COVER STORY : Keeper of the Flame : As long as Al Nodal is in charge of Los Angeles’ $10-million arts budget, <i> multiculturalism </i> will never be a four-letter word

It may not be the toughest neighborhood in Los Angeles--but the corner of 6th Street and Rampart Boulevard is hemmed in on every side by what the cops call “the element.”

To the southwest is Lafayette Park, home to the homeless and a growing narcotics trade. To the southeast lies the “Alvarado corridor,” which Los Angeles police officer Rudy Alvarez calls one of the city’s most notorious alleys of the illegal and the dangerous.

What if someone, say, lives at that particular corner? Well, says Alvarez: “If he goes just down the block, he’s in a real bad crime area; if he goes one more block off to the west, he’s in trouble. He’s pretty much in the middle of things.”

This presents no problem for Adolfo V. (Al) Nodal, general manager of the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. He likes to be at the center of the action.

At this corner, in a penthouse apartment overlooking the city, dwells the 42-year-old Cuban immigrant who, since 1988, has been responsible for distributing the city’s annual arts budget, which has ballooned from $3 million to $10.3 million during his tenure--and which this year includes an additional $1 million for riot recovery programs pending City Council approval.

He’s in charge of implementing his department’s “cultural masterplan” for the city. The 182-page blueprint published in 1991 encourages a multicultural philosophy and outlines “the social and environmental responsibility of art and artists,” instead of a lofty art-for-art’s-sake approach. That plan has divided the Los Angeles arts community--pitting artists clamoring for change against established arts organizations fearful that their funding, their influence and even their definition of “art” is being shaken at the base.

With an annual salary of close to $79,000 a year, Nodal could live most anywhere, but enjoys the unexpected--both in housing choices and art. In a former incarnation as head of a Washington art space, for example, Nodal commissioned artist Bob Wade to build the 40-foot-tall “World’s Largest Cowboy Boots” insolently close to the White House. Last September, the Cultural Affairs Department co-sponsored a “graffiti conference” with the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, a meeting that brought the “street art” camp together with the “graffiti vandalism” camp--firm believers that art is the stuff inside a museum, not the defiant scrawls of spray paint on the walls outside.

“ Everything is wrapped up in the graffiti issue,” Nodal says. “Generational issues, multicultural issues. There is a very potent element of youth trying to define themselves. The fact that there are kids out there trying to address the needs of society, sometimes in a very valiant way, is what moves me most about it.”

During a conversation at his home, Nodal recounts a social gathering at which he and other arts officials discussed their places of residence. “San Marino, Brentwood . . . I said: 6th and Rampart --this lowlife,” he says, clearly proud of that distinction.

But the lowlife looks different from way up high. From the empty rooftop of his building on a recent hazy Saturday, Nodal sees a very different scene than the one described by the LAPD.

From up here, Nodal does not see the “element,” the dispirited transients and a dope-ridden park. He forgets the burglar he found in his apartment the first week he moved in (who, surprised, dove out a window onto a rooftop below with Nodal’s wallet). Instead of burned-out businesses and ravaged streets, Nodal sees art .

Nodal points. At 6th and Carondelet is the Asbury apartment building, its neon sign on top, which reminds Nodal of his plan to relight all of the historic neon signs in the mid-Wilshire area. “We could do it for $60,000,” he asserts. Then there’re the places one can’t quite see from the roof--but Nodal knows where they are. There’s the corner of 1st Street and Boyle Avenue in Boyle Heights, now home to Olympic Donuts and a gathering place for day workers. Nodal plans to turn it into a plaza for mariachi groups. There’s Western Avenue below Melrose, where Nodal has already commissioned a series of pro-city murals by kids. “These kids are a great tool to communicate with the gangs,” he said. “And after (the riots), we can’t afford not to use any tool at our disposal.”

Like Nodal’s empty rooftop, the entire city represents an enticing potential space. Especially now.

“I was out there in the riot all the time that it was happening--I just felt that I had to be out there,” Nodal says. “This neighborhood was burning, anyway. It was really horrible, really scary. I just felt like I needed to see it to really understand it. I took a drive, and I literally broke down and cried . . . but I don’t stay depressed for too long.

“Before the riots, I was starting to get a little kind of antsy,” Nodal confesses. “I thought, ‘I’ve got everything done I wanted to do . . . and I got it done fast.’ But now that this thing has hit there’s an incredible energy in the city to do new things.”

