VALLEY WEEKEND : CULTURE COMES TO SUBURBIA

Last summer, at roughly the same time that Universal Studios Hollywood began construction on a $100-million “Jurassic Park” ride, the county’s Museum of Natural History announced that it could no longer afford to operate its satellite museum in Burbank.

No surprise there. The San Fernando Valley is a suburb, after all, with distinctly suburban affinities for thrill rides and video rental. Gourmet coffee shops thrive here. Galleries do not.

But that does not suggest an utter absence of culture. The concept of the Valley as a wasteland has grown stale. More annoying still are those well-heeled residents desperately attempting to prove otherwise by campaigning for some grand arts center to be erected in a local park or beside a shopping mall.

Both sides of this argument seem stuck on the notion that culture translates directly into square footage, that buildings make the art. As if we need another Music Center 15 minutes north of the original. As if Reseda will never be complete without world-class ballet.

In fact, the Valley is terrain with a far subtler if no less valuable aesthetic, offering the same thing to artists that it offers to everyone else: reasonable property values.

Small theater has long survived on the affordable leases along Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood. Established artists such as Robert Williams, Ernie Barnes and Craig Stecyk moved here because they could afford the studio space and afford to live in decent neighborhoods.

Some artists have been forced here as a result of the very same institutions that critics insist are necessary for a community’s cultural identity.

“Being an artist is a shuck deal,” Stecyk said after he and his wife, painter Lynn Coleman, chose a small house in Woodland Hills over the then-gentrified downtown scene. “You move into someone’s place and fix it up and get all your artist friends to move there. Then all the secondary people come along and all of a sudden you have bistros and galleries. The rent goes up.”

Not much danger of that happening in Van Nuys or Pacoima, which are nonetheless close enough to downtown and the Westside so that artists, dancers and musicians can attend exhibits and performances over the hill. As a result, some interesting work gets done.

A painter named Grant Alkin turned an earthquake-ravaged Northridge home into an immense artwork. With the house gutted and awaiting repairs, Alkin obtained permission from its owners to splash the walls, ceilings and floors with swathes of color. “As you walk through the door,” he explained, “you literally walk inside the painting.”

Just up the freeway, in her Newhall apartment, CalArts student Vanessa Schwartz toiled over an animated film called “The Janitor.” The 4 1/2-minute short featured a pudgy little figure who works as God’s handyman, painting Mars with two coats of red and sprucing up the moon, which, he grumbles, “is a real dust catcher.” It became one of only a handful of student projects ever to be nominated for an Academy Award.

In no less impressive an effort, a group of Woodland Hills residents, who had been pestering elected officials for three decades, finally won a branch library for their neighborhood last spring.

So it seems only fitting that the city’s Cultural Affairs Department has recognized the Valley as fertile ground for emerging artists and grass-roots efforts. Community arts centers in North Hollywood, Tujunga and Encino were recently handed over to private arts groups that desperately needed the modest space for performances and exhibits.

Similarly, the Madrid Theatre in Canoga Park--which had fallen on hard times as an X-rated cinema--is being rejuvenated as a bare-bones community stage.

None of these facilities rival the impressive arts complexes that other Southern California communities have erected. In the great scheme of things, it seems the Valley was not made for such grand edifices.

But the Valley has a cultural role to play. And you’re never more than a few blocks away from a cup of chocolate raspberry coffee.