SOUTH-CENTRAL : Artwork to Promote Ethnic Harmony

A large-scale public art project launched this month is aimed at building understanding among the African-American, Korean-American and Latino communities.

Under the Cultural Explainers project, a monument will be built in each community to symbolize an achievement of the respective ethnic group. The movable, three-dimensional monuments will be rotated among the communities “to represent each culture to the other,” said Franklin U. D. Westbrook, program coordinator. He is also a designer with the Social and Public Art Resource Center, a Venice arts organization and gallery that is sponsoring the project.

“Hopefully, the monuments will reflect something of the uprising, but will also show the history, achievements and struggle of these groups,” Westbrook said.

The first monument will be created in the African-American community though a series of meetings with artist Pat Ward Williams. The African-American phase of the program probably will not be completed until mid-1994. Artists Yong Soon Min and David Avalos have been selected to work on the Korean-American and Latino projects.

The project has received about $50,000 in funding from the Hitachi Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

If the project is successful, it probably will be expanded to include other ethnic groups in the Los Angeles area, Westbrook said.