Shake-Up at Municipal Art Gallery : Art: Edward Leffingwell, gallery director, says he would rather resign than be put in charge of public art projects.

In a move that has shaken the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park, Edward Leffingwell, director of the gallery and the city’s visual arts program for the last four years, appears to have been forced out of his job. He wasn’t fired. His position was eliminated as part of a city budgetary squeeze, and he was transferred to a job that he does not want.

“As far as I’m concerned, as of today, he is working as the director of public art,” Adolfo V. Nodal, general manager of the Cultural Affairs Department, said Monday. Nodal terminated Leffingwell’s former position and put him in charge of public art, a newly created position funded by the city’s Percent for Art program.

But Leffingwell said he intended to decline the transfer and to tender his resignation on Tuesday. “Directing public art projects is not what I set out to do,” said Leffingwell, who is known for curating fine-art exhibitions and writing critical essays.

Leffingwell said he will continue to work at the gallery through February as a consultant paid by the Muni’s board of directors (a support group that supplements the gallery’s city budget with privately raised funds) so that he can complete major exhibitions that are in process. A retrospective of George Herms’ work is slated for the fall and “LAX: The Los Angeles Exhibition ‘92,” a biannual collaboration with several other institutions, is planned for the winter.

Leffingwell, who directed programming at the Institute for Art and Urban Resources in New York before coming to Los Angeles, contends that the new position is not an appropriate use of his professional training and experience. “I turned 50 in December, and I’m not interested in cutting off part of my anatomy so that I can be a civil servant and have a comfortable pension,” he said.

Leffingwell further stated that the transfer would put him in charge of an area that he does not wholeheartedly support. “I’ve been the most critical person in the department about the practice of public art,” he said, asserting that vast amounts of money and energy poured into public art programs across the country have yielded few superior projects.

Some sources close to the Muni have speculated that Nodal has closed out Leffingwell’s position to get rid of an employee who was hired before Nodal took over the Cultural Affairs Department. Others have contended that stripping the city’s major visual arts showplace of its director proves that art exhibitions are a lower priority than performing arts and art in public places.

But Nodal insists that his decision to eliminate the directorship was entirely motivated by budgetary constraints and criteria for making mandated cuts. “We were asked by the City Council to cut positions in the department. At the same time, we were told that layoffs were a no-no,” he said.

In making the cuts, Nodal said he was faced with a twofold problem: to eliminate supervisors whose responsibilities could be taken over by other employees, and to ensure that those supervisors were qualified for transfer--at the same salary--to positions funded by other budgets.

Leffingwell, whose $52,000 annual salary has been paid by the Cultural Affairs Department’s general fund, was transferred largely because the general fund has been trimmed over the past few years while the public art budget has grown, Nodal said. Curator Noel Korten and park director Earl Sherburne are expected to fulfill Leffingwell’s former duties.

(Jane Kolb, the only other Cultural Affairs Department staff member to be transferred, has left her position as director of public relations and become a senior management analyst, a position that is funded by the Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts, Nodal said. Four unfilled positions--a senior clerk typist, two art instructors and a performing arts coordinator--also were phased out, he said.)

“I think it’s a great solution to a difficult problem,” Nodal said of Leffingwell’s transfer. “Ed has supported public art in the past,” he said, expressing surprise that Leffingwell does not view the change in his job description as a desirable career move.

While praising Leffingwell’s tenure as director of visual arts, Nodal said he thought Leffingwell would be an asset to the public art program. “We need a director of visual arts,” Nodal said, noting that he hopes to reinstate the position when money becomes available. “But we need a director of public art too.” Los Angeles’ public art program is likely to become one of the largest in the country, he said.

Members of the Muni’s board of trustees view Leffingwell’s impending departure as a rerun of a familiar story. “It’s very sad,” said attorney and board chair Joseph R. Austin, recalling that longtime gallery director Josine Ianco-Starrels was transferred to an administrative post against her will by Nodal’s predecessor, Fred Croton. “After the Josine debacle and now Ed, it will be difficult to get a top-quality person if the position is ever reinstated,” he said.

“We feel a moral obligation to the city, to the gallery and to the artists of this community, but it’s frustrating,” board member Stanley Grinstein said. “I’ve always felt that running an art program with the government is a minefield. It just doesn’t work.” A move to form a partnership between the city and the gallery’s private support group was rejected by the city about four years ago, he recalled.

But now the city may lose private contributions to the gallery. The board raised $225,000 for exhibitions in the 1991-92 fiscal year. A total of $400,000 has been budgeted for 1992-93, but it is difficult to raise money for an organization that has no director, Grinstein said.

With Leffingwell as a consultant, the board will carry out the exhibition program through February, he said. But board members are “worn down” by the gallery’s problems, and the future of the gallery depends on what transpires in the coming months, he said.

“We’ve put our money where our mouth is,” Grinstein said, “but our options are open. We need to know what the city wants. I just hope we can reach a meeting of the minds.”