The Fine Art of Making Friends : Museums are reacing out to ensure that ethnic visitors feel welcome. The efforts are starting to pay dividends and win plaudits.

Lucia Diaz, director of the Mar Vista Family Center, remembers the uneasiness many of her families felt before their first visit to the J. Paul Getty Museum.

The center serves mostly low-income Latino and African American clients, and few had been to the Getty, although it is free and less than 20 miles away in Malibu. As Diaz recalled, one older woman, a native of Mexico who rarely ventured out of her neighborhood, was particularly apprehensive, fearful that she wouldn’t be welcome because of her limited education and inability to speak English. The woman’s heart sank when she stepped off the bus and onto the sumptuous grounds. Although the museum, a handsome replica of an ancient Roman villa, beckoned, the woman was sure she would be perceived as out of place.

But the woman’s fears were allayed at the door. She and the rest of the Mar Vista group were greeted by Getty staff members and offered tours in English or Spanish. Fascinated by what she saw and heard on the tour, the woman said later that she would like to bring her grown children with her when she visited next.

The Getty has become one of the favorite destinations of Mar Vista Center families, Diaz said. “They make you feel you’re in a safe place.”

More and more museums are doing what the Getty is trying to do: open their doors to a more diverse population. To accomplish that, museums have had to confront--and try to change--the perception that they are elitist institutions, with little or no interest in visitors who aren’t well-educated, wealthy and white. Their efforts to reach out include everything from bilingual signage to forging ongoing relationships with community groups. And despite hard economic times, many Westside museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the George C. Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits, seem to be succeeding, as evidenced by small but real gains in attendance by minorities.

Local museums say they cannot wait until their staffs are more multicultural--a stated goal of the Getty and others--to attract new groups. “It’s a matter of fairness for me,” said Getty director John Walsh. “We’re doing it out of a sense that we’re not being as effective with our population as we could be. We’re missing chances to change lives.”

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No local museum has been more ambitious than the Getty in its efforts to democratize. In a 1988 survey, the overwhelming majority of Getty-goers--89%--identified themselves as white. Subsequent studies looked at what kept people away from the museum and revealed that many, whatever their ethnicity, thought the museum was geographically remote, stuffy and inhospitable to children. They also found the museum’s parking reservation system hard to understand.

Some public perceptions stunned the staff. “Because our name is Getty, some people thought we might be an oil museum,” recalled Barbara Whitney, the museum’s associate director for administration and public affairs.

Also surprising was the notion that the museum, which abuts Pacific Palisades, was in a remote area of Malibu.

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As step one in the process of widening its audience, the Getty decided to focus on Los Angeles’s large Latino community. Some ways of attracting more Latinos were obvious. Three years ago the museum introduced a Spanish-language telephone information line and it has hired more Spanish-speaking reservation agents. But, as Starr said, other strategies for change emerged only “when we began to listen to what people wanted instead of what we thought they wanted.”

Providing educational experiences for their families was a major goal of Latinos interviewed in depth in 1992. Whether they were longtime residents fluent in English or recent immigrants who spoke mostly Spanish, many said they would very much like to visit an art museum that offered family-oriented educational activities.

Mindful of the perception that children weren’t welcome, the Getty became more family-friendly on several fronts. A public service announcement was filmed, featuring an African American schoolgirl describing the Getty as free and fun. It began running in 1990 on local TV stations at cartoon time. Highchairs were ordered for the restaurant and a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich (with beverage and chips for a relatively inexpensive $1.95) was added to the menu.

The museum also decided to recruit children as allies in its effort. More than 25,000 schoolchildren from the 90-plus ethnic backgrounds represented in Los Angeles come to the museum every year for staff-taught programs or to tour with their teachers. For several months in 1992 each student visitor was given a postcard as a keepsake. On one side was a photo of “Irises,” the famed Van Gogh painting for which the museum paid between $50 million and $60 million in 1987. On the other side, in both English and Spanish, was an invitation to the child to come back with his or her parents--no reservation required. Five percent returned with parents in tow.

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In 1992 the museum drew larger-than-average Latino audiences to two exhibits. For “The Passion of Christ in Renaissance Manuscripts,” the Getty sent announcement flyers to predominantly Latino churches, in addition to alerting the Spanish-language media. For a show of photographs by Mexican artist Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the exhibit labels were written in Spanish as well as English. In surveys conducted at both shows, 12% of the visitors identified themselves as Latino, twice the percentage of Latino visitors during 1991 and three times as many as in 1988.

