Gift is shoveled back to sender
The artwork-on-a-shovel that left town eight months ago with Margie J. Reese, Los Angeles’ former arts chief, is back in the city-run Watts Towers Arts Center after a detour to Reese’s home in Irving, Texas.
Last July, an apparently unknowing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa presented the work by L.A. artist John Outterbridge as a farewell gift to Reese when she left her job as general manager of the Cultural Affairs Department for a position with the Ford Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria.
The handoff of public property should not have happened, according to Steven Presberg, an investigator for the city’s personnel department. Presberg was asked by the mayor’s office and Karen Constine, Reese’s interim replacement at Cultural Affairs, to determine whether the piece was, in fact, city-owned -- and if so, how it became a parting gift for a department head.
Will Caperton y Montoya, spokesman for the Cultural Affairs Department, said Reese readily agreed in January to a request by Constine and assistant general manager Leslie Thomas to send the shovel back as soon as she was able to return from Africa to Texas.
The officials sought its return after two citizens groups that support the Watts Towers and the adjoining arts center learned of the gift and tipped off The Times, which ran a story about the episode Jan. 12.
The Outterbridge shovel was “no worse for the wear” when it arrived at the Watts Towers Arts Center last week encased in Plexiglas, said Rosie Lee Hooks, the center’s director. It was rehung Thursday.
Outterbridge, who had three pieces in last year’s acclaimed “Los Angeles 1955-85” exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, is the best known of 13 L.A. artists who were commissioned to make shovel art for the 2003 ceremonial groundbreaking for the new Charles Mingus Youth Arts Center.
Presberg said that although he had not been able to reach Reese, some in the Cultural Affairs Department had “the impression” that she thought that because the $13,000 raised to commission the artists came from private donations, the shovel art was not city property and could be properly given and received as a gift.
City workers involved in acquiring the shovels probably failed to follow regulations governing how artworks should be taken into the city’s collection, Presberg said. But that didn’t mean Outterbridge’s piece was untethered property that Reese could accept as a souvenir of her 5 1/2 years of service under mayors Richard Riordan, James Hahn and Villaraigosa.
“They’re the city’s shovels, no question,” he said.
Villaraigosa and his staff did not know the mayor was giving away a piece of public property, said Presberg. “The shovel was never in the mayor’s possession but in the possession of the department” until it was given to Villaraigosa to present to Reese.
Outterbridge said that the Friends of the Watts Towers Arts Center, a citizens support group, paid him to make a new commemorative shovel in the absence of the one given to Reese. Both of his shovels, as well as the 12 others, are on display through July 29 along with other works by the 13 artists in a show dubbed “Spirits of the Ancestors: A Continuum,” at the arts center, 1727 E. 107th St.
Reese’s return of the shovel “makes everything whole,” Outterbridge said. “I don’t hold any grudges against anyone.”
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