Region’s Major Arts Groups Hold Steady Post-Sept. 11

Spend enough time in conversation with those who chase donor money for Southern California’s leading cultural institutions, and three words keep coming up: We expected worse.

In the midst of recession and national calamity, many of this region’s visual and performing arts groups say they’ve safely scraped through the most harrowing fund-raising season in memory.

Their income for 2001 may be flat or down slightly, but top officials say they know of no layoffs at major Southern California cultural organizations and only a few cancellations in this year’s schedules.

Although arts groups here still face substantial challenges, leaders agree that this region’s troubles are modest compared with the crises faced by their counterparts in New York, and milder than those cropping up in the San Francisco area.

“I don’t think any of us feels particularly fortunate. But as we look to colleagues in other cities ... it’s quite different,” said Jeremy Strick, director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Like MOCA, most major cultural institutions in this region say they’re either making no programming changes or responding with delays and detours that audiences will never notice. However, arts insiders agree that the smallest organizations and individual artists may be more vulnerable to financial woes than the larger groups.

“It’s been tough,” said Margie Johnson Reese, general manager of the city of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. “But I really don’t think it hit rock bottom, as we feared.”

An irony, several veteran arts officials said, is that this area’s post-September endurance owes a lot to two circumstances that until recently looked like weaknesses.

One involves tourism. Because cultural institutions in Los Angeles depend less on tourist spending than their counterparts in many other locales, Johnson Reese noted, a decline in travel has had less effect on museums and theater attendance here than in such cities as New York, Chicago and San Francisco

Another factor may stem from the declining number of Fortune 500 corporate headquarters in Los Angeles County. Veteran fund-raisers said that compared with other major cities, L.A. ranks relatively low in home-grown corporate support for the arts.

As a result, this area had less to lose when Sept. 11 and the mounting recession prompted many corporations to slash their arts grant-giving and advertising budgets.

Meanwhile, local audiences and individual donors, who supply the lion’s share of income to most cultural groups here, have been largely steadfast.

Though results are still being tallied at most organizations for the last days of 2001 (when Dec. 31 tax-deduction deadlines inspire many contributions), several, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, the Pasadena Playhouse and the Orange County Performing Arts Center, say they’ve seen individual donations accelerate since Sept. 11, surpassing figures from the year before. In some cases, those increases may compensate for dips in support from corporations, foundations and government agencies.

The California Arts Council, which makes grants to organizations statewide, has been targeted for a 7.7% cut in its $32-million annual budget by Gov. Gray Davis. The Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, which made $5.8 million in grants locally in the last fiscal year, has been told to tentatively expect a 15% budget cut for the year beginning in July.

At the Los Angeles County Arts Commission--where this year’s pool of outgoing grant money is expected to match the 2001 total of about $3 million--executive director Laura Zucker said that in the weeks after Sept. 11 she considered staging a workshop to help organizations cope with sudden fund-raising shortfalls. But by the end of October, she and her colleagues had changed their minds.

“We didn’t see the evidence that the need was that strong,” said Zucker.

Throughout the region, arts leaders make similar reports.

At the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which is relying on contributions to cover roughly 30% of its $52-million budget this year, managing director Deborah Borda had confessed to profound worries in the first weeks following Sept. 11. But last week she said she was “delighted” with individual contributions in recent months, and that “we’re on target with our [pre-Sept. 11] projections.”

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which counts on government, corporate, foundation and individual donations to cover more than 70% of its $41.8-million annual budget (and where a major capital campaign looms as officials plan to rebuild the museum complex), donation numbers are still being crunched. But the museum says it had 41,390 paying visitors from October through December of 2001--slightly more than in the last quarter of 2000.

At the Center Theatre Group, which includes the Ahmanson Theatre and Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center in downtown Los Angeles, both individual and corporate donations are on a pace to meet goals set in July. Of 56 corporations that gave $5,000 or more last year, officials said, just one has warned of a possible post-Sept. 11 change in direction.

