L.A. Arts Funding Seeks Public, Private Balance

Christopher Knight’s article concerning arts funding in the city of Los Angeles (Calendar, Sept. 4) calls for a response.

To put the Los Angeles Arts Endowment in perspective, it is more than just the grants program and includes the Arts Development fee program, which guarantees a percentage of monies from new development for the arts. This program will generate over $10 million of arts programming annually and, based on initial projects, much of this funding will be used to commission work by individual artists.

The grant program is intentionally designed to balance the private and public percent for arts program to ensure that areas of the city with smaller amounts of development will receive an equal share of arts services.

The city’s grants to individual artists indeed require them to create projects in public settings. However, this is the only city in the United States which has introduced any form of funding of individual artists in recent years. The Cultural Affairs Department is looking at ways to provide individual grants that support the artist and make an impact on the community.

This is our initial approach and the department continues to research other avenues of funding artists, including regranting programs.

The mandate of the Los Angeles Arts Endowment, created by the City Council by ordinance, is “to create new and additional funding for the arts in the city of Los Angeles in order that a coordinated citywide arts policy may be implemented that incorporates all arts and disciplines for the cultural benefit of the city, its citizens and its visitors.”

In response to this mandate, the Cultural Affairs Department has put in place a program that makes every effort to balance the cultural needs of the city with the needs of artists and art organizations.

With the grants program, the department supports arts citywide, and artists and arts organizations are the conduits of this support. With this citywide arts program, the city is helping artists and arts organizations create their own revenue through sales of tickets or artworks, and through the development of larger audiences. Earned income (and development of sources for that income), not grants, should be the principal means of support for any creative endeavor.

Survival of the arts (and artists) is dependent in part on the education of new artists and new audiences for artists. With the current elimination of the arts curriculum from the Los Angeles United School District, grant programs like the Cultural Affairs program ensure that young people are exposed to the arts.

The projects Knight singled out were chosen by peer panels, and criteria included artistic merit as well as contributions to the city.

Los Angeles artists such as Amy Hill, Suzanne Kerr, Dan Kwong, Danny Martinez, James Newton and Jude Narita--to name just a few--have gained importance and support through the grants program and the city has benefited greatly from their work.

While we don’t claim to have all the answers on how to support the arts in a city as large and as diverse as Los Angeles, we do believe that the Los Angeles Arts Endowment is a major step forward and deserves to be judged with all the facts in place.