One place where arts funding is up

With arts budgets on the chopping block all across the nation, the latest round of grants from the Warhol Foundation has arrived just in time to sustain a batch of shoestring operations and save special projects that may have been cut at larger institutions. The New York-based foundation recently announced $1.34 million in grants to 23 organizations, including $70,000 to Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, for an exhibition on Minimalism, and $60,000 to Culver City’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, for a series of poetic documentary films.

But there’s even better news for stressed-out folks at cutting-edge arts organizations: Total Warhol grants for fiscal 2002 reached a foundation record of $4.84 million -- a 20% increase over the previous fiscal year.

It isn’t that the foundation is such a smart investor, although putting lots of money into bonds has helped, says Joel Wachs, the former Los Angeles city councilman who heads the Warhol organization. And it isn’t just that the foundation continues to profit from sales of Warhol’s work.

“We wanted to send a message,” Wachs says. “Even in bad times, a lot of people have a lot of money. Sometimes they can do more, spending some of that money in bad times than in more plentiful times.

“You can take a conservative approach and pull back, or you can act in the spirit of Andy Warhol and say, ‘We have the resources and we are going to help you now when you need it more than ever.’ We are committed to having the small nonprofits survive and the larger museums do important scholarly shows that are not blockbusters.”

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is “a classic example of the kind of creative genius we want to nurture,” he says. Its grant will fund two digital films in its “Chain of Flowers” series, produced in collaboration with Kabinet, a Russian curatorial group and journal based in St. Petersburg. Each film uses an exhibit at the museum to spark a conversation with the Russian group.

MOCA’s Warhol-funded show, “A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968,” will continue the museum’s tradition of exploring complicated themes in exhibitions that “really add to the knowledge of the field,” Wachs says. Curator Ann Goldstein is organizing the show of works by 40 artists who emerged in the 1960s, which is expected to open at the museum in March 2004.

-- Suzanne Muchnic