First Crop of Arts Winners at CalArts : Awards: Alpert honors, based primarily on artistic merit, also give an edge to those responsive to the role of the artist in society.

The first five winners of the CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts will be announced this morning, at a ceremony at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The recipients are Reza Abdoh (theater), Ann Carlson (dance), James Carter (music), Mel Chin (visual arts) and Leslie Thornton (film/video).

The awards--which are funded by the Herb Alpert Foundation and administered by the California Institute of the Arts--are being announced to coincide with the school’s 25th anniversary. They were created by Alpert last year and consist of $50,000 fellowships, to be given to five mid-career artists annually.

Establishing the awards is the musician-philanthropist’s way of helping to bridge what he sees as a serious gap in support. “I feel strongly that we need to promote the arts in this country,” says Alpert, speaking by phone from Italy. “The arts are as important as getting guns off the street.”

The awards, which are based primarily on artistic merit, are also designed to give an edge to artists who are, as the program guidelines put it, “responsive to the complex, challenging . . . role of the artist in society.” And the winners do indeed share an activist, or at least humanistic, sensibility.

Abdoh, whose “Quotations From a Ruined City,” premiered here as a work-in-progress as part of the 1993 Los Angeles Festival, is an avant-garde theater and opera director whose highly confrontational works point to the moral relativism of society in decay. Carlson, who is scheduled to perform as part of a group program at UCLA’s Wadsworth Theater on May 12 and 13, is an experimental choreographer-performer who often features non-dancers in her egalitarian-themed works.

Chin’s art addresses a range of social concerns, including the plight of the environment; Thornton is working on a film about a 19th-Century adventurer who travels between cultures; and musician Carter has been praised as a saxophonist who both pays homage to and extends the jazz tradition.

The recipients were chosen via a process designed by CalArts and administered by program director Irene Borger. Five panels of nationally recognized artists and arts professionals--including three MacArthur “genius grant” fellows and a Pulitzer Prize winner--made final choices from a pool of nominees generated by anonymous nominators.

The fellowships--which also stipulate that the recipients spend a week to 10 days in residence at CalArts’ Valencia campus--are intended to support a year’s work. “It’s a chance for us to take part in identifying artists at a crucial moment in their life’s work,” says CalArts president Steven Lavine. “What we’re trying to do is give these artists a chance to go further and deeper.”

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Although the awards were launched prior to the most recent spate of attacks on government funding of the arts, Alpert sees them as a symbolic counter to the ongoing opposition. “There are those who don’t see the importance (of the arts), and that’s unfortunate,” he says. “In order to perfect (an artistic) skill, you need discipline, and through that discipline comes the ability to do other things.

“The arts are an important way of learning to be sensitive to others,” continues Alpert, whose foundation was established in the early 1980s and funds not only the arts, but educational and environmental causes as well. “But we’ve almost completely wiped them out of education.”

Further, Alpert hopes that his actions will set an example. “If (the awards) will encourage other people to replicate this, I’m fine with that,” he says.