Renovation to Interrupt Barnsdall Park Traditions

Very little noise emanates from Studio 4, and that’s amazing in itself. Inside, a gaggle of 5- and 6-year-olds are doing what they do best: having fun digging their fingers into squishy balls of clay and shaping rudimentary forms of elephants and castles.

It is midmorning in the Barnsdall Art Park classroom, and the children are quietly absorbed in their work until one of them barks. “Woof!” And then another one, “Woof!” and then “Woof!” and “Woof!”

Such expressions of joyous abandon have echoed for decades in Barnsdall’s Junior Arts Center classes, which have attracted thousands of youngsters to the woodsy East Hollywood campus on Olive Hill.

Now the park, home to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House, is getting ready to close July 1 for up to a year. A $21-million seismic upgrade will include renovation of buildings, shoring up of some of the hilly terrain and the planting of 1,000 trees.

Many of the art classes--including adult courses--will move a block away to Hollywood Lutheran Church. Others will shift to nearby Los Angeles City College and the Craft and Folk Art Museum in the Mid-Wilshire district. But students and instructors say they will miss the special tingle of plying their crafts amid a tableau that is a work of art itself.

For generations of Los Angeles children, the city-run art classes at Barnsdall have been a rite of passage, a ritual of summer vacations and winter afternoons, of colorful ceramics and masks and collages.

Barnsdall has achieved a role of quiet prominence in the art education of Angelenos for three simple reasons: The instructors are accomplished, many having discovered art at Barnsdall themselves; the class fees are low because of city funding; and the setting is idyllic.

The hilltop campus at Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont Avenue includes the Junior Arts Center; the Wright-designed Barnsdall Art Center, where adult classes are held; the Municipal Gallery; and the Gallery Theater.

The junior center, gallery and theater were built in the 1960s and ‘70s but have the look of the low-slung stone Hollyhock House, the 1920 Wright-designed masterpiece that is a magnet for architecture tours.

The junior arts programs are so popular that parents line up at dawn during registration periods to secure places, sometimes for multiple children. Since classes are limited to 12 students, everyone receives individual attention.

Last summer more than 800 children took one or more classes at costs that ranged from $1.50 to $2.50 per course, depending on age. Mayor Richard Riordan has decreed that this summer, city-sponsored children’s art classes throughout Los Angeles will be free.

City officials say they believe that the art park is the only one of its kind in the world. It had its origins in the early 1900s, when wealthy eccentric Aline Barnsdall came west to realize her dreams of creating a utopian theater company.

She hired Wright to help her develop an innovative community, and the Hollyhock House residence was the first Los Angeles project of the famous architect. In 1927 Barnsdall donated the house and 11 surrounding acres to the city as an arts center.

“It’s already a city treasure and revered as that, and in the future it will become more of a model,” said Earl Sherburn, director of the park.

Face Lift to Come at a Price for Programs

The renovation of buildings and grounds is designed to restore Wright’s original vision to a campus that has taken on the aspect of slightly crumbling ruins. But it will come at a price to its arts programs. About two-thirds of the classes will be relocated to nearby venues.

But many ceramics, photography and weaving classes will stop until the park reopens because equipment like kilns is too hard to move. The park will not be able to run its popular summer day camp, and summer classes for children moved elsewhere will accommodate only 250 to 300 students.

“The move will have a big impact and will be especially hard for the instructors,” said Istiharoh Glasgow, director of arts programs. “Some of them have been with the program for 10 or 15 years, and it’s like moving your house. There won’t be the same ambience.”

Though Glasgow has been directing the arts programs for only a few months, her family’s acquaintance with Barnsdall is intimate. Her husband taught at the Junior Arts Center years ago, and when her four children were small they attended classes there. All still draw or sketch, and three are involved in film production as writers, producers or editors.

“The ability to study art opens up a lot of creative faculties that wouldn’t get opened otherwise and that are very useful when applied to other lines of work. I see that with my own children,” Glasgow said.

In the classrooms are little engines of energy waiting to be started. Unleashing all of that creativity are people such as Howard Marshall, who teaches mixed media classes for 5- and 6-year-olds and 7- and 9-year-olds. Class projects can range from making puppets and wrap dolls to creating prints and watercolors.

“I enjoy working with this age group,” said Marshall, 43. “They’re very open. Every day is like a new adventure, and they never know what to expect.”

A few weeks ago, a group of 5- and 6-year-olds made Mother’s Day cards with cutout drawings in purple, magenta and red that they pasted on paper. One girl, Esther, ran out after class and forgot her cards, one of which depicted a dark-haired woman holding a blue-and-yellow umbrella and standing on a green lawn.

Inside, Esther’s sentiment summed up a child’s world: “Mom, thanks to marry Dad, because I like my dad very much.”

Today, the class is engrossed--wrist-deep--in clay. Young Choi, 5, sits kneading a ball of the soft gray stuff, with her head of dark-ponytailed hair and plump ruby-red cheeks barely high enough to peep over the table top. She has the enigmatic smile of a tiny Mona Lisa but is all business.

“What are you making there, Young?”

Smile.

“Do you like coming to art class?”

Smile.

Her ability to devote herself to the project at hand has paid off.

“I think she will be an artist when she grows up,” says her father, Chang Choi, who has come to pick her up. “I have a lot of her artwork at home, and she has already won an award from a Korean newspaper for her work. She likes this teacher. There’s something different every time.”

Another 5-year-old, Joseph McGee, wants Marshall to check out his molded, well, blob. It could be a horse. It could be a car. Joseph’s not telling.

“What’s it called, Joseph?” asks Marshall.

Stare.

“OK, so it’s untitled.”

Marshall has the patience of a man who is totally at ease with children. Part of his comfort level may be because he scampered around this same studio as a youngster, discovering his path in life.

“I was a student here from the fifth grade through high school,” he says. “This is the first classroom I was brought into, and here I am now.”

Coaxing Children to Expand Their Canvases

At the beginning of the course he gently explains to his charges that this is not Romper Room: They are here for a purpose.

“All of the children here have talent. Sometimes it comes out early, sometimes later; it depends on the child,” he says.

A few doors down, in Elmira Adamian’s drawing and painting class, a group of 10- to 12-year-olds is studying light and dark, using shading to evoke sunlight on a tree or the shadow cast by a pear.

Adamian, a slight woman with long waves of hair, moves about the room encouraging the children’s efforts, coaxing them to expand their canvases.

Adamian has been at Barnsdall for 14 years and each semester assigns her class a landscape project, often the famous Hollyhock House, which is only steps away.

“I love the atmosphere in the park,” she says.

For Glasgow, the renovation offers the opportunity to rethink the park’s role in the community. For although it is wildly popular to those who know about it, its existence falls under the radar screen of many Los Angeles residents.

In the past, subway construction had made access to the park difficult, and the park had a reputation as a gang hangout after dark. With the Hollywood subway finished and more security at the park, conditions have improved.