L.A. Schools Unearth Their Art Treasures

Hunting for storage space in a subterranean storeroom of Virgil Middle School, Principal Gloria Sierra peered into a dark corner beneath a knot of pipes draped in cobwebs.

“I reached in and pulled out a serene and lovely oil painting, obviously original and in desperate need of cleaning,” she recalled.

That painting is part of a vast art collection--ranging from antiquities to California landscapes--owned by the Los Angeles Unified School District and recently valued at about $20 million.

The trove, donated by graduating classes and other benefactors over the decades, includes Greek, Roman and Etruscan urns, jewelry and other artifacts valued at $3 million, and 350 oil and watercolor paintings representing 150 mostly turn-of-the-century California artists. In addition, the district keeps a collection of first-edition early California books and 25,000 historical photographs and negatives.

One painting, a portrait of two American Indians by Maynard Dixon, is thought to be worth about $1 million, said district art consultant Stone Ishimaru, who is heading the effort to catalog the valuables.

Some of those treasures are being stored in crates in a Los Angeles vault, others are under lock and key at various schools, and still more are stashed in dark corners across the 700-square-mile district. All were donated by graduating classes and other benefactors over the decades.

“It’s all over the place,” said district spokesman Brad Sales.

“We’re in the final stages of a 10-year inventory effort. Once these things are properly identified, photographed and cataloged, we’ll decide their best use,” Sales said.

What took so long?

“The district is huge; we had to visit all 634 schools,” said Ishimaru. “Some schools had records of their art, some didn’t. Then too, principals move from school to school and had no idea of what they had.”

Now, Ishimaru, who has worked with outside experts to assign a value to the art, wants to see all of it housed under one roof in some future downtown museum.

“They can’t be sold, according to state codes, and they belong to the public,” Ishimaru said. Gifts to a public agency such as a school district cannot be sold for a profit, he said.

“So I’ll be meeting with Supt. Ruben Zacarias soon to discuss preserving these artworks in a building that would be used as a teaching device and open to the public,” Ishimaru said, adding that his inventory is nearly completed.

“My main concern is the problem of preservation, restoration and security,” he said. “Many of our paintings were sold or stolen between between 1900 and now. The appropriate place for them is in one building downtown.”

Meanwhile, some staff members of the J. Paul Getty Museum have had preliminary discussions with district officials regarding proper storage and identification procedures that could be used in handling rarities such as a collection of Greek and Roman antiquities at Venice High School, a Getty spokesman said.

Sierra knows exactly what she would do with the landscape painting and two other pieces she dug up last month in the concrete storeroom known on her 84-year-old campus as “the dungeon.”

Admiring the paintings that she has temporarily propped against a wall near her office, she said, “We’re going to have them cleaned up and then placed on the walls in our library. Discovering them has been like uncovering the history of our school and the community.”

Sierra’s first discovery came a few minutes after she ventured into the dungeon. It was a painting titled “Santa Monica” by Dana Bartlett.

No sooner had Sierra found his name penciled on the back of the bronze-colored frame than she and school librarian Michael Sabin researched the artist on the Internet.

They found that Bartlett was primarily a landscape painter who lived in Los Angeles from the 1920s until his death in 1957. An active member of the Southern California art community, he had a gallery and taught at Chouinard Art Institute. His works are held by several local museums, including the Huntington Library and the Southwest Museum.

A few days later, a school janitor returned to the dungeon and found two more paintings--another landscape by Bartlett and an oil painting by Gordon Coutts. Both of them were rendered in golden browns and muted greens typical of the tones used by California artists in the 1920s and 1930s.

“They will have their debut at a faculty meeting next Tuesday,” Sierra said.

Ishimaru figures that there is more “gold to be found in the district’s forgotten projector rooms and basements.”

“We have to keep on digging,” he said. “The district must make everyone--staff to custodians--look around and see what they have. After all, a principal at a middle school looked behind some boxes in a dungeon and found a valuable painting.”

“Luck was with us,” Sierra said. “A dungeon is no place for these paintings.”