EXPOSITION PARK : Mass Medium for Museum’s Message

Selling art through billboards may sound avant-garde, but officials at the California Afro-American Museum hope it will capture the attention of commuters--and draw visitors and money to the museum at Exposition Park.

Forty billboards featuring Romare Beardon’s “Quilting Time” were unveiled last week throughout Los Angeles County as part of the museum’s first fund-raising campaign.

“Los Angeles County is a huge place and it’s virtually impossible to reach everyone, so we’re doing a combination of things to increase awareness and membership, including billboards,” said Aurelia Brooks, chief executive officer of the California Afro-American Museum Foundation.

“This is the first time we’ve done billboards and it’s kind of a test to see what kind of results we get. After all, this is a driving society.”

The billboards will appear for a month in the San Fernando Valley and other parts of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Pasadena.

Brooks said the 30-foot billboards of the 1979 lithograph, which depicts an 18th-Century setting of two people in a quilting room, are also meant to broaden the scope of the museum as a place that presents historical images of African Americans in the United States and elsewhere.

“This museum is a state museum and what it has to offer is not just for the African American community, but for everyone. So we tried to cover as much of Los Angeles County as we could in our first membership effort,” she said.

The billboard space, estimated at $30,000, was donated by Patric Media in November after Brooks approached the organization for help.

County Supervisor Yvonne Braithwaite Burke, who was a co-founder of the museum, called the campaign an important tool to increase membership. “The billboards will help get the word out that it’s a vital museum in Los Angeles that is world recognized and a growing center of culture in Los Angeles,” she said.

About 500,000 visitors have passed through the museum annually since it opened at the present site in 1984. Brooks said the state has slashed funding to the museum by more than 30% in the past few years. The museum received about $1.3 million in state funding in 1991, and that amount went down to about $816,000 this year. The museum does not charge admission.

“It’s been bad (economically) for us like it has been for everyone else,” said Brooks.