The survey also revealed that Latino visitors felt good about the Spanish labels, no matter how fluently they spoke English. One wrote, in English: “I enjoyed the fact the Museum exhibits Mexican art and cared enough to (label) it in both languages.” Only 4% of the visitors said they read only the Spanish labels.

Steven D. Lavine, president of the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, said such efforts are part of a larger trend.

“Museums are making very serious efforts to broaden their constituencies,” he said. “It starts with what you put in your museum.”

But to achieve real diversity, more needs to be done. As important as ethnic programming is, the real test is “whom you show genuine respect for,” Lavine says.

One reflection of that respect is who is involved in decision-making: A number of local museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, have multicultural advisory boards. Bilingual brochures are among the crucial gestures that make a museum less forbidding to new audiences, but they are only a beginning, Lavine says. “You have to realize it’s going to take years.”

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Somewhat surprisingly, many museum officials said they don’t need pots of money to make new groups feel more welcome. And it’s a good thing, too, because, unlike the Getty, most local museums are severely underfinanced.

Largely supported by the county, the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries in Hancock Park has suffered major staff reductions and other economic woes in recent years. But even the Page has become more multicultural, according to Catherine Krell, deputy director for marketing and public affairs for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the Page’s parent institution.

In the past five years African American visitors have doubled to a still modest 3%, while Latino attendance has quadrupled to 8%. The number of visitors identifying themselves as Asian or Pacific Islander has grown from 1% to 6%, Krell said.

Although the Page lacks funds for a full-scale study, visitors were recently asked, in English or Spanish, what they liked and disliked about the museum. Many said they wished gift-shop souvenirs were less pricey. As a result, the shop now stocks more items that cost $2.50 or less. A hot seller is a pencil, black as the asphalt that bubbles in the tar pits, that features the museum’s sabertooth logo. Young visitors snap up 50 to 100 every day at 50 cents apiece.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is also trying to diversify despite serious financial woes. According to Jane Burrell, head of education, most of the museum’s multicultural programs are related to specific exhibits or collections. In November, LACMA will open a major show of Jain sculpture and painting. The museum has identified a school in Buena Park with a large number of students who practice this form of Hinduism. LACMA will bring in the students and their non-Jain classmates for special tours.

Maintaining relationships is an essential part of audience-building, according to Burrell. “You can’t reach out to a community that is not your usual community one time and expect them to continue to come,” she said. LACMA has had a multicultural advisory board since 1988. And when an exhibit excites an ethnic community, the museum tries to build on that success. Last summer there was a strong African American turnout for an exhibit of paintings by black artist Jacob Lawrence. A show of prints by African American artist Romare Bearden opens July 14.

The museum also plans an ambitious program in connection with this summer’s exhibit of 18th-Century Korean Folk and Court Art. Libraries and community centers throughout the city will be the site of hands-on art activities for children, featuring such skills as Korean pottery techniques. Included will be neighborhoods that have experienced tension between African Americans and Koreans. Free transportation to the exhibit and free admission will be offered to all participants and their extended families.

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Enthusiastic volunteers or the above-and-beyond efforts of staffers are what make some outreach programs possible. Maritza Galdamez is the busy secretary in LACMA’s education department. But she has taken it upon herself to ensure that every Spanish-language news outlet in the Southland knows about such LACMA activities as next month’s exhibition of work by Chicano artist Gronk, a native of Los Angeles. She also reviews the translation of museum materials into Spanish, such as an information sheet about animals in Asian art.

One museum has a head start when it comes to multicultural appeal--the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Founded in 1963, the museum contains cultural materials from around the world, including major collections from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania. As Fowler deputy director Doran Ross explained, “We’ve been dealing with most of the planet, except Western Europe, since the beginning.”

The museum opened in new quarters on the Westwood campus in 1992. Last year it held its most successful exhibit to date, a show of pre-Incan treasures from Peru called “The Royal Tombs of Sipan.”

According to Ross, the museum made a special effort to make Latino Los Angeles aware of the show by hanging banners in English, Spanish or both over selected streets. Stories related to the exhibit were pitched to the Spanish-language media, including four local Peruvian newspapers.

The exhibit, which is now touring, attracted 100,000 visitors, including 15,000 children from schools in East Los Angeles and other largely Latino areas who were given special tours. The museum also underwrote a “Royal Tombs of Sipan” issue of Faces, a nationally distributed anthropology magazine for children.

This year, the Fowler will present shows devoted to a painter from Kenya, the household saints of Puerto Rico, the Iranian immigrant experience, Indonesian textiles, a Mexican artist who works in papier-mache, and the ancient religious rites of Haiti.

Diversity, said Ross, “is what our museum has always been about.”