Minorities as Part of Picture : Arts: The new director of the Public Corporation for the Arts is looking for more ways to include black, Latino and Asian cultures in the growing Long Beach art scene.

Sandra L. Gibson, who became executive director of the Public Corporation for the Arts earlier this month, plans to include minorities in a field of activity that in this city has been traditionally dominated by whites.

“We have people out there doing wonderful work that is unknown,” said Gibson, 34, whose background includes traces of all three of the city’s major ethnic minorities: black, Latino and Southeast Asian. “We need to find a vehicle for these cultures.”

The vehicle may be the nonprofit agency she heads. It is charged by the city with promoting the arts in Long Beach.

“We expect her to set the direction,” said Bernard Landes, president of the agency’s 21-member board of directors appointed by the mayor. While Gibson is answerable to the board, Landes said, the body traditionally gives wide latitude to its executive director in determining policy.

Promoting the artistic endeavors of ethnic minorities is not a new idea in town. The PCA’s own list of grants awarded to local artists and arts organizations this year includes the Cambodian Art Preservation Group, Khmer Women Weavers, a black group called the Wajeehah Theatrical Ensemble, a musician who wants to organize a multicultural performing ensemble, a group providing workshops for American Indian youths to create books about their tribal heritage and a photographer putting together a series of black and white photographs of black ministers in Long Beach.

Gibson wants to expand the annual Long Beach Art Expedition, a one-day tour of artists’ studios, to a weekend and include a wider range of art activities, some of them ethnic. Another possibility, she said, is to create a second arts festival in the Anaheim Street corridor, which straddles the city’s central area, in which most of its minorities reside.

Landes says the board has its own goals. Among them, he said, is the improvement of the International City Festival, an annual three-day extravaganza highlighting ethnic foods, products and entertainment. Specifically, he said, the board would like to reorganize the event to focus more on “quality” rather than “commercial” crafts.

With the new “percent for art” program this year, he said, the PCA may have the money to do that and more.

Enacted largely at the agency’s behest, the policy requires downtown developers to set aside 1% of their construction budgets for art, a requirement that could generate hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next 10 years. About 80% of the money, Landes said, will be used for public art projects approved by an as-yet unnamed seven-member advisory committee. The rest, he said, will go directly to the PCA to use as it sees fit.

As director, Gibson will be in a position to exert a major influence on how the money is spent.

Money, in fact, was a major factor in the success of her predecessor, Lindsay Shields, who left the post in August to become assistant to the president of the California Institute for the Arts in Valencia. In five years, Shields guided the PCA from an agency with a $143,000-a-year budget to an organization with an annual budget of $940,000 and an increase of nearly 400% in the number of its programs. During the same period, the city’s contribution rose from $150,000 a year to $637,000.

Gibson said she plans to follow Shields’ lead by continuing to expand the organization’s financial base, which, in addition to the city’s contribution, consists of state and federal grants, as well as corporate donations. One of her most immediate goals, she said, is to renew a three-year $150,000 National Endowment for the Arts allotment, matched by the city, which expires this year.

Those who have worked with her in the past say that Gibson has a management style well-suited to leading an umbrella-type organization like the PCA, in which diplomacy and persuasion often work better than the simple exercise of authority.

“She’s kind of like the Pied Piper,” said Patrisse Dawson, administrator for campus personnel and employee benefits at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where Gibson was her supervisor.

Beginning as administrator of campus operations and personnel, Gibson--who has a master’s degree from Northwestern University in historical musicology and performance--advanced in four years to director of operations for the institute’s Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies. “She takes charge,” Dawson said, “but she allows for your input. She lends to your creativity, as well as gives you direction.”

Back at the PCA headquarters on the bottom floor of the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center, meanwhile, the new director is still in the process of putting art on the bare walls of her tiny new office, meeting the local dignitaries with whom she will work and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the staff she inherited.

“This city is at a crossroads,” she said. “Long Beach is about to be given the recognition it deserves and I want the arts to be part of it.”