Coalition Fuming Over Philip Morris Sponsorship : Art: A group of UCLA professors, students and artists plan to demonstrate at previews of a Romare Bearden exhibit funded by the cigarette company.

A coalition of professional artists, UCLA professors and students have joined to protest sponsorship by tobacco giant Philip Morris Companies Inc. of the art exhibition “Memory and Metaphor, The Art of Romare Bearden, 1940-1987,” which opens at UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery on Tuesday.

During a special VIP preview reception tonight and a member’s preview Sunday afternoon, the protesters, led by UCLA Art History Professor David Kunzle and controversial billboard artist Charles Sherman, plan to use their own artworks to expose what they see as “Philip Morris throwing a smokescreen over their crimes through art sponsorship.”

As the centerpiece of the protest, Sherman will mount his latest billboard--a six-panel, 10x20-foot representation of teen-age versions of the Virginia Slims girl, Marlborough Man and a smoking baseball player and dancer--near the gallery. The billboard, which reads: “WARNING: PHILIP MORRIS FUNDS ART BY ADDICTING + KILLING OUR CHILDREN,” was conceived by Sherman and painted by Kunzle, muralist Eva Cockroft, painter Mike Howells and UCLA student Vicki Rapaport.

“It’s despicable for a school like UCLA, that’s supposed to be concerned with the welfare of its students, to pander to the cigarette companies,” said Sherman, who drew attention last fall for his “Who’s Burning America?” campaign in which he mounted a controversial billboard in Hollywood of the American flag being burned by a cigarette. “It is important for the arts to be funded, but it’s just too bad for it to be by someone like Philip Morris.”

In addition to Sherman’s billboard, the protesters will also display a 15-foot sculpture of a cigarette by artist and UCLA staff member Steve Simmons, as well as large banners with statistics on smoking deaths and the number of children who begin smoking each year. Literature will be passed out, and Kunzle has put together a slide show of cigarette adds and billboards altered by local artists, as well as slides of other anti-smoking artworks.

At Philip Morris’ New York headquarters, George Knox, the company’s vice president for public affairs, said: “We would have hoped that any controversy about an art show we’ve funded would be about the art itself, rather than about our involvement. But we recognize that there are people out there who object to anything we do, and there’s not much we can do about it. But we’ve been contributing millions to the arts for more than 30 years.”

Although Knox said the company does not have a a blanket amount budgeted to the arts annually, recent annual corporate contributions to the arts have been approximately $15 million.

As well as drawing attention to ethical questions of the sponsorship, the UCLA protesters hope to use the backdrop of the Bearden exhibition, a retrospective of works by an important yet underexposed African-American artist, to raise minority awareness of the smoking issue.

“Cigarette companies are now targeting minorities and the Third World, and Philip Morris turns out to be one of the major sponsors of exhibitions by minority groups,” said muralist Cockroft. “This is a part of their campaign to say that they’re a friend to Latinos and the black community.”

Kunzle, who is circulating a petition among UCLA art and health department faculty asking that the exhibition either be canceled or that the university avoid such sponsorship in the future, said: “There has to be other sources of funding out there. There are corporations that are decent, and UCLA should not be in a position of supporting someone like Philip Morris because it’s a lethal product they’re selling.”

In a letter signed by 20 faculty members sent to Henry Hopkins, director of the Wight Art Gallery and chairman of the UCLA art department, Kunzle writes: “The much touted corporate sponsorship of the arts by Philip Morris seeks to draw a cosmetic veil over the fact that they are, in effect, mass murderers. They offer art to prettify their literally deadly greed and cynicism. UCLA . . . cannot be party to the corruption and killing of youth.”

Hopkins, who took his post on July 1 after the Morris-sponsored exhibition was already planned, has approved Kunzle’s requests for protest space.

“This is a university campus, after all, and one has to have an open discussion,” Hopkins said. “The exhibition will provide the source for that discussion.”

Calling Philip Morris “a major funder of the arts that every major institution in the country has benefited from,” Hopkins said the funding is “a major issue that’s been debated 100 times in 100 ways. Everybody always sees a certain problem with it, but with museums and institutions in serious financial straits, to be able to do the kind of programs they’re doing (the institutions need to accept the funding).”

Hopkins, noting that state funding cuts have already forced the gallery to have two “black spots” in its schedule where no exhibitions will be on view, said, “We felt (being able to mount) the exhibition was the important issue, and the funding source was not as important to us.”

In fact, without the Philip Morris-sponsored Bearden exhibition, the gallery “could very well have been” closed for a third exhibition spot, Hopkins said.

In 1990, tobacco sales accounted for 41% of Philip Morris’ more than $51 billion in revenues. Food products accounted for 51%, with the rest from alcohol, financial services and real estate.