How about those who choose to run away from that energy instead of embracing it? A trace of bitterness creeps into Nodal’s voice. “As far as I’m concerned, let those people go,” he says. “All of those people who are now running away from it, they’ve been running away from it forever. The hell with ‘em. It’s the negative people who stop us from doing positive things for the city.”

Nodal rarely dwells on the negative. Nor is it his style to name names. But he acknowledges that holding the purse strings for the complicated and fractious Los Angeles arts community creates its share of conflict.

While Nodal’s commitment to multiculturalism has won the support of many, a recent Buzz magazine article called multiculturalism “the new tyranny” in the art world; an even more recent L.A. Weekly cover story questions multiculturalism as the “new racism,” and one essay in its package denounces the city’s cultural masterplan as a “color coding system” for artists that discounts individual cultural differences.

Observers say dissent exists within the Cultural Affairs Department too. Nodal’s workaholism has frustrated some longtime staffers used to a more sedate pace. And when it comes to funding decisions, as in the larger arts community, it’s the old guard versus the new. “It’s cleaved right down the middle; it’s like a viper’s nest over there,” said the former chief of one Los Angeles performing arts organization.

Bert Ball, hired by Nodal as director of Materials for the Arts, a new program that distributes donated materials to artists and arts organizations, declined to discuss office politics. But he described his boss as “tough and demanding, but very fair. . . . Having a city job has been a pretty cushy thing, and Al doesn’t see it that way. He’s a taskmaster--he doesn’t hesitate to give you assignments all the time. He doesn’t just make statements--he delivers.”

When making public appearances, Nodal lacks a veteran speechmaker’s charisma; his low-key, vernacular style often fails to capture the attention. Nor is he always tactful in making his points. “He’s not very suave about it; he ruffles feathers,” says one city official.

But when there’s a call for action, Nodal becomes commanding. On the Monday after the riots broke out, Nodal called a staff meeting at Frank Lloyd Wright’s tranquil Hollyhock House at Barnsdall Park to try to make sense out of the chaos. “All right--listen,” he said tersely. “The focus of this thing is immediate response. All programs resume today, full blast.” Nodal then proceeded to suspend all vacations for two weeks, outlined a six-part course of action, and demanded reports detailing citywide damage to artworks and facilities, and an analysis of the impact on the budget to be filed by the next afternoon.

Ball and friends tried to get Nodal to relax by coaxing him out for a horseback ride in Griffith Park the following Friday. Nodal wore cowboy boots, a hat and a bandanna, but the costume failed to transform him. “Here we are up in the country, trying to get away from it all, and he’s completely focused on how he can help the city, even though he’s dressed like a cowboy,” Ball says. “Everybody is riding through the woods, and he’s discussing new ideas and programs.”

Nodal has learned to deal with the conflicts--reluctantly. “In a bureaucracy, there are some people you have to push,” he says. “It’s good that I’ve learned it, but sometimes you learn things you don’t really want to learn. The thing about a job like this is, a lot of people have different ideas. My job is to try to move everybody in some kind of direction. I always say it’s like alchemy: You take a lot of crap and turn it into gold.

“A different set of people love us or hate us every year. . . . I don’t take any of that stuff personally, because I’ve been on the other side of that, and I know how it felt.”

In fact, Adolfo Victoriano Nodal was an artist. He was 7 when his family immigrated from Cienfuegos, Cuba, to Miami in 1957. As a child, Nodal worked for his father, a boat builder, and figured he would go into the family business. But his father died when Nodal was 15, and instead of building boats, Nodal went to Florida State University, where a photography course triggered an interest in art. He earned a bachelor’s degree in graphics and art history from FSU, and then a master’s degree in contemporary art from San Francisco State University.

After his graduation, Nodal worked for the Museum Society of Fine Art Museums of San Francisco as a preparer, which meant “putting up shows and taking them down.” But distracting Nodal from that pursuit was an interest in a burgeoning new world of artists organizations, which he says began developing “so artists wouldn’t be beholden to galleries or museums anymore, and they’d have their own spaces.”

