Reflections of a City: Looking for a Few Good Volunteers : The Getty Combed L.A. to Find Its Docents and Aides, Hoping to Mirror the City’s Diversity

When the Getty Center opens this weekend, visitors may be so bowled over by its marble majesty that they won’t notice the human warmth radiating from its enthusiastic army of volunteers.

From the moment visitors enter the white tram that chugs up to the great beige marble plaza, they will be informed and oriented not by the usual signs with arrows, (“architect Richard Meier doesn’t like signage,” a museum worker reports), but by more than 800 live and smiling mortals.

Need a restroom? A coffee? An idea of where to start?

Look for one of 430 volunteers wearing blue vests and outfits in the architect’s favorite colors. (“Meier-white tops and beige travertine solid color” bottoms are musts, states the volunteer handbook.)

Want to know more about the buildings themselves? The blue-vested ones will direct you to outdoor tour groups that form every 25 minutes, led by another category of volunteers called docents. Each docent has written his or her own script to introduce visitors to the intricate complexities of Meier’s Modernism.

They will lead tours of the buildings’ exteriors while discussing “architecture as sculpture” and “architecture as art,” not to mention Meier’s meticulous use of “T.L.C.” (texture, line and color).

Indoors, in the museum’s four art information rooms, the family room and at the children’s storytelling spot, it is also the 400 docents who will run the show, helping guests understand and enjoy what is frequently called by staffers “the Getty experience.”

The museum’s siren call to potential volunteers sounded from the moment earth first moved on that Brentwood hilltop. Some who observed the center’s prolonged birth (it took 13 years) from cars on the freeway below, pledged that one day they would make it up that hillside. They would offer themselves on the altar of art.

“I would drive the 405, look up at it, and feel what I can only call a mystical compulsion,” says a San Fernando Valley woman who had never volunteered before, and who was so sure she’d be rejected by the tony institution that she never even told her family she had applied. (She was accepted as a docent.)

Gathering this corps of unpaid helpers was not a simple task. All along, Getty leaders say they went out of their way to make sure these key people reflect the cultural diversity of the region. How successful they were is not clear, and they expect the program to evolve.

At the same time, the Getty decided to give volunteers a smaller role than they enjoy at many other such institutions, and this has led to some complaining.

Unlike at many other major museums (including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York), Getty docents will not lead tours of the art in the museum’s galleries. Paid personnel have been hired for that purpose.

Claudia Hanlon, who heads the docent program, explains: “We have an incredible commitment to education here, and we feel strongly that paid professional teachers should take the public through the galleries.”

Anne Burlingame, past president of Volunteer Committees of Art Museums of Canada and the United States, says the Getty is bucking a trend. “At most museums in this country, docents are highly trained by staff educators, so they can guide the public through the museum’s collections. Recently, museums in other parts of the world are beginning to understand the value of such volunteer service, and are starting to follow suit.”

In recruiting volunteers to complement its paid staff of 800, the museum already had a head start: Most of the 100 volunteers at the old Getty on Pacific Coast Highway were set to transfer to the new site.

But they presented a slight problem. The majority fit the old profile of museum volunteers that persists around the country: Most were white, female, over 50 and of relatively high socioeconomic status. And most lived on the Westside.

“When visitors come to the Getty Center, we want them to see the true L.A. reflected here. The old Getty volunteers are wonderful, but they don’t reflect the real L.A.,” says Claudia Hanlon, hired 2 1/2 years ago to recruit about 400 docents and run the docent program. “We made a conscious choice to try and change the profile.”

At about the same time, the Getty hired Mimi McCormick through its visitor services department. She heads the volunteer division, which needed to add more than 400 people to be deployed outdoors around the new 24-acre campus and at some indoor spots. (“Where are the restrooms?” has been the most commonly asked question at pre-opening events, McCormick says.)

From the start, Hanlon and McCormick say they tried to attract the broadest possible spectrum of applicants. “We wanted more men involved, more young people, more diversity,” says Hanlon.

They hired outside consultants to advise on how to get the word out into the community. They went to newspapers big and small in the city and all the valleys. They contacted universities and professional groups.

Says McCormick: “We recruited in areas we felt were under-represented. We went to community fairs, to Watts and East L.A. I did a fair held at the downtown library, for example, where some had never even heard of the Getty.”

