members, Money

Three years ago Maudette Ball, then executive director of the Palos Verdes Art Center, tried to tap the pocketbook of a prospective donor. She was rebuffed.

And none too politely.

The man said he “was not going to pay for a lot of rich people to stand around and have a glass of wine with their friends,” said Ball, who left the center last spring to pursue other projects.

Ball says that attitude about the venerable art center, one of the oldest cultural groups in the Los Angeles area, is shared by others.

It is also an attitude that Vincent Beggs, the organization’s newest director, will probably confront as he tries to accomplish two major goals--boosting the center’s sagging membership and its modest endowment.

To achieve those ends, Beggs, who was hired in August after working eight years as a private consultant for museums nationwide, says the center plans to do something it has not attempted in the past--aggressively recruit members from neighboring communities such as Torrance, San Pedro and Redondo Beach.

Although the private, nonprofit center has been a mainstay in the South Bay since its modest beginnings 59 years ago in a back-room gallery at the Malaga Cove Library in Palos Verdes Estates, Beggs said it is “not known as a first-rate, happening art center. We are existing in a vacuum. So it is my job to pop that bubble.”

When the center was established, it was the only focal point for art and culture on the peninsula and one of the few in Los Angeles County.

“Practically everybody in the community belonged to it because there were only 500 homes, if that many,” on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, said Millie Beckstrand, who joined the center in 1937 and has donated tens of thousands of dollars to it over the years.

“We had to make our own entertainment because there was very little art in Los Angeles. There was nothing around in the beach cities or Long Beach in those years,” she said.

The center is now housed in a handsome hillside complex at Crestridge Road and Crenshaw Boulevard that was completed in the early 1980s. Besides operating three galleries on the premises, it offers dozens of classes in subjects ranging from sculpture to printmaking to ceramics and the culinary arts.

Since 1976, the organization has also run a popular program for elementary schoolchildren in which trained volunteers teach art at South Bay schools. Center officials estimate that more than 10,000 children a year participate in the program.

Beggs, whose resume includes stints at the American Craft Museum in New York and, earlier, the Cultural Affairs Department of the city of Los Angeles, said the center relies heavily on a loyal group of about 500 volunteers, eight staff members and 35 full- and part-time instructors.

It also relies on dues from its 1,700 members, most of whom live on the peninsula, for about 25% of its annual operating budget, which this year will be about $320,000. The remainder comes from corporate and individual donations.

Although Beggs said there has never been a “potential crisis” in the center’s finances, Ball said that in her five years as director money was tight at times. Sometimes, she said, fund raising fell short of expectations. Under the center’s by-laws, it must operate with a balanced budget.

“We took a budget cut the year before last in order not to go into the hole,” said Ball, who now oversees a private art collection and works on a public arts program that a developer has proposed for a planned community in Orange County.

Ball, Beggs and Walter Burkley Jr., the center’s president, all say it needs to bolster its endowment and its membership, which has declined by about 20% in the past two or three years. These were the center’s goals even before Beggs arrived.

“One of the things stressed when Maudette (Ball) was hired was more community outreach and (trying) to get down off the hill and serve the broader South Bay community,” Burkley said.

“We have this beautiful facility, but we don’t have a very substantial endowment to support the facility,” he said. “What we are hoping we can do is have a major endowment drive within a short period of time.”

Beggs said the center will soon embark on a direct-mail membership drive that will target 50,000 to 60,000 homes in the South Bay. The center hopes to attract at least 1,000 new members from the campaign, he said. Membership donations will range from $35 to $1,000.

For the endowment drive, Beggs said he has sought the advice of professional fund-raisers. His goal is to increase the center’s endowment from about $400,000 to at least $2.5 million in the next several years.

Whether Beggs can accomplish this remains to be seen. Beckstrand points to competition in neighboring communities from other art centers that did not exist when the Palos Verdes Art Center was founded.

And Ball said the endowment and membership drives could be hurt by some people’s perception that Palos Verdes is a “polite, white, rich bedroom community.”

But Beggs said he is confident that the center can attract new members, largely by publicizing its facilities to people unfamiliar with them. “It is a marketing problem,” he said. “What we have here is a wonderful opportunity that has not been marketed properly.”