Ex-Chief of Festival 2000 Admits Mistakes : Culture: Lenwood Sloan acknowledges at public meeting that ‘mismanagement’ helped caused the bankruptcy of the Bay Area event.

At an emotional public meeting held here Wednesday, Festival 2000 former director Lenwood Sloan likened the sudden demise of his wide-ranging multicultural arts event to a “four-car collision” and acknowledged that his own “mismanagement” helped cause its midstream cancellation.

“I have had my tears about this,” he told the group of roughly 65 artists, administrators and arts funders who turned out to discuss the festival, which was forced to declare bankruptcy. Sloan added: “I clearly cop to the fact I was more concerned with the aesthetic than with the event itself. I did not pay enough attention to the event because I was so involved in the cause (of multiculturalism).”

The festival was slated to run Oct. 3-28 and present more than 200 events involving 1,000 artists. It collapsed two weeks into its run, though most performances and exhibits went on as planned. Festival organizers filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on Nov. 9, citing $550,000 in debts and $75,000 in assets. Artists and arts groups are still owed roughly $175,000 for their services. An additional $375,000 is owed to dozens of commercial vendors and numerous Festival 2000 employees.

Sloan helped to arrange Wednesday’s community meeting, and flew in for it from Washington, where he earlier this month assumed a $70,000-a-year post as director of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Inter-Arts Program.

In an opening rambling narrative, Sloan sketched a picture of a festival with grandiose goals, unrealistic finances and a sketchy administrative structure. He said that when the city’s Municipal Grants for the Arts office hired him to run Festival 2000 in January of 1989, “I asked specifically what my job would be and I was told . . . I would not have to raise funds. I was just there to make the art happen.”

But as Sloan increased the projected budget from an initial $550,000 ($500,000 of which came from Grants for the Arts) to $2.3 million, he said he was forced to come up with additional monies to pay for an expanded program, a staff of 20, and a hefty travel budget he needed to develop national “task forces” and to consult repeatedly with organizers of arts festivals from around the country, including Atlanta’s Black Arts Festival and the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C.

Sloan blamed the ensuing fiscal problems on his too-optimistic projections of ticket sales and a lack of funding support. Though pledges of $100,000 came from the San Francisco Foundation, the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trust, Sloan complained that he had “no institutional backup. The Los Angeles Festival had Mayor (Tom) Bradley working hard and furiously (raising money) alongside an internationally-known director (Peter Sellars).”

Sloan also refuted fraud charges filed by Michael Valerio, a former business manager, that Sloan had misused festival funds to buy expensive gifts for consultants and silk shirts for himself. “There was a lot of money spent and you have a right to know where it went,” he told the assembled crowd. “There is also a stack of receipts I didn’t hand in because I knew the festival couldn’t afford to pay them.”

Sloan’s explanations did not satisfy many in the crowd, including several former Festival 2000 employees. “I worked my butt off for the festival and I got nothing back in return,” declared Thomas Bradway, a technical director who said he is owed $1,500. Bradway also spoke bitterly of unpaid festival colleagues “who have newborn babies and are wondering how they’ll get through the holidays.”

Questions were also raised about Sloan’s “impresario image” and the lack of community involvement in the planning and executing of the event. Edsel Matthews, director of Oakland’s Koncepts Kultural Gallery, claimed that Bay Area artists were cut out of the planning process early on. “As the festival got further and further along, the community got more and more disenfranchised,” Matthews said. “Nobody felt Festival 2000 had anything to do with us.”

There were also objections to Sloan’s leaving town to assume his new post at the NEA. Idries Ackamoor, a member of the theater group Cultural Odyssey, which performed at the festival, told Sloan, “I think you were interested in where you were headed and yes you’ve gotten there now.”

Defending his new position, which awards $4.4 million in grants for interdisciplinary arts, Sloan said: “I needed to put myself in a place where I could reauthorize myself and restore for myself a sense of validity in my decision-making process.”

NEXT STEP

San Francisco Supervisor Terence Hallinan, who wants a Festival 2000 financial accounting, has scheduled a hearing Dec. 13. Also at issue will be whether the city will pick up the $175,000 tab owed to San Francisco artists and arts groups--which has been promised by arts officials. Rudolf Nothenberg, chief administrative officer, now says the financially strapped city may not have the money to “make whole” local cultural groups affected by the festival’s collapse.