Institute Is Branching Out

CalArts has gone from the campus to the community.

With more than $1 million in grants, the school has begun a 3 1/2-year project in which CalArts faculty and students will help educate junior and senior high school students in three Los Angeles-area facilities--Watts Towers Arts Center, Plaza de la Raza in East Los Angeles and the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice.

“This is not an outreach activity,” CalArts President Steven D. Lavine said. “This is an expansion of the idea of how to teach an artist.”

The program will give current CalArts students a chance to transmit their new knowledge to the next generation of artists, Lavine said. It will also help high school students discover possibilities that they never imagined, he said.

“We didn’t do this for recruitment,” Lavine said, “but these kids will be able to see that scholarships are available. Students will wind up at CalArts as a result of this program.”

Among the grants were $545,000 from the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Fund, and $175,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts Challenge III program.