Trustee Gives $7 Million to L.A. County Art Museum : Culture: Funds will be used for an amphitheater, to improve adjacent park grounds and to present programs.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has received a gift of $7 million from museum trustee Dorothy Collins Brown to build an amphitheater and make other improvements on parklands surrounding the Wilshire Boulevard institution.

The donation is the second-largest cash gift from an individual ever received by the museum, surpassed only by a 1990 contribution of $10 million by Walter H. Annenberg.

Brown’s gift will provide funds to complete the long-planned Hancock Park Improvement Project, an ambitious plan to rejuvenate grounds surrounding LACMA and the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries. Initial funding of $5 million was provided in 1992 by a county bond for parks improvement. That money will cover the first phase of the project, including lighting, irrigation, drainage, restrooms, parking lots, fencing, landscaping and pathways.

The donation will fund the project’s entire second phase, which has three goals, according to the museum: to make the park an attractive retreat; to establish a $2-million endowment for the maintenance, operation and security of the park, and to provide performances and educational programs. Plans also call for installing artworks on the grounds in a sculpture garden and a Family Art Walk.

The amphitheater is expected to be the focal point of the park. The outdoor facility, to be named the Dorothy Collins Brown Amphitheater and located between the two museums, will be used for music, theater, poetry readings, dance recitals and performance art. The project is being designed by landscape architects Hanna / Olin Ltd. of Philadelphia and Fong & Associates of Orange County.

LACMA board President William A. Mingst praised Brown’s gift as “one more positive sign that everything is coming back together” at the museum, which is rebounding from a series of budgetary and staff cutbacks that began in 1992. Mingst said Brown’s generosity will ensure that the six-acre park will be a unique public gathering place.

“It’s a marvelous thing,” County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said of the gift. “It’s good to know that there are still people out there who have that kind of vision and care deeply about the future of the community. In a city of this size, it’s disappointing that we don’t have more people who contribute to our cultural life. Now more than ever, we need the charitable-giving community of Los Angeles to follow the lead of their predecessors who built the Music Center and the County Museum of Art, who gave us Griffith Park and the Observatory, to take us into the 21st Century.”

Brown was not available for comment. In a statement, released Friday by the museum, she said: “Parks are vital to the life of any community. It is my fervent hope that this gift will help to create an inviting and attractive environment for the museum and surrounding neighborhood.”

Brown, who has lived in Los Angeles for more than 60 years, was elected to the museum’s board of trustees in 1989. She funded the museum’s Dorothy Collins Brown Auditorium and the four-tiered waterfall that descends from the central court to a street-level pool near the entrance.

A patron of other civic and cultural organizations, Brown is a benefactor of the Music Center of Los Angeles County and serves on the boards of KCET-TV, Channel 28, the Los Angeles Opera Assn. and the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens.