The Culture Club : Amid Urban Blight and Disappearing Funds, ArtPartners Creates a Neighborhood Program Where Everyone Wins--Especially Children

Slicing through another heavy sheet of construction paper, Jerome McGee, 10 1/2, his stocky, gluey fingers pressed through the finger holes of blunt-edged scissors, talks onlookers through a tour of his morning creation.

Jutting out of the tabletop like a centerpiece of exotic blooms, his paper structure is an explosion of colors and shapes--curlicues, arches, spheres. McGee sounds like the proud chief architect touring the site, missing only his hard hat.

“This is a park that I’m building for the year 2000. Here’s the fountain,” he explains, spinning the structure around. It jiggles like a Jell-O mold. “I figure we’ll probably need a day-care center here. That’s really important for the neighborhood. And here’s the little pool where kids can swim.”

Suddenly Jerome lifts his creation, flips it and shakes it vigorously. “Have to make sure it’s earthquake safe, you know.”

Young architects with new tools in their hands are building something larger, something more than just intricate paper edifices. For any person who attended California public elementary schools before the 1980s, this scene at the Watts Towers Art Center scares up happy memories. But these kids are quite often gauging their artistic abilities for the very first time, says Sheila Batiste, the center’s education coordinator and art instructor. Budget cuts long ago obliterated many arts and music programs in schools.

“As soon as I mention that they are going make some art . . . “ Batiste’s eyes light up behind her glasses. “It’s as if I’m giving them a gift.”

In a way she is.

It is not so much structures like Jerome’s that are remarkable, it is instead the story he and other children have constructed around them, the blueprints of dreams, of expansive thinking.

This site is more than an arts center. The staff, more than baby sitters or tour guides. The afternoon, more than craft time with glue, paints and educational videos. And what is being built here is far more than bright paper fantasies--but the beginnings of a foundation.

This center and its five sister community centers run by the City of Los Angeles’ Cultural Affairs Department faced the worst-case scenario. As their combined budget dwindled from $534,000 in 1991-’92 to $176,500 in ‘95-’96, some sites faced certain demise--possibly to be abandoned. Six more sad, tangible examples of neighborhood blight.

Until ArtPartners swept in--a team effort that strives to be as creative as the artworks it enthusiastically promotes and sponsors.

In a funding climate that is mercurial at best, ArtPartners liberates the centers from relying solely on the public budget by securing private funds. That frees the CAD to focus on its primary course: protecting not simply buildings, but the children and communities that surround them.

Officially launched last month, the program is the three-years-in-the-making brainchild of Adolfo Nodal, the CAD’s general manager. It is a three-sided partnership--with support tailored to each center:

* The CAD provides the buildings, coordination and administration.

* Local arts organizations provide instructors and programming in some centers, while at others more programming dollars are provided for existing city staff.

* Corporate and foundation benefactors provide money.

“Through ArtPartners, we’ve generated close to $600,000 for running these things already,” Nodal says. “It’s more than replacing what was there. It’s generating a whole new energy.”

The first step: Linking local theater, dance and other art collectives, many of which have never had formal office space, with partners--including Target/Mervyns, the Ahmanson Foundation, American Express, the Los Angeles Times and La Opinion, and Sony--who put up programming dollars.

Ultimately, the CAD hopes that ArtPartners not only will enable these centers to continue programs, but will also serve as a model for rejuvenating city-run art programs and saving abandoned structures nationwide.

It’s not just an investment in the arts, but an investment in the community.

From Encino, North Hollywood and Tujunga to Watts, Pico-Union and Highland Park, these centers sit in distinctly disparate neighborhoods, facing distinctly unique urban needs. Yet they have attempted--even short-staffed and on a shoestring--to serve them. The programming: custom-made.

“This has allowed us to expand [programming],” says Watts Towers Art Center Director Mark Greenfield, “and to raise the center’s profile in the community.”

The result has been an always-open door for neighborhood students and adults to discover their poetic talents, or lose themselves in the flow of African drums or in modern dance. The center also hosts visiting students who see a slice of city history as well as discover their hidden strengths.

“We see art as being such an integral part of education,” Greenfield says. “Children with creative backgrounds have skills that carry over into other disciplines--everything from design to math.”

This center is a neighborhood nexus--shepherding creativity, evolving self-awareness in people of all ages. The careful alchemy is keeping costs low enough so neighbors don’t have to choose between putting dinner on the table and the price of a comic book art workshop. The true meaning of a community arts center.

“The center has become neutral ground,” says Greenfield, who acknowledges the gang turf and crime that surrounds his little island. “It is held in high esteem by people who may not hold anything else in importance.”

Those kinds of safe harbors vanish quickly in busy cities fighting to simply subsist. There isn’t enough support, not enough light and nourishment to nurture artistic growth.

“The kids in every one of these centers know them as more than just art places,” Nodal says. “This is often the place kids go when there is a problem in their community. Whether it is city government or trees or abuse, our directors deal with it or refer it to others who can.”

It was just that type of multipurpose resource that Nodal wanted to uphold and steadily build on. But staring into the face of declining funds, Nodal had to think fast.

“We’ve shielded the centers somewhat, but there’s been a reduction of staff, dollars. In order to continue I figured there must be a more interesting way.”

Through his travels around Los Angeles, Nodal often came into contact with various arts collectives that were running business on the fly--home office headquarters, post office box letterheads.

“There was a great need for facilities and we thought we could marry the two needs. It seemed to be a win-win situation--organizations got their space and centers got a shot in the arm.”

In a selection process that required proposals, community meetings, panels with arts leaders as well as those residents who were familiar with the center’s needs and community desires, Nodal and the CAD staff, like matchmakers, began the careful and complex process of pairing arts consortiums with neighborhoods and centers with consortiums.

As for corporate sponsors, “They came out and looked at the sites, were turned on by the neighborhoods, or saw that there were good things happening at the center. For some there was love at first sight.”

But not always. Fears that corporate dollars might hinder the freedom of expression derailed the program at William Grant Still Art Center, just off Adams Boulevard.

“They were afraid that a large organization would come in and take the site, and they would cease to exist at community level,” says Earl Sherburn, who has been the CAD’s director of community arts since 1990. “A lot of the African Americans who work there were afraid that a lot of programs would be lost.”

The fear wasn’t unfounded amid debate over the National Endowment for the Arts. With scarce money and opportunities, many artists and arts organizations have become increasingly protective of their little plots of land.

“It is not a privatizing effort in any way,” says Nodal, who wants to clarify that the CAD has not simply left its baby on a doorstep. “There’s been a lot of hand-holding and technical support.”

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Some centers, with already high community profiles, were an easier sell than others--both to corporate sponsors as well as to the communities they serve.

The Watts Towers Art Center, in its many incarnations, has provided a fulcrum for a community in flux, culturally, socially, while drawing on its illustrious history and its namesake landmark jutting into the sky,

While across a sweep of freeways, tucked away in a rustic glade in the Verdugo Hills, the McGroarty Arts Center also draws on the historic and its status as a community institution. Housed in the former domicile of John Steven McGroarty--poet, playwright and politician--the center is a social hub for residents from the bedroom Sunland-Tujunga and Foothill communities.

Although the two centers’ neighborhoods starkly differ demographically, the same social issues affect their worlds.

While residents in Watts do what they can to keep their children safe and provide diversions that could turn to passions, the Sunland-Tujunga residents are still reeling from the first smudges of graffiti on their hardware store walls and the more shattering news that gang life has begun to encroach on their carefully tended world.

“It’s scary,” says Susan Cheyno. “All of this talk about retaliation and turf. Seeing the town go down. . . . And what are we going to do about it?”

Cheyno and Isabella Barrone are fighting back and ArtPartners has allowed them to run their programs the way they would like them. With money from the Ahmanson Foundation, they have been able to augment classes in everything from watercolor and stained glass to piano and Highland dance--bagpipe records and all.

“Bottom line was, it saved us,” Cheyno says.

The other centers--Encino Media Center, Art in the Park, Lankershim and the William Reagh Photo Center--face a tougher challenge, as completely new programs and the people who run them share close quarters for the first time.

At William Reagh Photo Center, walking distance from MacArthur Park, the mix is a vibrant swatch of an L.A. microcosm.

Collectively titled the Unity Arts Center, the building is home to UP Inc., Grupo de Teatro Sinergia, Korean Classical Music and Dance Company, and Stage of the Arts.

David Greenberg, executive director of Unity Arts, takes a turn through the building pointing out the 99-seat theater, throwing open the doors to the photo labs. “We’re trying to get kids to shoot each other with cameras, not guns.”

To date, it is the only one of these centers without a corporate sponsor, and quite possibly the one that most needs one. “We’d like to make a real dent,” Greenberg says, “whereas right now we’ve really only made a scratch.”

Grupo de Teatro Sinergia presents its productions in English and Spanish on alternating weekends.

“We’ve been trying,” says troupe director Ruben Anavizca. “Sixty percent of this community is Latino. First generation immigrants. So it is very important for us to do it. A lot of people just didn’t know what this place was or that there was anything there for them. Before it was only a building . . . now there is a marquee, there is a theater, there is a cultural center.”

For, says Greenberg with the ferocity of an olden-days optimist, “This neighborhood sits at the apex of all these different cultures. . . . And if it ever comes together, it’s [through] the arts.”

*

Raising a diminished profile has been the struggle at the Lankershim Art Center as well.

In a former Department of Water and Power building, it houses four organizations under the umbrella of Community Arts Coalition: the Road Theater Company, Martin Dancers, Los Angeles Printmaking Society, Synthaxis Theater Company.

“We used to be in a warehouse,” says Taylor Gilbert of the Road Company, exiting the temperamental elevator and winding down a hallway and into a 99-seat theater space, painted flat black, with chairs refurbished by a high school auto shop class.

“It’s sort of new to me to actually have a home. The community has been supportive, merchants have donated foods, services, even though many residents really didn’t know what to expect.”

Gilbert understands a bit of their confusion. “The center opened, then it closed, then it opened again. . . . But that history aside, it’s up to us to bring in people.”

They do that by papering newsletters and fliers throughout the area, and by looking into media public service announcement time.

These efforts have eased the confusion about the center’s purpose and its activities, providing a bit of a stabilizing, normalizing effect. The partnerships, however, have at moments felt the burn of tension.

“It’s like four people getting married. ‘I sleep on that side of the bed.’ Sometimes it can be volatile. We’re just beginning to figure it out,” Gilbert says.

For Estelle Busch of the Synthaxis Theater Company, running her program out of this center has been a dream just out of reach for more than two decades. She had office space down the street in the late ‘70s.

Busch, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1953, has watched it shift and merge--from predominantly white to heavily Latino. She has been exploring ways to link the communities through intergenerational theater. The program has not only unlocked a door but opened up new options, without compromising creativity.

“I was very excited about it. I thought Al Nodal had a marvelous idea,” Busch says. “They were going to close down the center. It was going to be a total loss. And here, we’re giving a lot to the community--giving them an idea about what culture is all about, and we, the company, benefit from a facility that is beautiful.”

*

As Gilbert has pointed out, the edges are still being smoothed as ArtPartners is readied for its close-up--an all-eyes-poised pilot project for other cities.

“The partners get a little unruly at times, and that’s to be expected with any family,” says Sherburn, the CAD community arts director. “We’re monitoring the system monthly and making quarterly reports. And they can always pick up the phone and call me. We want them to be successful.”

Still, there are bugs and questions to be worked through, limits to be tested.

“We certainly didn’t want to get into a situation of asking our corporate funders: ‘Can I do that?’ ” Watts Towers’ Greenfield says. “And the jury is still out on that.”

“I was worried about the limits on creativity,” Gilbert admits. “But we didn’t have to pass our scripts past the city. You morally do what you feel is right.”

Target/Mervyns community representative Jeff Speigel, for one, believes in handing the artist the reins. “We look to them as the service providers to try to help bring programming to the community. We want them to be creative. . . . Kudos to the City of L.A. for developing a unique public / private partnership that can be a model for other cities.”

CAD general manager Nodal hopes his structure is sturdy enough to withstand budget cuts and other political tremors.

“I really care about those centers. But I really care about these communities. I think we’ve turned the corner. And even if it failed, we wouldn’t close them down. They are just too important.”

It’s just a matter of rethinking, rebuilding a stronger structure, from the ground up.