A Dream Partly Fulfilled

Twelve years after the California Legislature defeated a bill providing $10 million in state funds to establish a Latino museum in Los Angeles, 11 years after the state granted the project a far more modest $300,000 in seed money, five years after a space was found downtown in a former Bank of America building, the Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture is up and running.

Well, sort of.

A cheerful volunteer welcomes visitors to “Paul Sierra: A Cultural Corridor,” an exhibition of vividly colored, expressionistic paintings installed on freshly painted white walls above a polished marble and tile floor in the museum’s street-level gallery. A videotaped interview and biographical information on the Cuban-born, Chicago artist are on view in adjacent spaces. Downstairs, a dozen staff members and interns work in offices.

All these signs of life are immensely gratifying to state Sen. Charles M. Calderon (D-Whittier), who has spearheaded the project and chairs the museum’s board of trustees. “This is a tribute to the fact that there’s a lot of support for the museum and a lot of folks really want to see it succeed,” Calderon said. “It’s been a struggle to make the museum a real thing that people can feel and see and touch and experience. But we always knew that by the time we got to that point, it would be easier to raise dollars. I think we are at that point now.”

Still, with a fund-raising goal of $13 million the museum is far from a dream come true. At best it’s a work in progress. Located in a partially renovated, derelict building on a woebegone strip of Main Street near City Hall, the museum looks more like a construction zone than a functional operation.

About $1 million has been spent on the renovation so far, but an additional $3 million is needed to finish the job. Bank of America rents the building to the museum for $1 a year and plans to donate the facility when the institution is “a going concern,” Calderon said.

Architect Jose Tomas Hernandez-Honles is in charge of the renovation. Outside on Main Street, artist Roberto Delgado is creating a massive concrete relief depicting a crowd of 8-foot-tall people on a facade designed by Jesse Camberos. The artwork is expected to transform the undistinguished building into a landmark, but it’s still in process, so visitors must enter the museum through a rear parking lot.

Inside, the gallery’s ceiling is awaiting the installation of fire alarm and sprinkler systems. An additional street-level gallery is under construction. Plans to move offices to the mezzanine and convert the basement into two more galleries are exactly that: plans.

But tentative as it may appear, the museum has reached a milestone by staging a large exhibition, publishing a catalog for the show and maintaining public hours (Mondays-Tuesdays and Thursdays-Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.). After more than a decade of sporadic advances and setbacks--including failed attempts to secure much more splendid quarters in the old Herald Examiner building and Lawry’s California Center--the project is beginning to look like a museum.

“We started at the worst possible time,” Calderon said, tracking the museum’s troubled history. “The economy was making a downturn. Private dollars for museums were drying up and because the economy was bad, the state didn’t have any money. Congress wasn’t handing out money either, so we have had to slowly but surely define ourselves and approach this as our dream and the dream of many. We just have to work hard to make it work.”

The dream is neither “just one more ethnic museum” nor “just another art museum,” he said. “Whatever art we bring in will be fine art by any measure, but we can also talk about how it is uniquely Latino and how the Latino influence has woven its way into American culture. That’s the goal.”

The museum will also present historical exhibitions on Latino achievements in sports, science and other fields, he said. “And finally, we want this to be a museum that the community feels comfortable walking into. We want everyone to be able to come here and feel high-brow.”

While works by Latinos from other nations will be exhibited, the emphasis will be on “the contributions that Latinos have made to this country as Americans,” Calderon said. “We have strong pride in our culture, but we also have strong pride in our country. We are trying to not only recognize the contributions made by Latinos but also to share the knowledge of how we have interacted to impact change in people’s lives. We also want the museum to be a symbol for Latinos who can come and see how much a part of this society they are, not how separate and apart and different they are.”

Combining the history, art and culture of Latinos in a worldwide context, the museum’s mission is broader than those of local Latino community arts centers and Latino museums in other cities, including Chicago’s Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum and the Mexican Museum in San Francisco.