And, in 1978, Nodal got his own space: He went back East to become executive director of the artist-run Washington Project for the Arts (WPA). During his five-year, shoestring-budget tenure, Nodal developed a downtown museum that the Washington Star described as a funky alternative to “the Corcoran, the Smithsonian and the other French-cuff museums.” WPA made a splash in temporary public art with the cowboy boots, “bum shelters” by Jon Peterson and Alice Aycock’s “Game of Flyers,” a huge tornado made out of old TV sets and appliances, which WPA placed near the Watergate Hotel. He also helped establish the National Assn. of Artists Organizations, which continues to represent alternative art spaces.

“D.C.--that’s really where I got going,” Nodal reminisces. “It was just the right combination of the size of the city, the organization, and people who were ready to go--we were really cookin’, it was really fun. We did hundreds of shows, hundreds of projects at any given time. It was wild, it was crazy, it was great. At that point, there was a real sort of feeling of involvement and commitment in the arts world.”

Paul Richard, Washington Post art critic since 1967, says: “If you told Washington artists that Al would be a big-time bureaucrat with an office next to City Hall, they would have guffawed.

“The first exhibit he ever did had an installation budget of $18. When he first took over (WPA) it was this wonderful but hideously scruffy downtown building that had Pegboard walls and horrible dead pigeons . . . and he lived downtown in this penthouse with his two cats, and he didn’t have any money.

“He was endlessly energetic. He would dun the businesses for help, he would paint the walls, and boy, could he party! They had the most amazing parties . . . the artists would be roaring drunk and happy, and he would be in his element. He wasn’t driven by some formalist convention or ideology--he was free.

“He really wanted to burst through complacency, and he liked change. But you know, people who are sort of used to handouts or grants from the government and think they’re going to get them forever would dread to see the arrival of Al Nodal.

“I know what bureaucracies are like. It’s a kind of work that, if he weren’t so strong, would crush his soul.”

Yet, says Walter Hopps, founding director of Houston’s Menil Collection, who was on the board of WPA while with the Smithsonian during those years, even Nodal-the-rebel had a knack for linking renegade artists to the status quo. “What was really noticeable was that his constituency was across the board, from strangers in the street all the way up to the political leaders who affect the fate of the nation’s capital,” Hopps says.

In 1982, Nodal married WPA assistant director Joy Silverman, who soon moved to Los Angeles to become director of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. (Silverman is now a New York-based arts activist; the couple divorced in 1986, but they remain close friends. Silverman says she often attends family gatherings with Nodal, his mother and sister, who live in Washington, and his 13-year-old daughter, Saskia, who lives in San Francisco with her mother.)

In 1983, Nodal joined Silverman in Los Angeles as director of exhibitions for the Otis/Parsons School of Art & Design. He also served as director of the MacArthur Park Public Art Program, which put graffiti writers to work on murals and brought sculptures, creative playground equipment and poetry readings to the seedy park.

“I was very social when I was in D.C.--I went to black-tie, diplomatic events two or three times a week. I was a museum director,” Nodal says. “And then, when I came here, they called me the ‘bum curator.’ I wore jeans, I was dirty all the time. I would get up each morning, go to the park, work in the park. I spent five years in that park. I love that park. I wrote a book about that park.”

That project was completed in 1987. Since then, MacArthur Park has slipped back into decay, Nodal admits. He is determined to try again someday. “It was undone by crack,” he says. “But we’re going to kick back in there with programs.”

Just before taking over as cultural affairs chief, Nodal divided his time between Los Angeles and New Orleans, serving as both vice president of the MacArthur Park Foundation and executive director of the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center. New Orleans urban planner and sculptor Bob Tannen says Nodal reached out to that city’s diverse community and saw to it that the city’s art activity was not all “white, middle-class ventures.”

Working with the diversity of New Orleans may have prepared Nodal for dealing with Los Angeles’ multicultural population. The city, however, was not prepared for Nodal. The mainstream institutions didn’t know what to expect from a minority administrator. And many of the city’s Chicano artists were leery of a Latino from a culture known for its political conservatism. But during his tenure, Nodal has fashioned a coalition around the issue of diversity, which is the main tenet of the cultural masterplan.

As might be expected, the city officials who mandated the masterplan commend Nodal. “He’s making it all happen,” says Councilman Joel Wachs. “There’s a whole range of issues that are raised when you open up the arts to everybody. He’s a real good listener, and has proven that one interest does not have to come at the expense of another.”

Deputy Mayor Linda Griego, a former member of the Cultural Affairs Commission that oversees Nodal’s department, says Nodal has an easy rapport with Mayor Tom Bradley and a much more open grant policy than Nodal’s predecessor, Fred Croton.

