LITTLE TOKYO : Gallery’s New Home Is More Hospitable

After 14 years of running a nonprofit art gallery out of a Downtown warehouse, Lydia Takeshita decided it was time for a change of scenery.

Takeshita vacated 3,500 square feet of gallery space in a three-story building on Mateo Street and moved LA Artcore Center to a commercial complex in Little Tokyo on 3rd Street.

What eventually drove her away, said the 67-year-old center director, was exactly the same thing that chased her gallery visitors from the area: Downtown blight.

Because of the influx of transients and prostitutes on and surrounding Mateo Street, “people were beginning to get scared to come Downtown,” Takeshita said. “No matter how much we put on a good show, people wouldn’t come.

“When you’re open 11 in the morning till 4 in the afternoon, to have just one or two people come in, that’s kind of sad,” she said. “Finally, we moved, and things are working out better.”

So much better that LA Artcore Center’s opening reception at its new home attracted 500 in March--doubling its largest crowd ever. The 1,500-square-foot gallery at 420 E. 3rd St. now draws 15 to 20 people daily.

Artcore’s move mirrors the recent Downtown exodus of other nonprofit galleries, such as the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), which relocated to Hollywood last April after spending seven years in the warehouse district on Industrial Street.

Although LACE now caters to a different crowd, Takeshita said she still wants her gallery to serve as a cultural arts center for Downtown.

The president of the Downtown Arts Development Assn., Jon Peterson, has criticized LACE for its move and applauds Artcore’s commitment to keeping the Downtown art scene alive.

“It sounds like, to me, they’re expanding,” Peterson said. “I think they’re a vital part of the community down here.”

Since its inception in 1980, Artcore has featured the works of young, emerging artists just out of college as well as that of experienced and professional artists on the brink of mainstream recognition.

This core group of artists gives the center its name.

Takeshita, who faced racial prejudice as a second-generation Japanese American during World War II, said the gallery’s concept developed when she was a professor of art at Cal State Los Angeles.

“We had a very close, intimate relationship with the (graduate) students,” she said. “They wanted to exhibit their works. They wanted a place to just contact other professional artists.”

College officials agreed to experiment with the opening of a gallery in Old Town Pasadena in 1979. Its success then brought on the idea of establishing a nonprofit public art center independent of Cal State L.A., Takeshita said.

A year later, Artcore was opened on Mateo Street with a $20,000 donation from one of Takeshita’s former art students.

“We started out with a membership of 30, and then we had 50,” Takeshita said. “And by the time we closed and moved, we had about 70. We’re just starting now to be recognized.”

The center operates on a yearly budget of $130,000, of which $80,000 goes to printing its quarterly magazine, Visions. The gallery is currently featuring artist Sandy Bleifer’s “Hiroshima Memorial Exhibition,” which consists of 35 figurative paper sculptures.

“I think the Artcore is rather unique because they’re nonprofit and they’re very organized,” said Barbara Mendes, 46, a Downtown artist who once lived across the street from the gallery.

“The old-fashioned galleries are fading away,” Mendes said. “It’s a lot of trouble to make nonprofit (work), so most artists just open their own.”

Takeshita plans to stick around. Artcore, along with some performing arts groups, is slated to move by 1996 to a permanent home across the street at the Union Church of Los Angeles. “This is my family--family of arts,” she said, holding out her arms to the surrounding paper sculptures. “I’ll never retire.”