You don’t have to be Jewish ...

Debt-FREE and growing like crazy, the Skirball Cultural Center must be doing something right. Since opening seven years ago in a steel, glass and stone complex in the Sepulveda Pass, it has attracted more than 3 million people to its multicultural program of performing and visual arts, literary events, lectures, conferences and classes.

Perhaps the world’s largest Jewish cultural institution of its kind, the Skirball will have a grand total of 500,000 square feet of built space on 15 acres when it opens the final phase of its current construction program, in 2005.

Exhibitions have always been part of the attraction at the airy, freeway-side oasis where people gather for lunch, weddings and ethnic music on the plaza. “Vision and Values: Jewish Life From Antiquity to America,” the permanent “core” exhibition, drawn from the Skirball’s 30,000-piece collection, tracks 4,000 years of Jewish history. Temporary shows have focused on everything from Sigmund Freud’s psychiatry to Maurice Sendak’s children’s book illustrations, Larry Rivers’ “History of Matzah” paintings and Joe McNally’s life-size Polaroid photographs of ground zero heroes.

But the eclectic lineup can be perplexing to outsiders who try to get a grip on the exhibition program and figure out what, if anything, unites the disparate parts. Are the Skirball’s galleries a venue for Jewish art and artifacts, multicultural shows with a Jewish connection, exhibitions with a social message or celebrations of Jewish people’s accomplishments?

“It’s not art for art’s sake,” says Uri D. Herscher, president and chief executive of the Skirball. “It’s art for enrichment of a civilized world.” And even though the material on view may not be art at all, that’s about as close as anyone comes to defining the exhibition program.

Still, the Skirball is not a static institution, and now would seem to be the perfect time to give the center a sharper identity. For one thing, the display space is about to expand considerably with the addition of Winnick Hall, a three-story structure with a curved roof designed, like the rest of the campus, by Israeli-born architect Moshe Safdie. For another, the Skirball Museum, which runs the center’s exhibitions, has a new director, Lori Starr, who is also the Skirball’s senior vice president. She joined the institution in 2001 after 15 years as director of public affairs and communications at the J. Paul Getty Museum and Trust.

Winnick Hall contains two 8,000-square-foot galleries, which will nearly double the exhibition capacity to 33,000 square feet. One gallery -- called the Getty Gallery, in honor of the J. Paul Getty Trust’s financial support of the Skirball -- is a temporary exhibition space on the third floor. It will open Sept. 12, 2004, with a landmark examination of Albert Einstein’s life and scientific work. The second-floor gallery, to be inaugurated in 2005, will be the permanent home of “Noah’s pArk,” a rotating children’s exhibition from a collection of 120 Noah’s Ark sculptures created by folk artists and donated by Los Angeles collector and philanthropist Lloyd E. Cotsen.

“The new building reflects a priority,” says Herscher, a scholar of American Jewish history who was born in Tel Aviv in 1941 to German Jewish refugees and immigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1950s. “The fact that you will have an 8,000-square-foot gallery for changing exhibitions is saying to the world: The Skirball wants to have more of this.”

But no radical changes are in the works. And that means presenting a broad array of exhibitions as integral components of the entire program. As Skirball publications state, the institution is “dedicated to exploring the connections between 4,000 years of Jewish heritage and the vitality of American democratic ideals,” and it aims to “inspire people of every ethnic and cultural identity.”

That may sound like a recipe for a multicultural muddle, but Herscher says it’s an expression of Jewish hospitality. “The joke in our home is that a Jewish dinner table is expandable,” he says. “There is always room. At the Skirball, there is always room.”

Begun in a basement

The museum -- which maintains a collection of archeological artifacts, ceremonial objects, Jewish historical materials and fine art -- got its start in 1972, in the basement of Hebrew Union College, near Exposition Park.

“When it was at its prime, it had a wonderful following,” Starr says, “but with the exception of its school program it was basically a museum showing Jewish art to a Jewish audience. When we moved here, the museum team tried to take the best of what was, but they also wanted to explore new types of exhibitions. One real departure is the belief that we don’t necessarily need to show the art of Jewish people to advance our mission.”

Every potential exhibition is reviewed in terms of how it amplifies or illustrates that mission, Starr says. The same criteria apply to other programs as well. And although Starr, program director Jordan Peimar and education director Sheri Bernstein each generate ideas for their own departments, they develop projects together. If Peimar and Bernstein think an exhibition is loaded with program possibilities, Starr is likely to recommend it to Herscher for final approval.

