Six Artists, Three Venues, One City

If you stroll into the Japanese American National Museum during the next couple of months, see art that doesn’t seem to belong there and start asking questions, you will make Claudia Sobral and Clement Hanami very happy. As co-project directors of “Finding Family Stories,” they hope to stir things up at the museum in Little Tokyo through their collaboration on a project with the Watts Towers Arts Center, which primarily serves the black community, and Plaza de la Raza, a Latino arts center.

In this, the second part of the three-year project, the three institutions are displaying contemporary works from inside and outside their traditional communities. All six participating artists--Judy Chan, Charles Dickson, Yolanda Gonzalez, Kori Newkirk, Miguel Angel Reyes and David Alan Yamamoto--will be represented at the Watts Towers Arts Center, which opens its show today. The Japanese American National Museum launched its presentation Thursday with pieces by Dickson, Gonzalez and Yamamoto. Plaza de la Raza’s exhibition, opening Nov. 14, will feature Chan, Newkirk and Reyes.

“The goal is to make connections between different communities of Los Angeles, using art as a language,” Sobral said. “The idea was to find contemporary artists who explore their identity by including family stories in their work. Part of the mission of this museum is to be inclusive, but the exhibition challenges our audience’s perceptions of ethnic cultural institutions.”

For the artists, the project provides an unexpected venue for their work as they participate in an exhibition with a social agenda.

“ ‘Finding Family Stories’ shows the similarities between the three cultures but also the diversities,” Gonzalez said. One of her paintings at the Japanese American National Museum, “Suen~o de Mague” (Mague’s Dream), portrays the artist butting heads with her great-aunt, an artist who inspired her. The piece also pays tribute to the importance of family in the Mexican American community and to nurturing women.

“The show was designed to order for me. It’s absolutely perfect,” said Dickson, who was working on a family tree sculpture, commissioned by James and Karen Hobbs, when he was invited to participate in “Finding Family Stories.” He is showing the commission, “Ancestral Tree,” at the Little Tokyo venue. The piece--made of a fallen tree, with the trunk and many branches left intact--includes carved images of ancestral characters inspired by African sculpture, Dickson said. “Family Song,” a related work based on the artist’s father, mother and aunt, is on view at the Watts center.

Bringing individual attitudes and aesthetic approaches to their work, the artists tell their stories in distinctive voices. “Swings in the Family Tree,” one of Newkirk’s works at Watts, combines family photos and memories of a tire swing that hung in his childhood backyard with the horror of black lynchings. Also at the Watts center, Chan’s painting “Not Welcome There” depicts a lunch counter that symbolizes eating places her Japanese American family could not patronize during the 1940s and ‘50s.

Although art is the visual focus of “Finding Family Stories,” the project managers insist that the organizational process is equally important. “Communication is the key,” Sobral said. Two artists represent each community, but they were selected by curators from all three institutions, she said.

“Finding Family Stories” first came into public view last year, when similar exhibitions were staged at the Japanese American National Museum and the Korean American Museum. But the project was actually in process a year before that--and in talking stages since before the Japanese American museum’s inception, Hanami said. The museum’s opening on April 30, 1992, coincided with the riots after the Rodney King verdicts.

Although the timing was an unfortunate coincidence, the message was clear, he said. To be a viable force in the city, the museum had to be more than a repository of Japanese American history and culture. “That was too limited. For our own survival we needed to look at different ways to reach out to other communities.”

Many Japanese Americans became involved with the museum to pay respect to their parents and preserve their history, but they began to understand that the institution had a role to play for their children in a multicultural city, Hanami said. Discussions about possible outreach programs led to talks about art exhibitions.

“Someone suggested a multicultural art show, but we wanted to go beyond that,” he said. “Since the museum was already forming partnerships with other organizations, this was an ideal opportunity to form new alliances.”

In conjunction with the show, each institution has scheduled a panel discussion with the artists. “Cross-Cultural Identity in Art: A Dialogue” at the Japanese American National Museum is slated for Nov. 7 at 7 p.m.; “Conversations With the Artists” is planned at the Watts Towers Arts Center for Nov. 15 at 7 p.m.; “Talking Finding Family Stories” will be held at Plaza de la Raza on Jan. 9 at 7 p.m.

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MOVING ART: Works by artist and filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, a distinguished member of Los Angeles’ artistic emigre community, appear periodically in local galleries, museums and theaters. The latest homage is “Optical Poetry,” a three-part celebration of the influential German modernist who fled his country in 1936, settled in Los Angeles--working for the Paramount, MGM and Disney film studios--and died in 1967.

The tribute begins this weekend with an exhibition at New Mastodon Books & Fine Arts. The gallery and shop, at 5820 Wilshire Blvd., will show abstract paintings, watercolors, sketches and memorabilia through Dec. 7. An “Animation Classics Festival” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater, Friday at 7:30 p.m., will screen three recently completed versions of Fischinger’s “Motion Painting,” among other works. The final event, at the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, is a program of short films featuring special effects from “Fantasia.”

Information: New Mastodon, (213) 525-2948; LACMA, (213) 857-6177; Goethe-Institut, (213) 525-3388.

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LACE: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, a Hollywood-based multidisciplinary arts organization that presents experimental and innovative work, is gearing up for its primary fund-raising event of the year. LACE’s 17th annual benefit auction--featuring works by Uta Barth, Rachel Lachowicz, Paul McCarthy, Jeffrey Vallance, William Wegman and many other artists--will be held Saturday night at the Jan Baum Gallery.

Pieces slated for sale can be previewed at the gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., in a walk-through with Lynn Zelevansky, associate curator of 20th century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Thursday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Cocktails and a light supper will be served Saturday at 6:30 p.m. The live auction will begin at 8 p.m.

The preview exhibition is free; tickets to the supper and auction cost $60 for members, $75 for nonmembers, $250 for patrons.

Information and tickets: (213) 957-1777.