DOWNTOWN : Child Arts Program to Get a New Home

Christmas is over, but the children in the Inner-City Arts program have a few more gifts coming to them in the new year: a larger, permanent building and new classes in dance, drama and music.

Inner-City Arts, which provides 4,300 Skid Row children with visual arts classes during and after school, has hoped for some time to add performance art classes. But the 3-year-old nonprofit program has been stymied by space restrictions at its temporary location in a pair of trailers at Ninth Street School.

The program has been housed in the trailers since May, 1991, when it was ousted from its donated Olympic Boulevard loft after city firefighters found potentially hazardous chemicals at a blue-jeans dying plant next door. The city Community Redevelopment Agency came to the rescue by providing $50,000 for the trailers at 9th Street and Towne Avenue.

Since then, program leaders have purchased an old auto body shop in the eastern part of Downtown to renovate for the new arts center, and supporters have raised more than $1 million of the $2.5 million needed to buy and build the facility. Architect Michael Maltzan has volunteered his time to design the 10,000-square-foot center.

Program leaders hope to break ground in January and move into the new building next fall.

Maltzan has planned an airy, light-filled center that will include an art gallery to display the children’s works; a dance and drama studio; a media center where children can use video cameras and sound equipment; a ceramics studio, and a multipurpose space to be used for classrooms and as an auditorium. Children will also be able to plant and tend flowers, fruits and vegetables in a garden.

Program leaders call the new center an oasis for children who typically live in cramped Downtown apartments and Skid Row hotels.

“We’re trying to make a very beautiful, very bright place,” said Maltzan. “We want the kids to draw from a variety of kinds of art.”

Inner-City Arts’ goal is not to produce award-winning artists--the program aims only to foster creativity and encourage it in daily lives, said founder and artistic director Bob Bates.

“If you don’t give children hope and show them they have tremendous potential . . . you’ll have another Beirut,” Bates said. “We’re focusing their energy in a creative way. Our intention is not to train artists. It’s to train creative human beings.”

Bates and his two staff art teachers have done everything from show the children how to make cartoon strips to invite a 21-piece orchestra to play chamber music. Members of professional and community arts organizations, such as the Los Angeles Repertory Theatre and the Museum of Contemporary Art, have also volunteered their time to teach the children.

“You get all these people together around the children . . . and the children see more, they express more and they’re more bold in the way they express themselves,” Bates said.

On one recent morning, staff teachers Yolanda Gonzalez and Bob Nydam helped a group of first-graders make Christmas cards with colored paper and bead necklaces.

Gonzalez found a few small beads and handed them to David Jokoh, 6, suggesting he paste them on the tree of his Christmas card. “Snowflakes--yeah!” exclaimed David.

Gonzalez, a professional artist, said the program teaches the children much more than just artistic lessons.

“I’m a Mexican woman, and I encourage the girls especially, and teach them it’s important to pursue education,” Gonzalez said. “A lot of times, one of the first things these girls ask me is if I’m married. I say, ‘No, I travel and have exhibits.’ ”