Getty Trust Reaches Out to Community

Dressed in a sequined vest, fringed trousers, jogging shoes, feather headdress and sunglasses, Native American performance artist James Luna mounted a stationary bicycle and captivated his audience with what he called “a surreal, post-Indian, subterranean blues experience.”

Pedaling in front of filmed images of a highway, he periodically pretended to dodge traffic or raised his fist in triumph. Then he dismounted and presented a series of piquant vignettes about Indian life amid American pop culture.

The only thing more surprising than seeing Luna’s performance on the stage of the Central Library’s Mark Taper Auditorium one Sunday afternoon last spring was that it wasn’t presented by an avant-garde arts group.

His one-man show wrapped up “Mapping Contemporary Native American Culture,” a series of public programs sponsored by none other than the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, a branch of the prestigious J. Paul Getty Trust.

The reputedly stuffy, Eurocentric organization’s patronage of a funky, ethnic art form may seem incongruous, but Luna said it boosted the Getty’s image among his peers.

Unlike institutions that embrace multiculturalism because that’s the only way to get grants and donations, the independently wealthy Getty “has taken the bull by the horns and presented programs that speak of diversity on various levels, and they deserve credit for that,” he said.

Consider another unlikely scene--also brought to you by the Getty Trust--at the Exposition Park-Bethune Regional Branch Library in South-Central Los Angeles.

A teenage mother with her baby in a basket designs a greeting card on a computer, while a gaggle of other youngsters use computers to do research, type papers and play math games. A sign suspended from the ceiling labels the high-tech enclave as a Getty Homework Center.

It’s one of four similar facilities established with a $340,000 gift from the Getty Grant Program in 1992, when riots after the Rodney G. King verdicts destroyed public library resources.

“It’s very popular,” senior librarian Kathleen Strelioff said, noting that the center is reserved for kindergarten through 12th-grade students during after-school hours but that adults use it during the day.

Meanwhile last winter at the Getty Museum in Malibu, teenagers, parents and grandparents with toddlers in tow thronged to the Isfahan Family Festival, which turned the museum’s Roman peristyle gardens into a Middle Eastern arts fairground, in conjunction with the exhibition “Book Arts of Isfahan: Diversity and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Persia.”

On Saturday, the museum hosted students from Stoner Elementary School in Culver City along with their families and teachers--the latest event in a 3-year-old Adopt-A-School partnership. Volunteering their time, museum staff members have served as pen pals, tutors and teachers’ assistants and helped reorganize the school library.

New Complex

Whether awareness of the Getty is the point of these and dozens of other community programs--or merely a desirable spinoff of the trust’s mission--is open to question.

But making itself known at home is a big item on the trust’s agenda as it prepares to open the Getty Center in the fall of 1997, unveiling a new museum and unifying the Getty’s formerly scattered programs in a complex designed by architect Richard Meier, atop a 110-acre site in Brentwood.

If the Getty seems to be going a bit overboard in its community outreach, give yourself a test: What do you think of when you hear the word Getty?

An eccentric oil baron who left his fortune to an art museum? A pile of money big enough to buy every artistic masterpiece that comes on the market? An intimidating museum hidden away in a Malibu canyon, where you have to call ahead for a parking reservation and check in with a guard? A bunch of esoteric scholarly programs that have nothing to do with your life in Los Angeles? A massive hilltop construction project that makes you feel insignificant from your lowly vantage point on the San Diego Freeway?

If one or more those characterizations rings true, you are not alone. Those are the images that have captured the popular imagination since 1982, when the J. Paul Getty Trust received the proceeds of Getty’s estate--a fortune now worth $3.9 billion--and its leaders had to figure out how to use all that money. But if the trust’s movers and shapers are successful, those will not be the pictures in your mind when you visit the Getty Center.

Instead of thinking wealth and privilege, officials hope you will have warm and fuzzy feelings about generosity and its rewards for the community. The imposing complex--priced at $733 million three years ago but now edging up to $800 million--shouldn’t seem like some rich guy’s ivory tower. You might think of it as L.A.’s front porch with a view of the world’s cultural heritage. Even better, you will know you belong there.

“Part of our aspiration for the Getty Center is that the public will feel welcome there, will feel comfortable on the grounds and at the museum, in contrast to an elite institution where they feel it’s remote from them and it’s designed to be that way,” said Harold M. Williams, president of the Getty Trust. “Once you are up there, it doesn’t feel at all remote. I think it will attract people who aren’t typical museum-goers.”

