Recession Takes Toll on Arts Groups : Economy: UCSD’s visual arts department and the Balboa Art Conservation Center have both suffered deep cuts.

The region’s faltering economy has caused major changes in two local arts institutions. UC San Diego’s widely respected visual arts department has lost three of its core faculty to a recession-driven early retirement program, and the Balboa Art Conservation Center has eliminated five positions, including that of director.

David Antin, Newton Harrison and Allan Kaprow will retire from UCSD effective Jan. 1. Though the university’s visual arts department will retain 25 permanent faculty, the departure of the three artists will be felt as a serious loss in the department’s stature.

“It’s a bad hit,” department chair Jerome Rothenberg said. “It hits the conceptual core of the department. They were among the more internationally prominent members of the department. They were key figures in terms of departmental visibility and attraction to students.”

Both Antin, 60, and Kaprow, 65, will be recalled to teach courses through the next two quarters, and all three can be recalled to teach for the next three years under the terms of the UC system’s enhanced early retirement program. The impact of the retirements will be delayed, therefore, but Rothenberg acknowledges that “it’s pretty serious.”

Antin, a poet, critic and performance artist, began teaching at UCSD in 1968. He has published more than a dozen books and staged what he calls “talk poems” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and elsewhere. Harrison, 60, has been at the university since 1967, the year the visual arts department officially began. He and his wife, Helen Mayer Harrison, who will continue to teach at the university, collaborate on artworks that address ecological problems.

Their work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Documenta and at museums and galleries internationally. Cities around the world have also commissioned the couple to make proposals for specific urban sites, and several of these are being built.

Kaprow started teaching at UCSD in 1974 and is credited with inventing the “Happening,” a precursor of performance art. He has received two Guggenheim fellowships and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for his work, which has been written about extensively. All three artists are tenured professors.

The three positions will be returned to the administration, and the visual arts department will have to request a replacement to get them back, according to Nancy Mah, the department’s chief administrative officer.

“We’ll probably not get all three back in a given year,” she said. “We’re trying to come up with a strategy that would replace parts of them, in increments.”

More than 300 faculty and staff members throughout the UCSD campus, School of Medicine and Scripps Institution of Oceanography accepted the early retirement package with its enhanced benefits. Of the 22 faculty retiring from positions on the general campus, the arts and humanities departments suffered the worst cuts, with nine positions lost. In addition to the three positions in the visual arts, theater lost three, literature lost two and music lost one.

It’s still too early to tell how the visual arts department will change in the coming years, Rothenberg said.

“It’s very difficult to be put into a situation in which there is no immediate recourse to make it better,” he said. “It is still a very powerful department, but it may point to a collapse of the University of California as a great intellectual institution that the gaps that are opening up are random.”

The Balboa Art Conservation Center, a nonprofit institution that serves museums and individuals throughout the Southwest, eliminated five positions earlier this month. In addition to the director, a full-time paintings conservator, a part-time paper conservator and two part-time support positions were lost. The cuts leave the center with a staff of seven.

“Museum members (museums that send artworks to the center for conservation) are in the same kind of straightened positions other nonprofits are,” former director Wynn Lee said. “Individual and member institution workload is considerably off. There was not a great deal of analysis needed to know that we would have to downsize.”

Though the cuts will affect the organization’s ability to respond quickly to its commitments, Lee hopes that, overall, the impact will be positive, “in the sense that it will allow the organization to continue. It’s a resource for the community and is certainly important for our member institutions. It would be sorely missed if it disappeared.”

Also feeling the pinch of these recessionary times is Sushi, the nonprofit performance space and visual art gallery downtown.

Though all of its programs will remain intact through the fiscal year ending June 30, 1993, the organization is cutting back “to bare bones,” according to director Lynn Schuette. City funds, the organization’s largest source of income outside of admissions, were trimmed substantially this year, and so far Sushi’s exhibition program has borne the brunt of the situation. Visual art coordinator Robin Brailsford resigned last month rather than take a drastic cut in pay.

“In this particular context, visual arts is the most vulnerable because it has no earned income potential,” Schuette said. “It has to be entirely underwritten, and that makes it very vulnerable given the current economic climate. It’s an ugly situation.”