ART : Lottes of Change Mapped by Art Institute President : New president, John W. Lottes, wants to beef up faculty and enrollment and expand the 30-year-old school.

Shortly after he was installed as president of the Art Institute of Southern California last month, John W. Lottes attended a party held by the support group Designing Women.

“One of my goals,” he told the well-heeled, well-coiffed crowd, “is to get each of you to commit at least as much to the school as you spend on your hair.”

Lottes related the story with jovial gusto last week, during a wide-ranging conversation in his office. A tall, portly 57-year-old man in a striped shirt and tie, he has a way of disarming a visitor with friendly, Midwestern-style candor and then dropping in little zingers (a story about a ‘60s party in San Francisco, say) that indicate his real allegiance to the anarchic, experimental world of art.

“Afterward,” he added, “one of the (women) said, ‘How did you dare say that?’ Well, I’m new in town. I can say whatever I want. And she said, ‘You don’t know how much I spend on my hair!’ I said, ‘But look at your hair. It’s lovely!’ ”

The finances of the 30-year-old institution--the only art school in Orange County that awards the bachelor of fine arts degree--are uppermost in Lottes’ mind these days. He said gifts and grants “plummeted” under the brief tenure of former president Russell E. Lewis, who resigned in January after only seven months on the job. Membership in the President’s Club, a group of businessmen, dropped from 55 to 26 simply because, as Lottes put it, “nobody wrote them, called them (or) invited them to anything last year.”

He first visited and evaluated the school six years ago as a consultant recommended by the National Assn. of Schools of Art and Design, and he sees the school’s mission as essentially unchanged: “To provide an intimate undergraduate experience for those students who want to be professional artists or designers and who don’t want to deal with a large, multipurpose institution.”

Lottes’ teaching career began in 1964 at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he subsequently served as dean and president. In 1983 he become president of the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, parent organization of the Institute of Arts, College of Art and Design, and Children’s Theater. For the past four years, he was president of the Oregon School of Arts and Crafts in Portland.

Art Institute faculty member Jonathan Burke, who was an undergraduate at the Kansas City Art Institute during Lottes’ tenure, remembers Lottes as “extraordinarily well-liked by both faculty and staff” and “always accessible” to students despite the size of the school (which then had nearly 1,000 students). When Burke wanted to arrange a cooperative arrangement with another institution--essentially, a pilot program for a single student--”John took the initiative. He had that much concern.”

Unlike the prestigious San Francisco Art Institute, which offers courses only in the fine arts (painting, printmaking, video, sculpture and so forth) the Art Institute of Southern California (formerly the Laguna Beach School of Art) tends to attract students interested in careers in commercial arts like illustration and graphic design.

“I think we’d have to build a stronger and longer reputation before we can attract students to come here for the fine arts,” Lottes said. “The job-oriented programs are easier to attract students (to). But I think that’s always true. I remember my dad said, ‘You could have done one thing worse (than study art), and that’s go to ballet school.’ ”

In fact, Lottes admitted, the school accepts into the four-year BFA program virtually everyone who submits a portfolio of work “unless they have motor control problems or just couldn’t handle it.” The portfolio review is mainly as a way for the teachers to analyze the students’ strengths and weaknesses.

Accredited in 1985 by the National Assn. of Schools of Art and Design, the art institute has been a candidate for accreditation from the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges for nearly four years (just two years short of the maximum waiting period, which involves site visits and evaluations by WASC staff).

Lottes, who said he hopes “to be here a good number of years,” noted that one of WASC’s major concerns was guaranteeing “the continuity of the institution,” which has had five presidents since 1984. Other concerns have to do with financial resources and how they are allocated.

“What I insisted on,” Lottes said, “is, first of all, improving faculty salaries and not cutting back, which was the mentality here.” Salaries begin at $23,000 for master of fine arts graduates fresh out of school and top off at $36,000--considerably less than schools like the Art Center College in Pasadena pay for teachers who are practicing designers.

Last year, a week before he resigned, former director William Otton announced plans for a $3.4-million building campaign that would double the size of the school. A 15,000-square-foot building was to be built on the art institute’s five-acre property and an adjacent 1.5-acre parcel owned by the Irvine Co. The expansion was one of several recommendations of a 53-member committee composed of business and professional people from the community, which met to study the school’s physical, financial and marketing needs.

The report was ignored after Otton’s departure, Lottes said, and the project came to a standstill. But at its last meeting, the board recently authorized an appraisal of the land parcel, with a view toward raising money to purchase it for the expansion.

Queried about potential opposition from environmental groups against further development in the coastal preserve, Lottes was noncommittal. “Apparently we have the city’s blessing to move in that direction,” he said. “The city . . . is interested in that limited expansion, nothing beyond that.”

Lottes’ other plans include expanding enrollment--already a record 130 this fall--by 60% to create “a critical mass we need to have--so there’ll be enough students in a section to really benefit from one another.”

He plans to revive a visiting artists’ program to broaden student exposure to different points of view and to organize a daylong symposium on art criticism. Asked where the money will come from, Lottes beamed. “One of the wonderful things about Orange County,” he said, “is that there are so many people with a lot of money, and they love doing those things. . . . They can have their name attached to it: ‘Sponsored by so-and-so.’ ”

Also on his list is a hunt for additional studio space in industrial areas of Orange County, “to give students a round-the-clock environment.” Under the school’s peculiarly unbohemian system--more suited to a bank than an art school--studios open at 8 a.m. and close at 5 p.m.

The school’s once-thriving gallery exhibition program of contemporary art, directed by Nancy Mooslin, ended last year when funds evaporated and President Lewis offered scant support. Although the current budget provides less than $12,000 for the gallery--now run by faculty members--Lottes plans to re-institute a full-scale program in fall of 1992.

“The exhibition program is like a football team in many ways,” Lottes said. “It’s a very public opportunity for access to the institution.”

He envisions a busy schedule of a dozen exhibitions a year, organized by a curator “who really has the responsibility and the independent authority to select work. I’m absolutely addicted to the belief that unless this institution is about making some honest and bold statements in the visual arts, we really don’t have a whole lot of reason for existence.

“If each year we can produce one person who becomes an important American artist, we will have succeeded. And to encourage these people, we have to share with them firsthand what other important artists are doing. Not just after they’ve become standbys, but while they’re still (unknowns). So we have to take some chances.

“I think it relates to what we’re doing in our liberal arts and our history classes. They should feed an intellectual appetite, an interest in exploration, and I don’t think they have. Happily, I’ve appointed (faculty member) Lynn Garrison to head up the liberal arts program. She is really interested in developing a more avant-garde intellectual (approach) in our courses.

“If we identify clearly what we do, work every way possible to do it better than everyone else . . . then people will support that, regardless of what their political or social leanings are. If we’re the best, the support will follow.”