Grants Fund Southland Exhibitions, Projects

Four Southland arts institutions have received grants recently to help fund exhibitions and projects.

L.A.’s Otis College of Art and Design has received a three-year, $330,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education.

The grant will foster a series of 18 culture walks throughout L.A.’s diverse neighborhoods by the school’s faculty in an effort to “identify patterns and practices that have influenced and molded” Otis’ diverse student body.

The project was one of 126 funded nationwide from a pool of more than 2,000 applicants.

The Rockefeller Foundation is giving $133,735 to Venice’s Social and Public Art Resource Center to complete the designs for the next four sections of Judith F. Baca’s monumental mural “The Great Wall of Los Angeles.”

Also included in the foundation’s announcement of nearly $2.4 million in cultural grants to 59 organizations nationwide was $20,000 for Los Angeles’ Cornerstone Theater to create and produce a multicultural, multilingual production known as the City-Wide Bridge Project.

Tyler Stallings, curator of exhibitions at the Laguna Art Museum, has been awarded $50,000 by Los Angeles-based Fellows of Contemporary Art to back “Whiteness, or Coloring Authority,” an exhibition scheduled in Laguna for 2003.

Stallings described the project as “a group exhibition of mostly California-based artists working in various media who explore representations of whiteness and how it is used to connote authority, ranging from the white cube gallery to skin tone.”

This will be the fourth exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum to have been funded by Fellows of Contemporary Art.