Sculpting Opportunities : MOCA and a Venice-Based Community Group Come Together to Provide Jobs by Creating Collector’s Items From Artists’ Designs

Red Grooms has made a new work. It isn’t one of the New York artist’s trademark walk-in environments, which typically re-create a busload of commuters, a wild rodeo or a bustling discount store in a splashy, cartoon-ish style. This time, Grooms has compressed a street scene onto a 10 1/4-inch porcelain plate. The piece, “Moonstruck,” depicts a flashily clad woman walking her poodle under a full, broadly smiling moon.

Is this a savvy marketing move to present collectors’ plates as high art? Yes, but the Grooms plate is also the first product of a collaboration between private industry and the art community designed to provide much-needed job opportunities.

The project, VOICE (Venice/Oakwood Inner City Enterprise), joins the resources and vision of Los Angeles residents Lynda and Stewart Resnick, art patrons and owners of the Philadelphia-based Franklin Mint, with the cultural clout of the Museum of Contemporary Art. The Resnicks donated $500,000 to lease and renovate a building at 1118 Abbot Kinney Blvd. in Venice, equip it as a factory and fund operations for a year.

MOCA has solicited prominent artists to donate designs for a series of limited-edition plates that are being produced by 10 neighborhood residents, ages 17 to 30, who were recommended through Community Young Gang Services, the Venice Skills Center and city probation officers. Jeff Belson, who formerly managed his family’s ceramics factory in Venice, is director of the project.

“It’s fun,” VOICE worker Chicano Dews says of his job. “It’s something to wake up for in the morning.” What he likes best is being part of a team and--having passed a 90-day probation period--getting medical and vacation benefits, along with his $6-an-hour salary.

“You’ve got to be willing to work, that’s all,” says Johnny Griego, who assembles the six-part Grooms plates after his co-workers have prepared the molds, as well as cast, fired, sanded and glazed individual components. Grooms’ colorful drawings are applied in the form of decals, which are fired onto glazed porcelain pieces depicting the woman, her dog, a bus, a sidewalk and a one-way sign.

“If the pieces aren’t good when they get to me, I toss them, so everyone works together,” Griego says. As a final touch, he dresses up the poodles with jeweled plastic leashes. Then the plates are packaged in specially designed, foam-lined cartons.

Belson says the workers are learning valuable skills that are needed in ceramics factories, as well as how to become responsible members of the labor force.

MOCA Director Richard Koshalek envisions the project as an experimental workshop for artists to try out new ideas in porcelain. For Grooms, “Moonstruck” was a chance to try an unfamiliar medium while making a social contribution. “I like it when someone takes something I have done and keeps going with it,” Grooms says.

Proceeds from sales of the artworks, above production and labor costs, will support the museum’s exhibitions and education programs. “Moonstruck,” to be produced in an edition of 4,000, is priced at $295. Additional VOICE products will be designed by Jeff Koons, Robert Rauschenberg, various Los Angeles artists and architect Frank Gehry.

Intended to become a self-sustaining business, VOICE is an outgrowth of a 1992-94 enterprise underwritten by sculptor Robert Graham, who employed youths to produce 3,000 bronze torsos, yielding $300,000 for the museum. In contrast, VOICE will produce many artists’ works and continue indefinitely.

“I pray that this will be a real business,” says Lynda Resnick, who conceived the idea to launch a community porcelain factory in 1992 after Los Angeles suffered a devastating round of riots and fires. Although she had experience with ceramic work through the Franklin Mint, she had never applied her expertise to this kind of social project. She was also inspired by the town of Vallauris in Southern France, known for producing Picasso’s ceramics.

She nurtured the idea of creating a workshop environment for several months and finally put it in motion after Koshalek asked her to join MOCA’s board of trustees. Already on the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Resnick declined Koshalek’s offer but told him about her dream. They immediately joined forces in what Koshalek hopes will be “a model of what the corporate world can do in our community.”

Resnick will use her marketing expertise to advertise and find museum-shop outlets for VOICE artworks, which are currently available at the Venice workshop and at MOCA’s store. Although the Franklin Mint is providing technical assistance and making master molds for the plates, it will not market VOICE’s products. The project will make its public premiere tonight at an invitational reception, where Grooms’ work will be unveiled.