Welcome to His ‘House’: Watts Towers : Arts: Photographer Willie Middlebrook, a protege of the arts center, returns as its new director hoping to ‘present a lot of different attitudes and ideas’ from all cultures.

As a young, high school art student, Willie Middlebrook would frequent the Watts Towers, staring in awe for hours at the folk art monument that is synonymous with the neighborhood.

Now Middlebrook, 36, has returned to the site as the new director of the Watts Towers Arts Center, the adjacent city-owned arts facility that serves as a vital link between the African-American community and the arts.

“Community outreach is our main involvement here,” said Middlebrook, a well-recognized artist who came to Watts Towers after spending five years as assistant director of another city-owned arts facility, the Los Angeles Photography Center.

“One of the problems in the black community is that our culture has been taken from us, and it’s hard to understand that need,” he said. “There’s so much more going on in the arts community than rap--and the children need to know that. We need to show the kids that there’s other ways of bringing out that expression--other than violence. . . . I remember what it was like to be young and energetic and wondering. I was always an art student, and I remember wondering, ‘Can I even go in that direction? Is there even something you can do with that energy?’ And that’s something that we can do here at the center, answer those questions for other young people.”

Middlebrook has formidable shoes to fill, taking over the job held for 16 years by artist John Outterbridge, a revered leader of the black community, who resigned in September to concentrate on his artwork.

“It’s my house, now, you might say,” Middlebrook said. “And I’m taking over from somebody who took very good care of it. But I can’t fill John’s shoes, and I don’t think anybody could, or would want to. I hope to maintain the level of understanding he developed between the community and the center, but I could never be John.”

Cultural historian Cecil Fergerson, another respected African-American leader whose portrait graces the front of the center in a mural painted by Richard Wyatt, agreed that nobody could fill Outterbridge’s shoes, but called it “really fitting” that the mantle should be passed on to Middlebrook, who started his career in 1973 at Outterbridge’s Compton-based Communicative Arts Academy, then moved with Outterbridge to Watts Towers in 1978.

“Willie will do fine; he’s a protege of ours,” Fergerson said proudly. “He trained right there in the Watts Towers, and is really a credit to (the center) as a person that the community turned out that went on in the arts. If it wouldn’t have been for people like Willie, the program wouldn’t have gone on.

“And Willie’s got good ideas, new ideas,” Fergerson added, “some of which he might have wanted to do all along. Sometimes you don’t want to tell the master what to do--you gotta wait your chance.”

Now that it’s his job to direct the center’s future, Middlebrook does indeed have some ideas of his own. Foremost, he’d like to broaden the center’s base, appealing more directly to the area’s now-predominantly Latino community, and use the exhibitions program to bring more understanding between African- and Korean-Americans.

“There’s these attitudes about the Korean community here, and we’ve never really taken the time . . . to sit down and talk about it,” said Middlebrook, who last year participated in several post-riot exhibitions including Santa Monica Museum of Art’s “Breaking Barriers,” “Bridging the Differences: Works by African-American Artists” at the Korean Cultural Center, and Highways’ “Barefoot in the Embers,” in which he did a collaborative installation with Korean-American artist Ji Young Oh.

“We’re perceived as a black center because we’re an older community here, and we’re more vocal. But I want this to be a community center,” he said. “I don’t want to take it away from the people that built this center, but I want it to be open to everybody. I want to present a lot of different attitudes and ideas, a lot of folks’ ideas--black folks, Latino folks, Korean folks, white folks.”

Middlebrook’s other goals--which all must be accomplished within his less-than-$200,000 annual budget--include fostering more direct artist involvement with the center, expanding the gallery’s programs to feature changing exhibitions every six weeks, and starting a nonprofit support group for the center. And he will continue the annual jazz and drum festivals and a “Visiting Schools” program that brings in 15 to 20 groups each month.

Middlebrook, who recently received his second National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for his photographic portraits of the black community and whose work is currently on view in a two-person exhibition at Pierce College Art Gallery, admitted that his new job would cut into his artmaking, but vowed that it wouldn’t halt it.

“There’s no way for me to stop doing my art, period,” said Middlebrook, who is collaborating with mentor Outterbridge and artist Stanley Wilson on a Green Line Metro Rail station. “I know that being an art center director is not the kind of job where you can go in 9-to-5 and then go home. It’s the kind of job that you have to give 100% of your time. But I’m sort of hyper and I like being involved in a lot of things. . . . In the last few years, so many people are interested in seeing my work, and I’m hoping that if that keeps going on, it will open more doors for black photography. That’s important for me, because there really aren’t a lot of outlets for images of black folks.”

Middlebrook’s concerns are currently reflected at Syracuse University’s Light Work gallery in a series called “Black Male Love Song.”

“I felt a need to show black men in America,” Middlebrook said. “We’re not shown in a positive light. I’m a black man in America--a large, dark, black man with dreads--and I’ve never robbed, beaten or stolen. I have a wife, the same wife, five children (ages 6 to 16) . . . I’ve never been to jail, and if you put drugs in front of me I probably wouldn’t know what to do with them. And I know a lot of black folk like me. These are the kinds of images that need to be seen.”