Griego praises Nodal’s development of the Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts and its peer panel system, patterned after the National Endowment for the Arts, in which groups of artists review applications and make recommendations for grants. Before Nodal, Griego says, the grant system was highly politicized.

“If you knew someone, you had a better chance; there were less checks and balances. What was happening, especially for the newcomers, was that it was more difficult,” Griego says. Now, however, “he’s been able to persuade the city and the mayor not to touch (the grant list). That was not the case a few years ago.”

Griego added that in his first year, Nodal may have let the pendulum swing too far toward new and underrepresented artists, but since then has achieved a better balance. Not everyone in the arts community agrees with her. And the battle lines are not neatly drawn between new and old.

True, there is alienation on the part of some predominantly white art organizations working in European traditions. “If a play doesn’t deal with an issue of the non-white world, it has less of a chance of being produced--that’s absolutely, definitely, provably true,” charges the director of one theater organization who asked not to be named. “Art should be judged on the basis of its excellence.”

But then, two of Nodal’s strongest supporters are Music Center President Esther Wachtell and Los Angeles Philharmonic Executive Director Ernest Fleischmann. “I think the cultural masterplan is very equitable,” Wachtell says. “It has increased dollars to go to support the community-based organizations that do need support, and yet it does give respect to concerns and problems and contributions that the larger organizations make to the scene.”

Fleischmann, who has attended some of Nodal’s frequent penthouse dinner parties (“he’s a great Cuban cook”), calls Nodal’s job “totally impossible,” but agrees with Wachtell.

“He has avoided giving grants because they are politically correct,” he says. “He has helped us all take risks, and I think he has helped explain to the individual artists that the big institutions are not the nasty sort of elitist types who try to swallow up everybody--they too serve an audience, and it’s a very large one.”

And, while one might expect the so-called “multicultural” groups to support Nodal, it doesn’t always work that way. Some of those groups feel they are caught between superpowers like the Music Center and newer multicultural organizations that spread the remaining funds too thin.

Those groups also fear that pressure on comparatively wealthy arts organizations to diversify their boards of directors creates too much competition for the relatively small number of wealthy, minority arts patrons.

While a strong Nodal supporter, Erwin Washington, executive director of South-Central’s L.A. Contemporary Dance Center, says: “I don’t know if I buy into all these minorities sitting on the Music Center board, the Joffrey Ballet board, the Mark Taper board. I need them on my board.”

And, like some white artists, many minority artists complain that the cultural masterplan’s community service edict may dilute artistic excellence by lumping pop culture or educational programs in with fine art aesthetics. “The style divisions are stronger than the race divisions,” Washington says.

A representative of an established multicultural organization, who asked not to be named, believes that Nodal’s backing of new organizations is not an attempt to even the score, but a personal power play. “I think it’s easier to deal with the young kid, the first-time grantee, than to people who will call him on the authenticity of what he is saying,” the representative says. “My feeling is he’s not putting his money where his mouth is.”

And, despite the masterplan, the representative charges that Nodal has no real grasp on the city’s minority population. “He is a Cuban in a Mexican city, he is a fish out of water,” the source says. “He is using his ‘Latino-ness’ as a reason for his importance in the city, and that could make anyone insecure. I think he’s more comfortable in the avant-garde white arts movement. It’s rebellious, it’s counterculture and it has money. I don’t think he was prepared for what it was really like to be an advocate for minorities; the racial politics here make the place like the Deep South.

“He tries to please everyone, and ends up pleasing no one. He has reason to be afraid--he knows he has enemies, and he intimates he’s getting it from all sides. I don’t think he knows if he has a friend anymore.”

Nodal acknowledges that L.A.’s Latino community, like the Asian community, is “fractured” into subgroups. “It was at several points difficult to work with the Chicano community because I was Cuban, but I think we’ve sort of gone over the hurdles on that,” he says.

Most of those critical of Nodal, however, fall into a single category: People who don’t get as much money as they want from the Cultural Affairs Department. Bill Bushnell, former artistic director of the now-defunct Los Angeles Theater Center, is one of those people.

“It’s no secret that Al Nodal and Bill Bushnell don’t like each other,” Bushnell says.