To some Getty watchers, this egalitarian dream is a delusion. Building a grand new home on a pinnacle of prime Westside real estate only reinforces conceptions of the Getty as a precious enclave for credentialed insiders, critics contend. They say the symbolism is more powerful than any campaign to reach out to the masses.

“They will never live down their elitist, isolationist image because of the unfortunate site of the building,” said Pratapaditya Pal, retired senior curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and an internationally renowned authority in the field. Currently doing research as a Getty scholar, Pal has high praise for the Getty’s programs and their impact on the city’s intellectual community, but he said the hilltop location is a mistake.

“It recreates a medieval image of a lord in a castle looking down at his fiefdom,” he said. “People feel intimidated about going to the County Museum on Wilshire Boulevard. How do you think they will feel about going to a castle?”

A prominent arts patron who spoke on condition of anonymity put it even more bluntly: “I will never feel comfortable there. I think the Getty was conservationally and environmentally incorrect in choosing that site. They didn’t have the best interests of the city at heart. They should have built [the center] on the Wilshire corridor.”

Other detractors contend that the Getty Center projects an image of art and culture as separate from daily life. By building on a wilderness hill in Brentwood, they charge, the Getty has missed an opportunity to transform a less affluent neighborhood and to make art part of life. An Acropolis that does outreach isn’t the answer, they say. It’s just another form of noblesse oblige.

Nonsense, said Kevin Starr, California’s state librarian and author of books on Los Angeles history. “Some people confuse elitism with quality. . . . Los Angeles is a great world city. It already has a lock on motion pictures, entertainment and pop culture, and a more than reputable representation in academia. Now it has an institution that’s key to high culture. That’s reflected in the architecture, and hurray for that. The fact that the building is so grand and conspicuous on a hilltop means we can look up and see this is a city that thinks about its relationship to the humanities and art.”

Even as these opposing views have been gathering force, the Getty has been engaged in an ambitious but little-known effort to establish a friendly hometown presence, make itself more relevant to the culturally diverse metropolis and spread the word that the Getty comprises more than a museum; it also has a grant program and scholarly institutes devoted to art education, research, information and conservation. Indeed, dozens of programs already are chipping away at the Getty’s seemingly impenetrable image and rounding out its profile.

What It Does

Since its formation in 1984, the Getty Grant Program has disbursed $54.7 million to support 1,300 projects in 126 countries, only about $2 million of which has been distributed locally. But an additional $33.6 million in emergency and special gifts has benefited Southern California museums, colleges, universities, cultural centers and libraries. Grants are competitive and subject to peer review, while gifts are made at the discretion of Getty trustees.

A $2-million gift to the Library Foundation of Los Angeles launched the Central Library’s Save the Books campaign after the fire in 1986, and a $350,000 challenge grant helped replace books destroyed at John Muir and Junipero Serra branch libraries during the 1992 riots. “They called us,” said Evelyn W. Hoffman, executive director of the foundation. “Their offer of help was the first call we received after the fire, and again after the riots.”

The grant program also funds summer internships for minority college students in local museums and visual arts organizations. More than $320,000 will be awarded this year to a total of 51 organizations, from the California Afro-American Museum in Exposition Park to Scripps College in Claremont.

“It’s an incredible program that addresses the lack of Latin American, African American, Native American, Asian and Pacific Islander people in arts professions,” said Glenna Avila, director of the Community Arts Partnership at CalArts. “And it deals with the problem not by just slapping a Band-Aid on it but by getting people into institutions.”

Another branch of the trust, the Getty Center for Education in the Arts, works with Southern California schools while fulfilling its mission to improve the status and quality of arts education nationwide.

The program has had a particularly strong impact at Grand View Elementary School in Manhattan Beach, where students get unorthodox lessons in contemporary art from ArtsEdNet, a World Wide Web site produced by the Getty.

One online session with New York-based artist Sandy Skoglund introduced her methods of staging and photographing room-size scenes of human frailties and banal disasters, using materials ranging from paint and paper to raw hamburger and cheese puffs. Instead of a dry march through art history, the kids got a juicy dose of Skoglund’s humorous approach to social commentary.

The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities is a research institute largely known for hosting an international array of visiting scholars, but it too has become a major player in local arts programming. “Originally, there was this sense that we invited scholars here, they came, we closed the doors, they looked at the books,” said Lynn M. O’Leary-Archer, associate director of the program. “But in 1992 we hired staff geared toward the Los Angeles community.”

