O.C. Arts Groups Praised, Criticized : Culture: Newport Harbor Art Museum is marked down because of its community outreach program by the California Arts Council grant advisory panel, while SCR is lauded for its efforts. The panel also raised various ethnic questions.

Orange County’s top art museum suffered the largest drop in ranking in the state because of its community outreach efforts, a California Arts Council grant advisory panel reported this week.

In the same round of sessions, South Coast Repertory theater won the highest rating of any arts group in the state for its outreach programs. Two other major Orange County arts groups received lower 1990 rankings as well.

The panel cited the Newport Harbor Art Museum’s loss of director Kevin Consey, chief curator Paul Schimmel and assistant curator Lucinda Barnes in the last year in reducing its ranking from a 3+ to a 2 on the panel’s 1-to-4 rating scale. The rankings delivered this week, formulated by a seven-member panel meeting here, will be weighed with rankings for artistic and administrative strength for the final scores.

Grant amounts will not be determined until September, when the full council acts on the panel’s recommendations based on these scores.

“In the absence of good leadership, there is no way we can determine if (any outreach efforts) they’ve outlined will go forward,” said Rand Castile, director of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.

Panelists also criticized lack of ethnic representation on the museum’s 44-member board (which dropped from five minority members to three during the past year) and in its paid administrative personnel (from six to zero), and for appearing to reach out only to the virtually all-white population of Newport Beach, where it is located.

The museum requested state money for its “Partners” program, designed to bring art education to schoolchildren, and its “Special Audiences Services Initiative,” which would improve accessibility for the physically and mentally handicapped.

Its application notes that the “Partners” program serves children throughout Orange County, and it gives a demographic breakdown of the county’s ethnic makeup, which it and other sources estimate to be about one-quarter Latino.

But panelists repeatedly cited a key graph in the museum’s application stating that it “serves the residents and visitors of Newport Beach, whose population of 65,000 is reported as 95% white, 3% Hispanic, 1% Asian and less than 1% each American Indian, black and other,” according to 1980 Census figures. “Within this community context, the museum seeks to achieve appropriate diversity of the board, staff, programming and audiences,” the application said.

Major arts institutions receiving CAC support are expected to act as major cultural resources, not just locally but regionally, Darlene Neel, manager of Los Angeles’ Lewitzky Dance Company, pointed out.

“An organization that wants to be recognized as an important regional, indeed national institution, (should not) base its activities on a city population,” Neel said.

Overall, said Ray Paredes, UCLA professor of English, “there is nothing in this grant proposal that targets multicultural groups, except by inadvertency. (The museum has) regressed.”

Museum board President Thomas H. Nielsen responded to the panel’s criticism Thursday, saying that the museum is “attempting to reach and identify people with a variety of backgrounds who would be interested in contemporary art.”

Regarding the museum’s curatorial leadership void, Nielsen said: “There is no question that not having these key individuals inhibits our ability to do some things. But nothing has changed our commitment” to reaching a broad-based audience.

The museum, which received a $59,386 grant last year, suffered an equally dramatic drop in this category, from a 4- to a 3. Panel comments made earlier this summer explaining these scores are not yet available.

While South Coast Repertory’s artistic and administrative rank slipped this year from 4 to 4-, it fared much better this year on outreach to under-served communities, winning the highest score, 4-, among 27 arts groups evaluated statewide.

Last year, the council gave the troupe a 3 for outreach and reduced its previous grant by nearly 25%, complaining largely about insufficient “ethnic diversity” on SCR’s board and staff.

This year, SCR increased its number of minority paid administrative personnel from two to six and minority trustees from three to six.

But panelists’ praise focused mostly on the Tony Award-winning company’s Hispanic Playwrights Project, which helps young Latino writers get their work into mainstream resident theaters and has resulted in three productions on SCR’s Main Stage in four years.

The Hispanic Playwrights Project “is by far the best program of its type in California,” said Phil Esparza, producer and administrative director of El Teatro Campesino in San Juan Bautista.

Irvine-based Pacific Symphony, which slipped from a 3 to a 3- for outreach, nevertheless won praise for its outreach to the local Latino community, specifically for its concerts and educational programs, such as those targeting Latino youths in Santa Ana schools. Panelists also commended its Hispanic Advisory Committee, composed of representatives from various organizations in the Latino community.

But Paredes doubted the involvement of one group associated with the committee. The Santa Ana-based Santiago Club “is primarily a group of Chicano Republicans interested in political issues (rather than) outreach and development,” he said.

(John Palacio, assistant to the chairman of the Santiago Club and the orchestra’s Hispanic program adviser, countered in a phone interview that the club is a nonprofit, philanthropic group that donates to projects that predominantly serve the Latino community. In the last two years, it has contributed about $40,000 in cash and services to the orchestra. Many of its members are high-profile Republican politicians, including two Santa Ana City Council members, he said. But “people misperceive their individual activities with the activities of the club,” which is legally barred from engaging in political activities.)

While lauding programming that featured Latino compositions, such as the Suite from “El Amor Brujo” by Manuel De Falla played at an Hispanic Family Concert this year at Santa Ana High School, panelists denounced a program presented in December at a seasonal Los Posadas because it included only traditional Christmas pop songs such as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” Los Posadas is an annual Christmas event for children that is widely celebrated by Latinos.

“I think they’d be embarrassed” by that program, Neel said.

Pacific Symphony executive director Louis G. Spisto, in a phone interview after the panel met, said the orchestra based its programming for the Christmas concert “on the desires of the Los Posadas Festival committee,” which is not connected with the orchestra. Spisto added that he wished applicants were offered a chance to answer panelists’ questions.

“No matter how much you write in an application, you can’t describe it all,” Spisto said.

Jan McElwee, director of corporate contributions for Carter Hawley Hale in Los Angeles, said that the orchestra’s board lacks ethnic diversity. According to the Pacific’s application, its board includes two Latinos out of 48 total members.

The orchestra received a CAC grant of $39,319 last year.

Opera Pacific, which received the same ranks this year and last as Pacific Symphony, got plaudits for adding an advisory committee of Asian community leaders to explore development of an Asian-oriented production by the organization’s Overture Company. It was also praised for a 20-member group that performs works tailored for youth, for its work with “mentally challenged students,” and received a positive report from a panelist who attended a partly bilingual Overture Company performance and workshop for children.

But panelists criticized an illustration promoting the Overture Company’s production of “Monkey See, Monkey Do,” a puppet opera for children, which was thought to present a negative view of Latinos.

The illustration, which depicts a cross-eyed monkey, his mouth agape, wearing a sombrero, “promotes stereotypes of the most demeaning kind,” said Castile, who also labeled the image “offensive.”

Paredes, one of several panelists who said the company should vary its outreach programs, said overall that the company’s outreach activities “are not notably innovative, they are not ambitious . . . very conventional, typical.”

Opera Pacific received $41,880 last year.