City Arts Funds Awarded Outside Review Process : Grants: The Cultural Affairs Dept. awarded $350,000 to groups based on staff and City Council recommendations. Some had been rejected earlier.

The Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department has quietly awarded more than $350,000 of Los Angeles Arts Endowment grants to groups that were not reviewed by panels of artists charged with selecting grant recipients, The Times has learned.

Some of the previously undisclosed grants were made to organizations specifically rejected by the city’s “peer review” panels, which were established by the department to depoliticize the process of granting city funds to artists and to assure that funded programs are of substantial artistic merit.

The peer-review process, which city officials have heralded as a symbol of enlightened municipal support for the arts, has become a central issue in the current heated national debate over government funding of the arts. Some of the criticism leveled in recent months at the National Endowment for the Arts has centered on its decisions to override its own peer-review system and not fund artists who, critics of the NEA claim, produce obscene or sacrilegious artworks.

At a July 11 news conference, Mayor Tom Bradley, City Councilman Joel Wachs and Adolfo V. Nodal, general manager of the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, chastised political opponents of the NEA while touting Los Angeles’ approach to arts funding.

“Los Angeles currently bases its decisions on the recommendations from a panel of peer advisers, while the NEA recently rejected the opinion of its own panel of peers regarding the awarding of four grants,” a press release from the mayor’s office stated. (The statement referred to NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer’s cancellation of grants to four controversial performance artists.)

At that time, the city announced more than $3 million in grants to 77 individual artists and 226 organizations. All recipients were selected by panels of their artistic peers.

But city officials did not announce that they had already bypassed the peer-review system and awarded an additional 32 grants totaling $352,000 on the recommendations of the staff of the Cultural Affairs Department and City Council members.

The previously undisclosed awards--which were included in a category labeled “Other” among the city’s so-called Special II grants to festivals and a citywide mural program--range from $50,000 for the Museum of Contemporary Art to $5,000 for the Grand People’s Company, a theatrical group that conducts cabaret workshops for veteran entertainers of senior citizens.

The grants were awarded before the July 11 news conference. When asked why they were not announced, Nodal said, “No reason, just that we wanted to stress the peer-review process.”

The fact that the unannounced grants were not subject to peer review is just a “glitch” that occurred when extra grant monies became available, Nodal said. Funds had been cut by about $500,000 from the previous year, but about $350,000 was restored after the peer-review panels had completed their work, he said.

The endowment, an arts funding package approved by the City Council in November 1988, is now operating on $5.8 million from the city’s general fund. Another $15 million or so is expected to be raised from fees on municipal and private developments. A total of $3.5 million was awarded to L.A. arts organizations in 1989-90.

The peer panels began meeting in the spring and completed their selection process by the end of June.

“The council asked us for recommendations” to use the restored funds, Nodal said, so he and his staff reviewed applications that the panels had not selected and accepted suggestions from council members. Had the funds been restored earlier, they would have been allotted to the panels, Nodal said.

According to Nodal, giving grants to rejected organizations is not a matter of rewarding unqualified applicants. It’s more a process of casting a wider net to “help organizations that the panels weren’t able to help,” he said.

Among applicants that “didn’t score high enough” to get grants from the panels, according to Nodal, but won grants in the “other” category, are the Angel’s Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, which received $7,500 for its program of exhibitions, performances, publications and fellowships; the Woman’s Building, which won $16,125 for exhibitions, performances, lectures and classes; and the Young Saints Scholarship Foundation, whose $6,000 grant will be used to train youth in the performing arts.

MOCA’s grant of $50,000 is much larger than other recipients in the “Other” category. (The next highest is $27,500 for the National Council of Negro Women.) But Nodal said the grant actually cuts city support for the museum, which usually amounts to about $80,000 annually. “I just felt it wasn’t fair to cut MOCA off completely. I have always maintained that we wouldn’t turn our backs on an organization just because it is big and prominent,” Nodal said.

“Joel Wachs supports the whole package, but I was the one who really said we should support MOCA,” Nodal said. Wachs, who is a trustee of MOCA, was not available for comment.

According to city records, the MOCA grant is to be used for an exhibition of Edward Ruscha’s work, a request that was turned down by the peer-review panel.

But that listing is “a mistake,” according to Nodal. The museum’s grant is intended for facilities and programs in general, Nodal said in a telephone interview. MOCA can use its grant money for the Ruscha show if it chooses, but the funds are not earmarked specifically for the show, which was rejected by the peer panel because the artist is too well established to meet the panel’s criteria, he said.