Now director/producer at California Repertory Company at Cal State Long Beach, Bushnell says that Nodal killed LATC by withholding $450,000 the city had available to rescue the theater during its days of financial desperation. It closed last August, and the building is now used for occasional productions while the city mulls various options.

Bushnell believes that Nodal withheld money because of a personal desire to have the city take back the building. “I think he spoke out of both sides of his mouth many times during the course of the negotiations,” Bushnell says. He says it has cost the city as much to keep the building open for occasional productions as it would have to keep LATC going.

Bushnell says that, ironically, LATC was the city’s only “truly multicultural theater.” “Granted, it was all run by white guys, but what we were doing was creating the one place in town where all those communities did come together and see each other face to face.”

Nodal believes that while he supported the theater’s programs, spending more on LATC would have been throwing good money after bad. “There was $450,000 there, but I really didn’t want to give it to (Bushnell) to keep the theater alive for another week ,” he says. “He couldn’t even tell me how long it would last. Then he would have gone under, and we would have had nothing.

“I feel for Bill. If you had a wonderful program that went down the tubes, you’d be bitter, too. . . . (The city) put $22 million into that theater over five years; that’s a lot more than we put into the whole arts community during that time. They did great things. But I don’t think Bill can accuse us of not doing enough.”

But some people like Nodal even if they don’t get money. Painter Michael McCall worked with Nodal in Washington--and never gets his grant applications approved. But Nodal still drops by McCall’s downtown loft to hit a few golf balls off the porch (although not very well, McCall says). “I think he’s an alternative to your normal bureaucrat,” he says with a grin.

But McCall refuses to accept Nodal’s masterplan. “I look at those grant (applications), and I think, ‘God, that means I have to go out and figure out a way to manipulate my thing that I make over here, or present it in a different way.’ . . . I don’t think you owe the government anything. I think just by doing art you are serving culture.”

And so does ex-wife Silverman. “My response to community-based art is, there’s an element that’s missing, and that’s the dialogue about art . . . that’s a big shift from the roots that Al and I came from,” she says. “There has to be a place or a voice for critique and dissent and analysis. I didn’t see that articulated in this ‘masterplan.’ ”

Nodal acknowledges that his point of view has changed somewhat from WPA days, when he rode the streets of Washington on a motorcycle and loved the avant-garde. “The harder it was to understand, the better I liked it,” he says. “I was really into that kind of work, and I still am. But for me, I’ve come a long way in seeing what art can do in the world. This is just one element of it.

“There’s a whole group of people who feel that we should be supporting good art, that’s it, no questions asked. You can’t ask more from art than that. But artists should be good citizens like everybody else. Why should the artists be precluded from doing something for the world?

“A lot has been said lately about the ‘death of multiculturalism’--well, we’re not going to give up on issues of equity. . . . There is a lot about the city’s multicultural policy that is very valid, and very, very important. I don’t think the people who are saying, ‘Get rid of it’ were ever really in it. Maybe ‘pluralism’ is the next thing, or some other - ism , but we have to build on what we have. Build your own culture, find what’s common between cultures--that’s the essence of multiculturalism.

“The community vision may be no art at all, and that’s fine, too. People have a right to have no art in their community. A lot of people don’t want graffiti, they don’t like the aesthetic. Hey, cool. Art doesn’t have to be everywhere.”

Nodal thinks city officials should be like the public artworks the WPA used to construct all over Washington--that is, temporary. In the past, Nodal says he has tried to change jobs at least once every five years. In his fourth year as cultural affairs manager, he’s not sure if he’ll follow that rule--or where he’s headed next. “I often wonder why it happened, how it happened so easily and quickly,” Nodal muses. “But I ‘m not going to be here forever. I want to do some other things. I don’t even know what.

“I like to work with people, and I like to help people, too. That’s a real rush. I could become an immigrant advocate real easy. We came as immigrants to this country and we had a hard time, and I remember how it was as a kid--we looked up to the people who could help our family. That’s so wonderful, so immediate.

“And I like the arts. I am not a politician in any way. All the politicking that I do, I do it to help art and people.”

Nodal says he’d like to move back to New Orleans someday. Or, someday, he’d like to live in Cuba, to which he returned for the first time last fall. “I just think Cuba is the most incredible place,” he says dreamily. “I don’t know about being an artistic leader, but sometime I’d like to go back to do something for my country.

“I’ve always changed around. This is not me forever.”