Art Grants: A Promising Development

Several weeks ago, when the city’s Cultural Affairs Department announced recipients of its cultural grants for 1996-1997, the extensive list featured something new and wonderful: For the first time since a civic grants program for the arts was initiated in Los Angeles in 1988, merit coupled with true artistic diversity has begun to be secured.

The Cultural Affairs Department had always meant its grant program to function in support of diversity, but success in that essential goal proved to be elusive. This time, thanks to a smartly conceived pilot program of grants to individual visual artists, diversity is the unmistakable watchword.

The recipients include Kim Abeles, an artist whose mixed-media sculptures and installations have been concerned with the social and political complexities of contemporary urban life; Michael Brewster, who makes acoustic sculptures that articulate space through the manipulation of invisible sound waves; and Victor Estrada, whose brightly painted plaster sculptures have been a lively and inspiring fusion of Modernist art, Latin folk conventions and mass culture motifs.

Grants, each in the amount of $10,000, have also gone to Martin Kersels, whose film, video and kinetic works have marked him as among the most interesting new artists around; Joyce Lightbody, whose small objects are obsessively covered with densely packed narrative scenes made from carefully snipped postage stamps and stickers; and Jorge Pardo, an artist whose Conceptually informed intrusions into domestic interiors destabilize comfortable assumptions about the culturally proscribed relationships between art and craft.

Individual grants have also been awarded to notable area artists Carl Cheng, Joe Grant, Phyllis Green and Michael McMillen. Most will participate in a public exhibition of their work to be held at the city-run Municipal Art Gallery next spring. (Kersels and Pardo are preparing independent shows and public seminars.)

Phyllis Green’s recent confectionary sculptures, which often recline like seductive sirens on small beds upholstered in brocade, couldn’t be more different from, say, Kim Abeles’ delicate drawings made from particulate matter captured from city air--otherwise known as smog. And that’s the point. A limitless range of artistic ideas, attitudes and approaches informs the current selection of individual grant recipients.

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It wasn’t always that way. Indeed, before now, it’s unlikely that many of the current recipients, whose number includes exceptional artists, would even have bothered to apply to the program.

That’s because the program used to sharply restrict the kind of art that could be funded, limiting awards to social activist artists. In 1990 the Cultural Affairs Department had launched a program under the rubric of Community Arts. Artists were required to submit plans for projects to be executed in partnership with social service agencies throughout the city, from hospitals and schools to recreation centers and correctional facilities.

While the genre of social activist art is perfectly legitimate, it represents just one kind of art from among a vast array of possibilities. Indeed, the genre is practiced by a very small number of artists; an even smaller number could be said to produce exceptional work.

The severe limitation in the category of Community Arts could be seen in the rapidly dwindling number of applicants to the grant program. In a city where untold thousands of working artists collectively comprise one of the great art-production capitals of the world, and at a time of generally diminished arts support, a stunning total of only 21 applications was received by the Cultural Affairs Department for the 1995-96 grant year. And most of those were repeat applicants from prior years.

One reason the Community Arts category had been set up in the form of a social service program, rather than as a wide-open art program, was that L.A.’s city charter forbids making civic grants to individuals. The potential for corruption and patronage abuse is too great.

Instead, artists must be hired as independent contractors who perform services for the city. Thus was born the cumbersome Community Arts idea, with artists given the uncomfortable role of performing social service tasks through eligible nonprofit agencies operating within L.A.

The abject failure of that plan finally led to a simple realization: The Cultural Affairs Department is itself a social service agency, whose civic function includes presenting art to the public at its Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park.

So, there wasn’t any need to restrict grants to artists who would, say, establish workshops in clay modeling at senior citizen homes or train adults in English-as-a-second-language courses to design bus posters. Those options are still open, for artists who might work in that vein. But other artists--who happen to comprise the overwhelming majority--could also be contracted to make art for public display in a prominent city art venue.

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It’s important to note that the program’s transformation came at the urging of an insightful peer panel that had reviewed applications for the 1995-96 fiscal year. Shocked by the dearth of applicants and dismayed by the low level of quality, they proposed an overhaul.

The peer panel had impressive credentials. Its members were Christy Armstrong, an artist and director of outreach programs at Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts; widely respected independent curator Noriko Fujinami; Gary Kornblau, president of the Foundation for Advanced Critical Studies and publisher and editor of Art issues. magazine; Santa Monica Museum of Art director Tom Rhoads; and Alma Ruiz, exhibitions coordinator at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The panel didn’t just complain, though. With the aid of former Cultural Affairs Department program administrator Jeffrey Herr, the members developed substantive proposals in a series of meetings that were enthusiastically received by the department’s general manager, Al Nodal, and director of the grants program, Roella Hsieh Louie.

Here is an unusual example of civic spirit in the service of art that is now bearing abundant fruit. Currently the Individual Artist Grant is operating as a pilot program, but the dramatic improvement in the quality and diversity of the grant recipients is evidence enough of the wisdom of the change. If the trend continues, it deserves to be made a permanent fixture.