Miracle on Reseda Boulevard

Want fries with that art?

Just a year ago a community-oriented art gallery opened in the shadow of a Northridge Burger King.

Founded by five Valley art organizations, the Valley Institute of Visual Art, or VIVA, was a triumph of vision and commitment over whatever complex forces have kept the Valley from having an art scene as vital as that on the Westside.

“We were told we would never pull it off and get our doors open,” recalls Connie Larson, president of VIVA. But Larson, an artist and educator who lives in Studio City, is thrilled to report that the gallery is not only alive a year after its opening, it is thriving.

The 3,000-square-foot gallery is already booked solid for the year 2000. And VIVA has annexed 800 square feet next door to use for art classes and other educational activities.

Larson talks faster and faster as she sums up VIVA’s heady first year.

Local visual artists all seemed to agree they needed a place to show and sell their work, but past attempts to create a community gallery had failed. Rents on Ventura Boulevard were prohibitive, and landlords were reluctant to rent gallery space to groups that included amateur artists.

But a core group of artists from the Valley Watercolor Society, Women Painters West, the Collage Artists of America, the Valley Artists Guild and the San Fernando Art Club persisted.

“Our motto from Day 1 was ‘Don’t let fear block the miracle,’ ” Larson says.

The group found a supporter in Elisabeth Waldo, an arts patron from an earlier era (a composer and violinist, Waldo has her own theater on her Northridge property, which she periodically opens to the public for concerts). Larson calls Waldo VIVA’s “art angel.”

Waldo leased the coalition space in a Reseda Boulevard mini-mall--space previously occupied by a yogurt shop and Dollar Deals store. Artist Michael Donegan spent hundreds of hours transforming it into a gleaming white-walled gallery.

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Most of the initial $20,000 needed to open the gallery was donated by the artists themselves. By January 1999, artists from the founding groups had begun hanging their often memorable work and were staffing the gallery on a volunteer basis.

“It’s just astounding to everybody,” Larson says of the nonprofit gallery’s success.

The commitment of the artists is key to VIVA’s surprising good health, Larson believes.

“They feel ownership. They feel it’s their gallery and they’re willing to donate and do.”

Artist volunteers open the gallery four days a week, welcome visitors and answer their questions, and even clean the bathroom.

“Every time I go to the gallery, I vacuum, I dust. It looks better than my house,” Larson says with a laugh.

Like other galleries, VIVA takes a cut whenever a painting or other work is sold. But VIVA’s is a modest 20%, in contrast to the 50% or 60% most commercial galleries receive.

“We’ve had some pretty impressive sales,” Larson recalls, including a painting that sold for $3,000. “We’re still not over that one.”

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One of the aims of the gallery, she says, is to eliminate the “intimidation factor” that keeps some members of the public from visiting art galleries. VIVA promises art without attitude. “We want to be the friendliest gallery in town,” Larson says.

“We’re going to do more on the lower end,” she says, explaining that VIVA will soon have more prints and other inexpensive works for sale. But it is also committed to remaining a true gallery, not a glorified gift shop. As part of its effort to maintain quality, VIVA recently got all its participating art groups to agree on standards for juried shows.

VIVA is already succeeding as a viable venue for local artists (it hopes to bring in more outside artists as well, Larson says). And now that the new annex has been readied (again by Donegan), it hopes to offer art classes, seminars, workshops--any kind of educational activity that will help visual artists and make art more accessible to the community. The gallery is already making an effort to link people who want to take a drawing course, for example, with artists who want to teach one.

“We are a resource center now,” Larson says.

Although VIVA is in the black, it doesn’t have a big birthday-party budget. So it is marking its first anniversary with a series of Saturday open houses all this month. Starting this Saturday, the public is invited to drop by the gallery at 8516 Reseda Blvd. to see the current show by California Russian artists and to celebrate a Valley miracle.

There will be light refreshments and balloons for the kids (balloons are very unintimidating, in Larson’s experience) and, best of all, there will be art.

Spotlight appears each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.