The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art...

The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art raised about $8,200 at its annual benefit auction and party Sunday, nearly doubling last year’s proceeds and exceeding this year’s goal by about $1,200. The center operates on about $1,500 a month, so the proceeds “absolutely” should keep it financially secure for at least five months, according to auction chairman Pat Merrill. More than 75 works by artists from Orange County and Los Angeles were auctioned.

About $4,500 was raised on Friday from a screening in Anaheim of “Yanomami: Keepers of the Flame,” a documentary, written and co-produced by Leslie Baer-Brown of Laguna Hills, about an indigenous South American people living in the Amazon jungle. A recent screening of the film in Los Angeles had raised $6,000. All the funds are intended for a medical project to aid the Yanomami, who are being wiped out by disease. Baer-Brown said she hopes to raise more money through video sales of the documentary, which a company in the Bay Area has agreed to distribute, and through sales of the film to public television stations. The film will be offered via satellite to some 350 such stations in October.

Daniel Martinez, formerly a visiting lecturer in the studio art department at UC Irvine, has been appointed to a full-time position as assistant professor at UCI. A 1979 graduate of California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Martinez is known for his often confrontational socially engaged public art designed, as he has written, to “explore the possibilities of disorder.” At UCI, Martinez teaches sculpture and public art, and supervises independent study and graduate projects. His recent commissions include “This Is a Nice Neighborhood,” a collaborative project for the San Francisco Arts Commission at Moscone Center; “Quality of Life,” a temporary installation for the Seattle Arts Commission; “Guerra de Culturas” for the Billboard Project, “Dos Cuidades” at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; and a permanent 40-foot sculpture for the El Segundo station of the Los Angeles Metro Rail. He is one of several artists working on the $300,000 Koll-Anaheim project in downtown Anaheim. His in-progress projects include pieces in Chicago, Madrid, French Guiana and Cherbourg, France.