Grass-Roots Arts Collective Takes Hold : Highland Park: The fledgling group is housed in the old Skateland building.

The enthusiastic crowd of 400 that showed up at an art exhibit opening in Highland Park’s old Skateland building on York Boulevard recently overwhelmed Adolfo V. Nodal, the top arts official in Los Angeles.

Nodal, general manager of the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, said later that the crowd reminded him of the alternative arts movement of the 1960s, when artists joined together to set up studios and galleries on their own.

“It’s time we opened up this kind of place, huh?” he said to the approving crowd of residents and artists from throughout the Los Angeles area who had come to see “Dialogue: Prague/Los Angeles,” a touring art exhibit that opened in Highland Park on July 6.

“Yeah!” the people called out.

Nodal said in an interview that he was excited and inspired by the energy present at the exhibit opening.

The presence of Nodal, who is known for wielding the arts as a tool to spur social change, signaled to members of Highland Park’s Arroyo Arts Collective that their fledgling, grass-roots group had won the cherished commodity of visibility.

“Something like this just doesn’t happen in this part of town,” said an elated Diane Alexander, one of three co-founders of the collective, which sponsored the exhibit. Featuring the work of 26 Czechoslovakian and American artists, the exhibit also has been at the Otis/Parsons Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard and the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

The exhibit’s Highland Park opening marked the arts inaugural of the 7,000-square-foot former roller rink, which the collective has occupied for about three weeks with the permission of the building’s owner, Disneyland executive Clare Graham.

The collective, which formed 11 months ago to try to unify and revitalize Highland Park through the arts, was given use of the building rent-free last month after a friend of Graham’s, local artist Larry Davis, asked him about it.

“We feel it puts Highland Park on the map,” said collective co-founder Matt Marchand, who edits the group’s newsletter. “It’s the first gallery that’s been in this community in a long time.”

But the sudden, unexpected chance to use the huge exhibition space has become an equally huge burden for the still-developing collective, which has grown to 130 members.

At the group’s first membership meeting last week, Alexander announced that the collective must raise more than $18,000 by the end of the year to cover the costs of operating the building as an exhibition space.

Among the costs are insurance, utilities, renovations--such as track lighting--and security, she said. The group is applying for nonprofit status to make it eligible for grant money, but in the meantime the group must rely on membership fees and private fund raising, Alexander said. Those fees have not been set.

More uncertainty emerged when Graham, senior managing art director for Disneyland’s entertainment/marketing division, said Monday that the collective needs to show him a well-thought-out plan for the building’s management and use before he will commit it to their use.

Graham, a sculptor who hopes to turn the building into a personal studio in about five years, said he is willing to let the collective use the building in the meantime provided they show him a good plan. So far, Graham said, he has heard little more than a plethora of disjointed ideas.

Marchand acknowledged that obtaining the use of such a big building was so unexpected that collective members at first didn’t know what to do with it. The group attracted the “Dialogue: Prague/Los Angeles” exhibit by advertising the exhibition space in its newsletter.

“This whole idea of a building just sort of landed on top of us, and we had to figure out what to do,” Marchand said Monday. “It’s so overwhelming that we haven’t grasped the whole reality of it yet.”

The collective’s newly formed, eight-member board of directors drafted a proposal Monday that they will present to Graham at a meeting scheduled for Saturday. The proposal lists the organizational experience of its board of directors and describes events the group wants to host in the building.

Painter Carol Colin, a member of the board, said she thinks the board’s experience in arts management will allay Graham’s doubts. For example, Colin and board member Robert Gero, who would oversee the building’s day-to-day operation, each operated successful studios downtown before moving to Highland Park.

Gero said he thinks the building will allow the collective to consolidate the pursuit of three separate goals in one place. The collective’s aims are to bring talent-filled shows and artists into Highland Park, to showcase local talent and to offer the community an arts center for art workshops, lectures and poetry readings.

“It gives us a focus point and it gives us a chance to really come together,” said Gero, a sculptor.

Some of the events the collective hopes to host in the building include Art Golf, a tournament in which local artists will design the holes; a masked costume ball for artists; a Cajun dance fund raiser; an art auction and an exhibition of Latino artists native to Highland Park.

Capitalizing on the visibility the building has given its group, the collective is pushing ahead with plans to sponsor arts events in cultural centers throughout the area. Two exhibits featuring Arroyo Arts Collective artists will open elsewhere within the next three weeks, said co-founder Hendrik Stooker, senior curator for Occidental College’s art department.

“New Visions of the Arroyo,” which opens tonight at The Art Store Gallery in Pasadena, features 20 paintings, drawings and basket art pieces depicting five artists’ impressions of the current Arroyo Seco River basin. The baskets are made of materials gathered in the basin, from branches to seeds, Stooker said.

An exhibit of abstract art, “Contemporary Abstractions,” features the work of 10 local painters and sculptors and opens Aug. 5 at Occidental College.

The collective’s most extensive project, however, will be coordinating open tours of Highland Park art studios as part of the Los Angeles Festival in September. For a $5 fee, people will be given maps depicting all participating studios and describing their art, so that people can decide which studios they wish to see, Stooker said. About 25 studios already have signed up, he said.

The group also hopes to co-sponsor events with established cultural centers in the area, such as Southwest Museum, the historic Charles F. Lummis house and garden, and Art in the Park, a city program that exhibits artwork in parks. The collective co-sponsored an arts, crafts and book sale with Southwest Museum in the spring at the Casa de Adobe, a replica of a Spanish residence next to the museum.

Collective members say the arts colony they are trying to build in Highland Park would be an alternative to the upscale galleries and studios downtown and on the Westside.

“They don’t want to be trendy,” Alexander said. “They don’t want to be another Melrose or Westwood, but more or less a small, sophisticated village with families.”