“One thing that makes the Skirball so special is that there is this equality between our public programs and our exhibitions and our education programs,” Peimar says. “When an exhibition is being considered, the program department is pretty much consulted from Day One.” And exhibitions don’t always take the lead, as they do at art museums, he says, noting that musical or theatrical performances occasionally inspire shows of visual art.

The Skirball, which has a $60-million endowment and operates on an annual budget of $11.6 million with 117 full-time employees, 15 part-timers and 300 volunteers, isn’t quite like any other organization. Its collection and exhibitions put it in a league with the Jewish Museum in New York, but its programs are akin to those at the 92nd Street Y. In Los Angeles, the Skirball is probably most similar to the Japanese American National Museum.

Winnick Hall will provide more space for a variety of programs, but much remains to be done before the opening. Even as construction is being completed, new docent training programs are getting started and additional volunteers are being recruited. Staff members whose offices will be relocated to Winnick Hall will move in December. Throughout the spring, the Skirball’s Web site will be redesigned and educational print material about activities at the new facility will be created.

In the meantime, “Girl Culture,” a current exhibition of color photographs by Los Angeles artist Lauren Greenfield, exposes the private lives of young girls who are fixated on their appearance. “With that show we are going to have programs for parents of adolescent girls and programs for the girls about self-image,” Starr says.

“The Photograph and the American Dream: The Stephen White Collection II, 1840-1940,” which opens Oct. 18, examines the promise and the reality of America in 150 photographs. That exhibition got the nod partly because “it deals with themes that resonate for us,” Starr says, “the notion of the city, work, child welfare and labor laws.”

A traveling show coming to Los Angeles after appearances in Amsterdam and Paris, it also appealed because it’s a rich subject for educational programs, Bernstein says. Her department is creating “family labels” for the photographs, planning in-depth tours for students of American history and devising other tours that make connections between the photographs and objects in the Skirball’s “core” exhibition. Peimar has scheduled an extensive series of films, music and lectures related to the show.

Another coming show, “Arnold Mesches: FBI Files,” is based on the bureau’s surveillance of the artist’s public activism, professional work and private life from 1945 to 1972. “It’s a deeply personal show,” Starr says.

The 80-year-old New York artist, whose work is based on world history and his own experiences, “took something that was very hurtful, his own FBI file, but saw something beautiful and turned the documents into illuminated manuscripts,” she says. “Art people will love it, but everyone will find something in it.”

And naturally, the Skirball has something else in store for visitors to the Mesches show: a festival of 1950s horror films that use some of the images in his paintings. Peimar is also exploring the possibility of presenting a play about the Hollywood blacklist.

Putting Einstein into context

When Winnick Hall opens, visitors will find even more manifestations of an integrated program, Skirball leaders say. At “Einstein” -- which was organized by the Skirball, the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Hebrew University in Jerusalem -- visitors will learn about the scientist’s discoveries and find that he got his start as “a young Jewish boy in Germany at a time when there were not many Jewish people becoming scientists,” Bernstein says.

Peimar is planning a lecture series with Southern California Light and Space artists who work with Einstein’s theories, including James Turrell. Theatrical presentations will include “Neutrino,” a comedic view of how scientific theories apply to human relationships by the British company Unlimited Theatre; “Apollo,” a historical overview of the American rocket program by the L.A. group Critical Mass; and a demonstration of Einsteinian concepts in terms of juggling, by New York theater artist Michael Moschen.

“There is no exhibition here without other very important components of programming,” Herscher says. “The context is essential. We want to make the exhibitions understandable and meaningful. When we have a show on Freud, we have people who talk about psychiatry and about the upper-class Viennese society that allowed him to do what he did.”

Anything but a purist, Herscher speaks of art as a unifier and a humanizer. At the heart of the exhibition philosophy is an ongoing effort “to figure out how to make art more inclusive,” he says.

Everyone is welcome at the Skirball, Herscher says, including members of the art crowd who have yet to discover it. But those who come to an art exhibition looking for “fine dining and a certain item on the menu might discover a larger menu than they expected. They might taste other delicacies,” he says, “and maybe have a wonderful dessert.”