Arts Groups Unite to Increase Their Visibility in Screenland

For the most part, the arts in Los Angeles are booming. In the wake of the Getty Center opening, Walt Disney Concert Hall finally got its green light. A spate of mid-size theaters such as the El Portal in North Hollywood and the International City Theatre in Long Beach have emerged. The city has more than 1,100 nonprofit arts organizations and is considered a nexus for cutting-edge classical music and visual arts.

The perception, however, doesn’t always match reality.

“In this city, the arts are in the shadow of the entertainment industry,” said Michael Alexander, executive and artistic director of Grand Performances, which presents free summer concerts in downtown L.A.

To grapple with that problem, local arts organizations are joining forces, seeking strength through collaboration.

The most recent example is Arts for L.A., a group of some 150 institutions that grew out of informal discussion among arts leaders in the mid-1990s. Its goals are to increase funding, attendance and audience diversity and to improve education in the arts. The group is a milestone of sorts--the city’s first major organizational attempt to bolster the image and clout of the arts and to develop a program of civic cultural planning.

“The arts have been a mom-and-pop business in comparison to corporate entities,” said Alexander, a member of the Arts for L.A. steering committee. “What we need is a road map.”

The first major Arts for L.A. meeting was convened a year ago this month at the Skirball Cultural Center. Participants included heavy-hitters such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Japanese American National Museum, Pasadena Playhouse and Center Theatre Group. Schools participated (CalArts, USC, UCLA), as did funders (the James Irvine Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Grant Program) and smaller operations ranging from the Actors’ Gang theater to Santa Monica’s 18th Street Complex to Self-Help Graphics, the East Side visual arts center.

“If a bomb went off in this building, the arts in this community would be wiped out,” Jerry Yoshitomi, former director of the Japanese American National Museum, observed at one of the organization’s gatherings.

At the outset, Arts for L.A. sent a survey to a selected group of more than 300 arts organizations in an effort to establish priorities. Marketing and audience development were high on the list, and a task force was formed to address them. In March, the task force began its own survey, asking 1,100 arts organizations to surrender their mailing lists for a one-time-only analysis of the region’s culture consumers. About 100 did, including most of L.A.’s major museums, orchestras and theaters.

Because some institutions were unwilling to share names of their members or subscribers, the master list was confidentially compiled by an independent marketing firm. What emerged, according to the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, which paid for data tabulation, is the most comprehensive picture ever of the local arts marketplace.

Taking Their Cues

From the Data

The nearly 1.4-million-name list was broken down by ZIP Codes. Though people in all of the areas had attended a cultural event during the past year, 80% of the customer base came from 35 of the ZIP Codes--primarily upscale areas such as Palos Verdes, Pasadena, Beverly Hills and the Encino-Sherman Oaks corridor. The research, overseen by Center Theatre Group marketing and communications director Jim Royce, also turned up some surprising statistics. A total of 73% of the households appeared on only one list--an incentive for other institutions to try to lure them in.

“We now know it’s not a zero-sum game, with everyone competing for a limited culturally oriented audience,” said Laura Zucker, executive director of the County Arts Commission. “That’s a 180-degree turn in our thinking and a strong case for cross-marketing.”

While Arts for L.A. has a local focus, the collaborations fostered by the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau seek to raise the cultural profile of the city nationally and internationally. Five years ago, it launched a cultural tourism program, headed by Robert Barrett, vice president of domestic marketing for the bureau, which linked the arts and business communities.

One of the more successful efforts targeted the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 1999 Van Gogh exhibit, in which the bureau partnered in a promotional campaign with five L.A. museums, American Express and 10 local hotels. According to a LACMA study, the project accounted for bookings of 82,000 hotel nights and $122 million worth of visitor spending.

An earlier project involved 350 arts leaders who helped formulate 13 ethnic and cultural tours of the city that were publicized by the bureau.

Partnerships have also appeared on the programming front, especially among museums. The Skirball’s “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture” exhibit, for instance, is co-sponsored and funded by the Getty, which presented two related lectures and provides a free weekend shuttle between the neighboring venues. And in March, UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History, LACMA and the California African-American Museum presented concurrent exhibits dealing with the heritage of African American music.

‘Made in California’

Is Biggest Project

An upcoming--and more extensive project--is LACMA’s “Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000” exhibition, opening in October. The Autry Museum of Western Heritage, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Los Angeles Public Library, among a host of other arts institutions, will serve up offerings under the “Made in California” logo--linked and promoted on a joint Web site.

“We wanted to intensify the cross-pollination,” said Stephanie Barron, LACMA vice president of education and public programs and senior curator of modern and contemporary art, “to have the audience that comes here discover something at a sister institution that they’d never encountered before.”

There are practical reasons for coming aboard, suggests Betty Wan, curator of an upcoming Pacific Asia Museum exhibit tied to the LACMA project. “Particularly for smaller institutions, the ‘Made in California’ label can put you on the map,” she said, “so everyone tries to fit in.”

As for the Arts for L.A. folks, their work has just begun. An arts education subcommittee is monitoring pending legislation and pursuing ways of placing the arts in schools. The marketing group is continuing its research, focusing not only on regular attendees but on those who’ve slipped through the cracks.

“Research must be done before strategies can be devised,” says Lars Hansen, president of the Theatre League Alliance of Southern California and co-chair of the marketing subcommittee. “What we’re after is lifelong participation: When people are invited to the party, they tend to stay.”

Such efforts, Barrett notes, provide a marked contrast to the days when competition was the norm in the arts. “Ten or 15 years ago, there were hardly any museum directors in contact with each other, other than the occasional lunch,” he said. “L.A. theaters were all islands. Only recently, not only here but across the country, collaboration is in the air.”