Redrawing the Art Museum Visitor Profile

Q & A: Art and Attendance

New art patrons of the next decade and how Southern California museums will attract them is the focus of “Drawing Audiences,” a half-hour KCET documentary that will air Friday at 9 p.m. on Channel 28 (with repeats Saturday at 5 p.m. and May 7 at 7:30 p.m.). In making the documentary--which includes discussions with museum directors such as Earl A. (Rusty) Powell of the L.A. County Museum of Art and John Walsh of the J. Paul Getty Museum--producers found that 89% of current Southland museum supporters are older than 56 and that 93% of all L.A. museum visitors are Anglo. To gain some insight into local museums’ strategies for changing these statistics, Art World talked with Celeste Durant, executive producer of “Drawing Audiences.”

Question: What does it mean to Los Angeles’ museums to have visitors that are predominantly white and older than 56?

Answer: If the museums are going to continue to be a vital part of the community . . . it’s going to be critical for them to attract (an ethnically) diverse audience. Especially if they’re going to engage patronage as well as attendance, they’ve got to engage the people that are living here. Also, to have a future audience, you have to attract younger people. you have to let them know that art is a vital part of their lives.

Q: What do you see as the factors that have shaped this current audience?

A: It’s been historical. It was the way that Los Angeles developed--the people that brought art and were concerned about art were predominantly white. And it’s continued that way, even though other people now live here.

Q: Who are the new audiences that the museums are trying to reach, and what are they doing to attract them?

A: From the interviews that we did, especially in terms of the Getty, they’re really looking to attract a younger audience. One of their biggest programs is a special program geared toward parents and children learning about art together. They’re really trying to get to them and teach them about art while they’re young. If you get to school children while they’re young, you’re going to have a more multi-ethnic base. Also, they’re doing interactive exhibits . . . and taped presentations making the whole world of art more accessible. That way they will encourage people who like art but aren’t particularly well versed in it, to go (to a museum)--and to go more than once, to begin to integrate art into their lives.

Q: What kind of problems do you think the museums will face in reaching this audience?

A: A good part of it will just be reaching out to the communities that they want to encourage. For instance, the Getty is doing advertising geared toward the Hispanic community. Another approach they’re going to have to take is to increase the ethnic nature of their collections and their exhibits.

Q: Through what you’ve seen in putting together this documentary, can Los Angeles’ museums survive if they continue to attract only the audiences they now have?

A: They’re really going to have to attract a younger audience. The audiences that they’ve been attracting are getting increasingly older, so they’re not going to be there (in the future). (And as far as attracting a more ethnically diverse audience), it’s essential, because the Anglo community is becoming the minority community. They’ll have to attract (ethnically diverse) communities to tap both the interest and the financial support they need.

THE SCENE

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s recent purchase of “Irises” isn’t the only Southern California contribution to the Vincent van Gogh centennial. The Norton Simon Museum has mounted its own tribute with “Vincent Van Gogh: Painter, Printmaker, and Collector,” which will be on display through the end of the year.

“It’s certainly a rare opportunity to see the work of a great artist from his early years to his later flowering--especially in the United States,” said curator Lanier Graham.

Featured in the exhibition are six of Van Gogh’s paintings, including “spectacularly colored late ones” such as “The Mulberry Tree” (1889) and “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” (1890), as well as “some of the dark early ones” including “Head of a Peasant Woman in a White Bonnet “(1885) which depicts Sien de Groot, a woman who later appears in the artist’s famous “Potato Eaters” (1885).

But Graham noted that the exhibition--which includes a drawing, an etching and one of the artist’s last letters--does not end with Van Gogh’s own works. Also featured are four Hiroshige prints and a painting by Adolphe Monticelli that were collected by Van Gogh.

“We added these to add some insight and understanding of his work,” Graham said, noting that Monticelli was “the only painter Van Gogh himself ever collected,” and that the exhibition explores “the relationship between the (Hiroshige) prints and (Van Gogh’s) own paintings.”

OVERHEARD

“Oh my god, they look like aliens! I wouldn’t want to come in here after dark--I’d have nightmares all night long!” said a college-aged woman with long dark hair speaking to her blue-jean clad friend while looking at paintings in the L.A. County Museum of Art’s “Francis Bacon” retrospective during its final days on view.

CURRENTS

A cast steel sculpture formed of materials from the ruins of last October’s San Francisco earthquake is included in “Oakland’s Artists ‘90,” which runs through July 1 at the Oakland Museum.

“This piece is in tribute to my community of West Oakland. . . . I wanted to celebrate the living, my neighbors who risked their lives to help those trapped on the Cypress structure,” said sculptor Bruce Beasley of his “The Pillars of Cypress,” which is made of scrap from the demolished Nimitz freeway Cypress Street overpass.

Beasley, who himself worked a 10-hour volunteer shift to help shore up the overpass’ remaining pillars, said he hauled away “a few hundred pounds of the mangled steel” for use in his 52-inch tall sculpture.

The annual Awards in the Visual Arts program is alive and well despite all the hoopla over last year’s inclusion of Andres Serrano’s controversial work “Piss Christ.” This year’s AVA exhibition--which features 10 artists from across the country--premiere’s Saturday at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where it will be on view through July 1.

The AVA winners, who will receive $15,000 each, include Santa Barbara-based conceptual sculptor Ann Hamilton (who currently has a show at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art) and Oakland-based painter Raymond Saunders. Other winners are Mike Glier of Hoosick Falls, N.Y. and Randy Twaddle of Houston, both of whom do drawings; photographers Lorna Simpson of Brooklyn and Sally Mann of Lexington, Va.; and sculptors Lisa Hoke of New York, Martin Emmanuel of Atlanta, Tony Tasset of Chicago and Malcolm Cochran of Columbus, Ohio.

The AVA program, which is administered by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, N.C., aims at bringing recognition to talented artists early on in their careers and to affirm that serious, accomplished art can be created anywhere an artist chooses to live and work.

After the New Orleans Museum of Art, the show will travel to SECCA (Aug. 4-Oct. 7), Harvard University’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum (Nov. 23-Jan. 13, 1991), and New York’s BMW Gallery (April 1991-September 1991).

DEBUTS

Austrian artist Eva Schlegel makes her Los Angeles debut at Shoshana Wayne Gallery with a show of abstract paintings on plaster and photographs silk-screened on glass. Schlegel lives and works in Vienna and has exhibited extensively in Europe. Her show opens Saturday.

Also opening Saturday is the first one-man show in Los Angeles by Nayland Blake. Blake’s work, “Punch Agonistes,” deals with issues of sexual repression, expression and deviation, as well as dominant cultural myths of the 19th and 20th centuries. Blake was recently included in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “New Work: A New Generation.”

French painter Philippe Judlin makes his West Coast debut at Feingarten Galleries through May 30. Judlin is part of a young movement in France that derives its inspiration from l’Art Brut , which shares an awareness of non-academic sources of art such as tribal, native and folk.

HAPPENING

Fifteen important American works that will be auctioned in New York May 23 by Christie’s auctioneers will be on view Monday from 11:30 a.m.-4 p.m. at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Among the works, which are estimated to bring a total of more than $8 million, are paintings by Thomas Eakins and Alfred Bierstadt. Information: (213) 933-1200.

“Visible Voices,” a program of 15 films and videos by local African-American, Asian-Pacific-American and Chicano artists, will be shown Saturday at the Los Angeles Photography Center, 412 S. Park View St. The free screening begins at 7 p.m. Information: (213) 738-7665.