Panel Urges Challenge Grant for Museum

A California Arts Council advisory panel has recommended a $21,225 Challenge grant for Laguna Art Museum but has rejected a $37,125 Challenge grant request from the Pacific Symphony.

The panel, whose recommendations will be accepted or rejected by the council at a meeting in Sacramento on Thursday, gave the museum a 4- ranking (close to the top of a 1-to-4 scale) and recommended the funding for “Chicano Printmaking: The Role of Self-Help Graphics,” an exhibit of about 60 prints by 30 artists who have worked at Self-Help, a print shop in East Los Angeles.

“Chicano Printmaking” tentatively is scheduled for early 1995 at the museum, which then plans to tour it nationally, according to curator Bolton Colburn.

The Challenge grant, which must be matched three-to-one, also would subsidize a bilingual color catalogue (English and Spanish), a council spokeswoman said.

The Pacific Symphony requested a Challenge grant to support its new Orchestral Institute at Cal State Fullerton, a joint training project between the orchestra and the university to begin this fall.

The panel gave the orchestra a ranking of 2+. Historically, only groups ranked 3- or higher receive grants. However, failure to obtain the grant wouldn’t automatically mean the end of the program. Funding has been allocated in the orchestra’s $5.6 million budget, and the project will proceed provided the orchestra’s $1.6-million fund-raising goal is met, according to the Pacific’s development director, Ken Goldman.

Since the start of its fiscal year July 1, the orchestra has reached 32% of its goal, raising $506,000 in cash and pledges, Goldman said.

PRIVATE PLEDGE: A local arts patron has promised to match, dollar for dollar, donations up to $10,000 in support of the San Juan Capistrano Regional Library’s performing arts series.

Frances Bass-Dudley of San Juan Capistrano will require that the donations to the Multicultural Performance and Visual Arts Series be earmarked for 1994 and made between Oct. 1 and next September, librarian and series coordinator Jose Aponte said Wednesday.

Therefore, Aponte said, $12,553 raised in recent weeks does not qualify for the matching funds. The $12,553, which came after the county withdrew its support of the series because of its own financial problems, is enough to keep the series going through next year; the money matched by Bass-will enable presentation of higher-profile, more expensive acts than normally appear at the library, Aponte said.

Bass-Dudley, who owns an investment firm in San Bernardino County, has also made donations to such Orange County arts organizations as the Pacific Symphony and the Newport Harbor Art Museum.

NEW YOUTH ORCHESTRA: Christopher Russell, music director of the Pasadena Young Musicians Orchestra, has been appointed head of the new Pacific Symphony Youth Orchestra, based at the Orange County High School of the Arts in Los Alamitos.

The new orchestra supplants a training program previously established at the high school by the South Coast Symphony, which dissolved in 1992. That group most recently was led by Pacific Symphony assistant conductor Daniel Hege, who in July became director of the Chicago Youth Symphony.

Russell will keep his position in Pasadena during this appointment.

“We feel this is a way to involve the Pacific Symphony in a program that is established and one which we think we can enrich quite extensively,” Pacific Symphony executive director Louis G. Spisto said Friday.

“We also see this as a feeder program to the Pacific Symphony Orchestral Institute at Cal State Fullerton,” he said.

Four off-campus concerts are planned by the youth group over the next year, Spisto said.

Spisto said the new group would pose no competition with such groups as the Orange County Youth Symphony led by John Koshak at Chapman University in Orange.

“It would be a sorry state of affairs if there were only one youth orchestra in Orange County,” Spisto said. “Actually there are already several other youth orchestras throughout the county. And there should be more.”

Times Orange County staff writers Chris Pasles and Janice L. Jones contributed to this report.