Mending a Tattered LACE : Arts: The avant-garde multimedia arts center is on the ropes, battered by inadequate funding and without an executive director since the sacking of Roberto Bedoya. Question: Is it worth saving?

It was an urgent two-page memorandum, a “desperate call for action” from the entire eight-person paid staff of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions--the avant-garde downtown multimedia arts center best known simply as LACE.

The Dec. 10 memo warned the LACE board of a cash-flow crisis, the risk of a missed payroll and “an untenable budget and little to no fiscal management” that together make a further muddle of “a time of great flux and instability.”

The memo was a direct assault on LACE’s executive director, Roberto Bedoya, whose appointment just half a year earlier had been hailed as a major step toward strengthening ties between the avant-garde gallery and multicultural artists.

Instead, finances and staff morale had spun precipitously downward during Bedoya’s tenure.

“Roberto’s response (has) been to further isolate himself and, as a result, LACE,” the staff memo concluded. “It has become the consensus of the staff that Roberto is not prepared to successfully fulfill the position of executive director. We are unable to watch passively.”

Nine days after the board got the memo, Bedoya was sacked. An emergency leadership team of Neil Barclay, a consultant with little experience in management of major arts organizations, and a LACE employee was installed.

And since then, LACE has been forced to cut and cut again its projected 1991 spending. LACE had a budget of $800,000 as recently as 1989. The plan for 1991 several weeks ago was a seriously reduced $600,000 and has since dropped to about $585,000 today, according to LACE sources.

Two full-time positions have been eliminated, one permanently and one until at least July 1. Ironically, the cuts wiped out the job of video coordinator Adriene Jenik, the co-interim manager with Barclay. She leaves late this month. Several weeks ago, performance coordinator Erica Bornstein resigned to take a job at Beyond Baroque, a Venice arts center.

Effectively, half of LACE’s full-time work force of six has been eliminated by layoff or resignation. There are also two part-time workers and about 20 volunteer staff members.

Now, nearly five months after the staff revolted against Bedoya’s leadership, the LACE board is believed to be close to naming a replacement. Interviews with two finalists for Bedoya’s former position are scheduled for Wednesday, with LACE’s board scheduled to select the new executive director that evening.

LACE’s board is struggling for control. “It isn’t a catastrophe. It is a crisis in the sense that (if) we’re going to stay alive and well and open, we’re going to do it by careful management,” said Kitty Chester, LACE’s treasurer. “We have to find new sources of funding.”

LACE’s decline was due to a mix of factors. Because LACE has been without a fund-raising director for nearly a year, opportunities to find new money have been missed. LACE insiders say a few large donors--givers of $10,000 or so at a crack--have pulled out. Grant application deadlines have been missed. Fund-raising events have had disappointing results. Donors have given smaller gifts this year than last, the result of the recession economy. Without an endowment and with few multiyear grants, LACE must raise nearly its entire annual budget during the calendar year in which the money is spent.

Gai Gherardi, a longtime LACE contributor and board member, said the board recognizes that the nearly yearlong absence of a development director has been devastating. “A lot of things are responsible,” she said. “One is that there has been a trend (downward) in money available to artists organizations. Simultaneously, we were operating not to the best of our abilities.”

“So far, we’re making it,” said Linda Nishio, co-chair--with Dale Stultz--of LACE’s board and a working artist. LACE’s bylaws require the board to include a set number of artists at all times. “We’ve made commitments to artists that we want to honor.”

LACE and organizations like it are between 10 and 15 years old and are the mature results of a trend dating to the mid-1970s. It was a movement toward self-empowerment by artists--a way to at least attempt to seize control of destinies that had, theretofore, been completely in the control of museums, galleries and large institutions with money. Artists were not in the loop.

LACE is an eclectic hybrid with a program more varied than many similar organizations in other cities.

In Los Angeles, though, said Marc Pally, an artist and LACE’s first executive director, the spread-out nature and car culture of Southern California require LACE to have an all-encompassing program.

In avant-garde multimedia art, LACE’s reputation nationally is equivalent in its field to the Museum of Contemporary Art or the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In 1989--the last full year for which LACE has produced a final financial statement--the organization spent $127,000 on its exhibition program, $115,000 on performances and $52,600 on its video division.

