Avant-Grant Philanthropy

Last year, charitable foundations across the country gave more than $20 billion to various educational, humanitarian and cultural organizations, funding everything from AIDS education to zoological training. An ongoing list of some of these grants appears in the publication Chronicle of Philanthropy--and a more earnest, almost unrelentingly tedious catalog of activities there cannot be outside of the early books of the Old Testament.

And then there’s the Getty. The grants from the J. Paul Getty Trust, which doles out about $10 million annually to support the visual arts, shine amid the nursing scholarships and wilderness development initiatives, the reproductive rights programs and public radio stations like a rhinestone tiara in a closet full of bowler hats.

Of course, many of the latest rounds of Getty grants, awarded April through June, went to prestigious organizations doing straightforward work--preserving the Woodlawn Plantation at Mount Vernon, for example, and translating 12 Da Vinci documents into English.

But a pleasing few had descriptions almost whimsical in nature, and whimsy doesn’t usually abound in the philanthropic literature. Consider the $72,000 awarded to English Heritage to conserve its collection of polychromatic stone fragments. Seems like a lot for broken bits of colored rock, doesn’t it? Or the $58,000 to Historic Royal Palaces for its collection of state beds and canopies. Now, no one sleeps in those beds, so it can’t be going to new linens.

A $54,000 internship was awarded to the Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center in Omaha, and don’t you want to know what exactly is being conserved there? But perhaps most tantalizing is the $100,000 given to the University of California for an interdisciplinary project titled “The Art of Rice.” Images of the rice- and macaroni-encrusted cigar boxes we all made in kindergarten come to mind, but that can’t be it, can it?

No, of course not, said Ann Scheider, administrator of the Getty grant program. “Although I remember being very curious about that myself when we saw the application.”

“The Art of Rice,” she explained good-humoredly, will be a study of the significance of rice in Asian culture as expressed in the visual arts. Rice-related festivals, goddesses and textiles, and “the regulated stages of rice agriculture as a metaphor for good government” will be analyzed and featured in an exhibition at UCLA’s Fowler Museum in 2002.

Closer examination of other curiously termed Getty grant recipients revealed equally serious, if offbeat, scholarly endeavors. Those polychromatic stone fragments come from the most significant collection of architectural stonework in Britain, and include Viking remnants, pieces of Roman sculpture and chunks of abbeys and ecclesiastical buildings throughout the ages. Conservation of beds and canopies includes research into their creation and significance as well as simple preservation and emergency restoration. And the Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center is a resource for museums and historical societies that do not have their own conservation/preservation departments. (How it came to be named for our 38th president, Scheider was unable to say.)

“We do fund an incredibly broad range of projects,” she said of the Getty’s sometimes idiosyncratic grant choices. “And some of the scholarship is, well, untraditional. If it’s innovative and interesting, we fund it.”

Mary McNamara can be reached by e-mail at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.