Hearing on Arts Endowment Renewal Scheduled at Getty : Arts: The hearing may play a key role in shaping the legislative debate over the future of the politically beleaguered endowment.

The House of Representatives subcommittee that will produce legislation to extend the life of the National Endowment for the Arts has scheduled its first and apparently largest hearing on the issue this year for March 5 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu.

The hearing, arts endowment officials said Friday, will provide the only opportunity in the process of renewing the endowment’s legislative mandate at which endowment officials will be asked to provide testimony.

Scheduling of the California hearing--which may play a key role in shaping the legislative debate over the politically beleaguered endowment--was announced Friday at a meeting of the National Council on the Arts, the endowment’s advisory board.

Meanwhile, the council on the arts is scheduled to vote today on a series of grants to visual arts organizations in which, The Times learned, an endowment review panel of outside experts has recommended approval of $50,000 grants to two organizations that played central roles in an arts-funding political crisis last year.

National Council on the Arts sources indicated funding had been recommended for Artists Space, a New York gallery that sponsored an AIDS-related arts show that was the subject of a political firestorm in November, and the Washington Project for the Arts, which accepted a controversial exhibit of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe last summer after the Corcoran Gallery of Art here canceled it. The $50,000 level represents the most money the endowment provides to individual arts organizations in the category in which the two agencies applied.

The maximum funding recommendation appeared to indicate the endowment’s review panel had chosen the grant recommendations as an opportunity to make an implied statement of support for the two organizations. Artists Space and the Washington Project for the Arts are among about 140 visual arts organizations that receive endowment support.

The National Council on the Arts votes in secret to approve or reject grant panel recommendations--through rejections are extremely rare. Each grant must also receive final endorsement by endowment chairman John E. Frohnmayer. Public announcement of the outcome of the grant process is not expected for several weeks.

Artists Space came to national prominence when Frohnmayer rescinded a separate $10,000 to support the AIDS show, “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing,” but then restored the money after vocal protests by artists and arts groups resuscitated a political crisis that gripped the arts agency for much of last year.

The crisis began with the endowment’s funding of two exhibitions, including the Mapplethorpe show. Congressional conservatives, led by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), protested public support for the two shows on the grounds that they included some works of allegedly sacrilegious or pornographic content.

The decision to hold the House subcommittee hearing in California was announced by endowment congressional liaison officials. The hearing is to be conducted by the postsecondary education subcommittee of the House Education and Labor Committee. The subcommittee is chaired by Rep. Pat Williams (D-Mont.)

The subcommittee is to produce a bill to extend the life of the arts endowment for an additional five years. The endowment’s legislative mandate technically expires later this year. The process--called reauthorization --is expected to produce a fresh firestorm in Congress over the nature of art that the government should support. The hearing at the Getty museum is to be the first of several held by the House subcommittee.

Senate and House arts leaders have said they hope to complete legislative action on reauthorizing the endowment by July 4.

In remarks Friday, Frohnmayer and several council members appeared to signal a new, sharper resolve to stand up to conservative criticism of the arts agency. “One of the benefits of the controversy,” Frohnmayer said, “is that people are beginning to recognize the necessity of promotion of creativity in our society.

“We in the arts are in the vortex of this debate . . . (over) what kind of society we are going to be in the next 10 years.”

Wendy Luers, a New York author, arts advocate and national council member, characterized the process as “a battle.” “We have to realize that it (the controversy over the government proper role in the arts) is going to keep coming up. People will keep trying to get at us. We should not be afraid of what we are. We should be proud of what we are.”

“We (in the arts) are all an easy target in an election year,” said New York state Sen. Roy Goodman, another council member, for conservative senators and representatives “to act as knights on white chargers trying to defend the nation against pornography.”