“The thing about LACE is that it has always overextended itself, with the performance, video, gallery and bookstore (facilities). I think that’s a strength,” Pally said. “The price that LACE has to pay for that is that it implies it serves the entire city. That’s very difficult.”

Founded in 1976 by a Chicano-dominated artist collective, LACE is housed in a two-story former industrial building that very much looks and feels the part. The structure, which once served as illegal loft housing for artists, was purchased with help from the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency.

LACE’s facilities include a second floor performance art space in which some of the most cutting-edge performers of the last decade have appeared, including Karen Finley, Tim Miller and Rachel Rosenthal. The space boasts a resilient floor, built like a well-designed stage, for safe use by dancers. It has also hosted a variety of other performance media. Also on the upstairs level are four low-rent apartments reserved for artists of modest means. But the mortgage arrangements on the building assure that the rents, alone, can carry LACE’s monthly housing costs.

On the first floor there is a gallery that, since it was opened, has shown work by dozens of prominent contemporary artists. Since its founding, LACE has shown work by such now famous artists as John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, Chris Burden, Bill Viola and Bruce Nauman. A video room is just off the gallery.

There is also a bookstore. Though there are some small specialized-media organizations in the area, LACE is a sort of one-stop for cutting-edge artistic media. Its national prestige has derived from this mix of programs. In cities like San Francisco and New York, specialized artist organizations have sprung up catering to each medium.

Financial emergency hit LACE earlier and harder than many of its peers in other parts of the country.

The crisis became inescapable after LACE’s traditional October benefit art auction brought in far less in donations than anticipated.

Bedoya had not hired a fund-raising director--the development program had essentially ceased to exist. There was a poorly handled flap in which critics attacked LACE over presentation of a performance art piece that allegedly included oral sex. Bedoya took a drubbing in the pages of a local weekly.

The National Endowment for the Arts reviewed the situation but took no action against the gallery, which gets large endowment grants.

By January, cash was so short that LACE had to plead with the city Department of Cultural Affairs to bend normal city grant-payment practices and fork over all of LACE’s funding for 1991--$35,000--in January. The gallery nearly missed a late December payroll.

A second annual fund-raising event--the traditionally bizarre Valentine’s Day dinner and dance--fell $1,500 short of the $17,000 it was supposed to produce. An exhibition scheduled for this year has been delayed until 1992.

When the LACE board organized a series of focus groups to seek advice on future directions for the gallery, there were complaints that LACE had moved too far from its roots and had begun acting too much like a large arts institution.

“I gave it the best that I had,” Bedoya said. “I can’t solve the anxieties of a dwindling support system. There are demands on these organizations to be totally accessible and to answer everybody’s desires and needs. When you get to be (an organization of LACE’s size) it becomes a different kind of organization.”

“It is probably an absurd expectation to put on an organization that it can be a homey, grass-roots hangout and also an institution that provides hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to artists,” said Pally. “You can’t have it all ways. It’s an absolutely impossible burden.”

Government financial support--from the NEA to state arts councils--is in retreat. Reasons are many, from diminished resources in deficit-ridden state and federal budgets to the financial fallout of a deal in Congress to partially resolve the NEA’s political difficulties.

“Sometimes there is a sense in our field that the bigger organizations can muddle through,” said Susan Wyatt, executive director of New York’s Artists Space, one of the most prominent of the LACE-like organizations. “But the bigger organizations are in certain ways more fragile.” Because such collectives generally lack endowments, they must each year re-create their entire fund-raising programs from zero. As they grow, Wyatt said, budgets remain dependent on a constantly increasing number of small contributions--like a jigsaw puzzle that is constantly expanding.

For Joy Silverman, a former LACE director who held the job immediately before Bedoya, LACE has no choice but to flow with the current it has fallen into. “Perhaps in these times, LACE has to cut back drastically because of this combination of events that has taken place,” she said.

“It’s important that organizations like LACE come out of these (situations) even stronger. On the other hand, maybe LACE shouldn’t exist any more. Maybe that’s something that has to be determined, too.”