In the end, Hanlon received about 1,200 docent applications. After preliminary conversations by phone, 700 were chosen to be interviewed.

Again, Hanlon says, outside consultants advised on how to conduct the interviews in the most expeditious and productive way. She was told to bring six or seven applicants together in a comfortable setting, and conduct what amounted to a coffee klatch.

The approach worked, says Bob Harris, retired publishing executive, who signed on as a docent along with his wife, Sheila, a retired Los Angeles Unified School District teacher.

“We wanted our lives to have focus. There are lots of other things we considered, but the caliber of people here, and the training, made us choose this.”

Sheila Good has been a docent at the County Museum of Art since 1984 and co-chairs that museum’s docent organization. Still, she says, “when we took a tour of the Getty Center, I was so overwhelmed by the beauty and energy of the place that I decided to sign on as a docent there too.” Good is a travel agent and has five grown children.

Gloria Lee, a retired chemist, says she considered volunteering at St. John’s Hospital and at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she worked for 26 years. “But here, the joy is in watching people’s eyes light up when they see the art, or grasp an idea they never understood before. It’s a true pleasure.”

The Getty’s docent training started last summer and continues to this day, says Hanlon. “We had three full-day sessions of general training about the Getty; we had architect Richard Meier and landscape architect Robert Irwin talk to them. We had a day of cultural diversity training, and another 45 hours or so of specialized training for those who were going to give the site tours and work in the art information rooms.”

McCormick says she received about 900 applications for about 300 available volunteer positions. “We wanted people who are enthusiastic and love working with the public, who maybe have customer service backgrounds,” McCormick says. “The volunteers’ main role is to greet visitors, make them feel welcome and comfortable. . . . So our first requirement is for people who really want to be out there, face to face.”

Rohmi Reid, 33, is in the new wave of volunteers. A director with the Exceptional Children’s Foundation Art Center in South L.A., Reid joined the Getty team two years ago and has watched the program burgeon.

“It’s been a fabulous experience from start to finish,” she says. “At the old villa, there wasn’t much diversity. Then they developed the outreach program, and that is all changing. The program continues to evolve, even as we speak.”

Neither Hanlon nor McCormick will offer information on the composition of the groups they eventually recruited. All they will say is that they are making “great progress” toward their goals of a younger, more diverse volunteer force.

One volunteer, who does not want to be named, agrees that progress has been made. “But by and large, it seems that white, middle-age females are the bulk of the docents and volunteers.”

Volunteers contribute 3 1/2 hours per week, for a minimum of two years. Weekend volunteers work every other week. Docents serve for 2 1/2 hours per week for a minimum of one year.

Even as they anticipate the grand opening, there is some grumbling.

A few volunteers say their job is merely to stand outdoors at an assigned post and direct foot traffic for more than three hours at a time--in wind, rain, cold or summer heat.

A few docents contacted also expressed some dissatisfaction. At other museums, they say, docents have autonomous organizations and schedule their own work hours, among other things. At the Getty, they say, they report to paid personnel who make most decisions for them.

A volunteer who’s come over from the Malibu Getty and didn’t want to be named says: “We’ve lost the ease and the intimacy we used to have. At the villa, we could visit any time and bring friends. We can’t do that now, because parking is so limited.

“We used to be able to stay after our work shift and go through the galleries; now we’re asked to leave. They haven’t even assigned us a place in the garage. We’ll have to drive around looking for a parking spot like everyone else.”

Then she laughs.

“I sound like I’m complaining,” she says. “But I’m really not. I realize very well that we have gained a hell of a lot more than we have lost.”

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Visiting the New Getty Center

Location: The Getty Center is located at 1200 Getty Center Drive in Brentwood.

Hours: Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Closed Mondays and major holidays.

Cost: Admission to the museum is free; parking is $5.

Transportation: Parking reservations are required and can be made by calling (310) 440-7300 or, for the hearing impaired, (310) 440-7305. Information is in English and Spanish. Visitors without a reservation can come via bus, taxi or bicycle, but parking in nearby neighborhoods is severely restricted. MTA bus No. 561 and the Santa Monica Blue Bus No. 14 stop at the front entrance on Sepulveda Boulevard. Bicycle racks and a taxi stop with direct phone lines to cab companies are located in the parking garage.