“What’s important about this museum is that it provides an alternative perspective,” said Denise Lugo, director of L.A.’s Latino Museum. “It combines the purist mentality with the aspect that makes art Latino.”

As for its audience, Lugo said the museum is for everyone. “We understand that this is a community museum, but we also understand that this is a national museum because there is no other museum like it in the country.”

The museum’s slow progress has led to disappointment, while its grand ambitions caused confusion about its agenda and constituency. Some observers say that opening with an exhibition of works by a Cuban American who lives in Chicago has alienated local artists--or at least missed an opportunity to engage them.

“It’s ridiculous. We’re here. Why don’t they ask us?” said one prominent artist who declined to be identified. Several Los Angeles-based Latino artists said the museum is desperately needed, but they have had little or no contact with it.

Defending the Sierra show, Lugo said it exemplifies the museum’s national scope and focus on the interaction of Latino and mainstream American art. The show was organized by one of the museum’s two curators, Monica Torres-Creason, who works with art by Latino residents of the United States. Margarita Medina, curator of Latin American art, is in charge of exhibitions from other countries.

Los Angeles artists will occupy center stage for the museum’s real inaugural, probably in the fall of 1999, when the second gallery is finished, Calderon said. The inaugural exhibition, “Los Four: A Retrospective of the East Los School of Painting,” will present artworks from the late ‘60s and ‘70s by Carlos Almaraz, Frank Romero, Beto de la Rocha, Gilbert “Magu” Lujan and Judithe Hernandez. Recalling a period of local art history, the show is being planned in conjunction with a large exhibition celebrating the millennium at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The Latino Museum will present several exhibitions prior to “Los Four,” including a Day of the Dead celebration in November composed of artworks from four regions of Mexico. “Young Quechua’s Wisdom,” a show of landscape paintings by Peruvian children, is scheduled for next spring. “Two Views of L.A.,” pairing Don Normark’s 1940s photographs of the Latino community in Chavez Ravine with Dennis Callwood’s pictures from the 1980s, will be presented next summer.

Los Angeles has such a large Latino population that many observers have questioned why it has taken so long to establish a Latino museum here and why the fledgling institution is lodged in such uninspiring quarters. In contrast, San Francisco’s Mexican Museum, which was founded in 1975 in the Mission District and has operated since 1982 at Fort Mason Center, is expected to break ground for a new building designed by internationally renowned Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta at the end of the year; about $10 million has been raised so far in a $26.6-million campaign for the building and an endowment.

During its long evolution, Los Angeles’ Latino Museum has been supported by grants from the state and the city, the Community Redevelopment Agency, foundations, businesses and individuals. But Calderon said the size and diversity of the Latino community can make it difficult to rally support for a cause, even one that seems to be a natural.

“People from Anglo backgrounds are not homogeneous. As Latinos we are not homogeneous either,” he said. “As we move from being a minority group to a majority group, we have hung onto language and culture, but we have assimilated into the larger community and joined clubs and unions. All those groups pull us away, instead of the community pulling us together to address issues that impact us.”

The museum can build a group identity that will benefit individual Latinos, he said. “But it’s difficult to pull in Latino businesspeople because they are involved in other things. I’m not trying to discourage that. I don’t need a lot of money if I can just get them to focus one time on this museum. And that’s what my effort is going to be now.

“Quite frankly I have been distracted over the last year and a half by my hobby, which is politics,” he said. “Now I am going to focus on the museum very intently. I’m going to organize the Latino political community to put together a meeting between them and the business community to make a major push for this museum. When you apply to a foundation or corporation, they want to know what kind of support you have received from your own community. We have received some, but there isn’t anything we can pull out of the pack that’s impressive. We need to do that, and I’m sure we can do that.”

* Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture, 112 S. Main St., (213) 626-7600. 10 a.m.-4 p.m., closed Sundays and Wednesday. Admission is free.