Since then, the institute has collaborated with local organizations to present 30 public programs on subjects ranging from “Street Art/Graffiti Vandalism” and “Black Brown Relations” to “Celebrations of Independent Video.” In honor of the Getty Center’s opening, the theme for the 1996-97 group of Getty scholars is “Perspectives on Los Angeles: Narratives, Images, History.”

Even as it launches worldwide initiatives to make cultural information more accessible and stem the tide of art thefts, the Getty Art History and Information Program is helping local arts organizations gain access to the Internet and World Wide Web. It also is enlisting them in Los Angeles Concept, a new Getty initiative designed to centralize Los Angeles’ cultural resources on the Internet and to facilitate the preservation, presentation and development of cultural heritage through information technologies.

While yet another branch of the trust, the Getty Conservation Institute, has helped preserve cultural monuments around the world--including Egypt’s tomb of Nefertari and China’s Buddhist art-filled caves in Dunhuang--it also has tackled local projects.

In a joint effort with El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument on Olvera Street, a team of conservators, scientists, historians and technicians is restoring Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros’ 80-foot-wide mural, “American Tropical,” constructing a shelter and public viewing station for the painting, and installing a permanent exhibition to tell the story of the politically charged artwork, which has been concealed from public view for more than 60 years.

“It’s hard to select a project for Los Angeles,” said Miguel Angel Corzo, Getty Conservation Institute director. “There are so many communities here and so many really historic monuments that have a value for the community. The reason we chose Siqueiros was that Los Angeles has pretty much become the mural capital of the world. . . . This one just happens to be painted by one of the world’s greatest muralists, which helps, and it happens also to be the only public mural of this international artist in the United States.”

Delayed by earthquake safety precautions and bureaucratic entanglements involving historic monuments, the project is expected to be complete in two to three years.

Local projects obviously make friends, but they consume an enormous amount of time and money. Questions have arisen as to why Getty staffers roll up their sleeves on the home front when they could pursue projects further afield that might appear to be more in keeping with the institution’s mission.

“It’s our responsibility,” Williams said. “Institutions have a responsibility to be engaged with their community.”

And nowhere more than here, he said. “Los Angeles is labeled by many as the city of the 21st century, and for a lot of good reasons. We are at the crossroads of this country and Southeast Asia and the Far East and Latin America. We are the most culturally diverse city in the country and probably in the world. There is only one thing lacking and that is we are not a community. We are a series of economic, political and ethnic enclaves. I think if we are to realize our promise, we all have a lot to do to build community.

“So that’s at one level. At another level, various aspects of the Getty--most visibly and notably the museum--are local institutions or have a local dimension to them. If we are going to really relate well to the community, we have to be out there.”

Changing Role

If that’s news to many in Los Angeles, it’s partly because the Getty’s hometown role has increased with age. “This is still a young institution,” Williams said. “But our community involvement has grown. In the initial stages of the trust’s development, our focus was a lot more on getting started, building staff, deciding what we wanted to become.”

He downplays the looming presence of the Getty Center as a “profound but subtle” motivation in community involvement, but the Getty’s coming out party in the fall of 1997 will put the trust’s programs, as well as its new buildings, in a glaring spotlight.

And the staff is getting ready to greet its local constituency through a trust-wide effort to make the facility user-friendly and revise standard concepts of what constitutes a VIP. “We’ll be using opening events very intensively to invite groups from all kinds of communities--professional groups, school teachers, church groups and community organizations,” Getty Museum director John Walsh said. “During the first year we will invite hundreds of thousands of people who might not be conscious of the place. It isn’t box office we’re after, or income. Because we are really embedded in Los Angeles, it’s important to serve Los Angeles first.”

With plans for picnic areas, concerts and family attractions, the Getty Center may be a victim of its own success. In anticipation of overflow crowds, reservations will be required, at least for the first year.

On the other hand, the site could prove to be as intimidating as some critics predict.

Either way, the Getty probably will continue to be a source of curiosity and controversy as it attempts to balance its public and private ventures.

“I think it is important, if one has to judge the Getty, to understand it within its own sense of mission,” said Andrea Rich, president of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “It’s a unique center for the arts and humanistic learning. There’s a need for retreat and removal to get to insights and reflections. I see it much more as a university-type institution, rather than a public museum. The notion of putting it in Central Park is contrary to what it is trying to do.” But the bottom line, she said, is that “Los Angeles is so lucky to have the Getty. It really brings a kind of visibility and stability to the arts and humanities that should be the envy of the world.”