At the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Strick reported that attendance and individual donations were meeting pre-Sept. 11 projections, but corporate and foundation money has lagged. Strick said his tentative plan is to pare this fiscal year’s budget by 5%, delaying hires and spending less in areas such as marketing and exhibition installation.

At Los Angeles Opera, Elizabeth Kennedy, director of administration, said, “September and October were terrible. But now, having gotten through the end of December, we seem to be pretty much where we’d hoped to be.”

Kennedy did acknowledge that many of the opera’s long-term plans have been delayed by the September attacks and the limping economy, most notably artistic director Placido Domingo’s ambitions to stage Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, an undertaking that could cost the organization $30 million or more. Opera officials, once aiming to begin the cycle in 2003, now say 2006 is more likely.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, senior vice president for advancement Dyan Sublett says that through early December, fund-raising was up 57% from individuals and up 32% from corporations--boosts that should neutralize a drop in government funding and allow the museum to meet its 2001-2002 budget targets. (Still, individual and corporate donations are a relatively small share of the museum’s overall $30-million budget, which depends most heavily on government support and earned income.)

At the Pasadena Playhouse, said general manager Brian Colburn, “[we thought] we might be as much as 30% to 40% off in fund-raising” as a consequence of Sept. 11. Instead, individual contributions and ticket sales for 2001 wound up narrowly beating 2000 figures. Colburn said the playhouse’s overall income fell short of pre-September targets but was down less than 10% from 2000.

At the Orange County Performing Arts Center, according to vice president for development Terry Jones, as of Dec. 21 the annual fund-raising campaign was about $140,000, or 15%, ahead of last year in gifts from individuals, and overall about $200,000 behind the $2.5 million it had raised by the same point a year before.

And at South Coast Repertory theater, managing director Paula Tomei said, “Last year we were at almost $1 million [in overall contributed income from Sept. 1 through December], and this year we’re at almost $1 million, too. We’re tracking right where we were last year.”

In San Diego today, the San Diego Symphony is formally announcing a $100-million donation from Qualcomm Chief Executive Irwin Jacobs, the largest single gift ever to an American orchestra.

In New York, circumstances for arts groups have been dire enough to inspire a citywide “arts recovery fund.” Layoffs and exhibition cutbacks have been announced at the Guggenheim and Whitney museums. The Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York (A.R.T./New York), extrapolating from a post-Sept. 11 survey of 101 of its 400-some members, projected a 2002 shortfall of $16.3 million, citing decreased ticket sales, fund-raising and other factors.

In the San Francisco area, where 8 cents of every dollar in hotel-tax revenue goes to the city’s arts grants program, limping tourism has city officials fearing cuts as deep as 25% in next year’s arts grants. The San Jose Symphony and the San Francisco-based Friends of Photography both closed their doors in October, saying that the recession and Sept. 11 had exacerbated existing money troubles.

And there have been some shortfalls in Southern California.

On Nov. 27 the Music Theatre of Southern California, a longtime presenter of musicals and concerts at the San Gabriel Civic Auditorium, said it would shut down, citing reduced revenues and donations since Sept. 11. On Jan. 8 the Pasadena Civic Auditorium Foundation canceled the rest of its Pasadena Civic Musical Series, scrubbing a schedule of touring-company productions of “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Riverdance” and “My Fair Lady” that would have run through April.

Less dramatically, at the UCLA Hammer Museum, which had a goal of $1.3 million in donated income between July 2001 and June 2002, development associate Kim Miller said, “I’m hoping we’re going to get two-thirds of the way to our goal.” Officials also decided to extend a $25-million capital campaign to pay for the museum’s planned redesign.

But most administrators describe a relatively stable aftermath here. Apart from donations, they say, ticket and gift shop sales, season subscriptions and other earned-income sources have held up better than many expected.

“When high-end restaurants were suffering, when amusement parks were down, when jewelry sales were off, people were still coming to arts events--because we provided meaning for them,” said Los Angeles-based arts consultant Jerry Yoshitomi.

Other delayed effects may turn up as corporations and foundations retrench further, officials say. Basically, said Zucker of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, “the recession has not yet really hit the arts community. This next year is going to be a very telling time.”