Civic Arts

Kent Twitchell’s inside job

Kent Twitchell made his name as an outdoor artist whose enormous, hyper-realist outdoor portraits have become an indelible part of the L.A. landscape.

But there’s a downside to all that larger-than-life public visibility. He’s seen many of his iconic works disfigured by vandals and sometimes unceremoniously destroyed over the years. So it is with a sense of relief and renewed enthusiasm that he’s working on his latest project—a series of murals for the county’s downtown Bob Hope Patriotic Hall that will be displayed safely indoors.

Our video visit to Twitchell’s downtown L.A. studio offers some behind-the-scenes insights into this important work in progress, while the gallery below gives a sense of the breadth of his work, from the salvaged remains of earlier pieces to the prep work for such still-standing murals as “Harbor Freeway Overture.”

Twitchell was selected in 2010 for his role in the Patriotic Hall project, part of an extensive renovation. In coming months, his artwork, painted on mural fabric, will be moved from his studio and adhered and sealed to the lobby walls of the imposing 1926 building.

Posted 3/21/12

From toppled trees, art

The Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, devastated by last December’s violent windstorms, has some beautiful plans for its fallen trees.

This week, the Board of Supervisors cleared the way for about 100 downed logs and branches to be given to artisans and wood artists to create pieces for a special exhibit and auction benefitting the Arboretum’s continued restoration. The project will be curated by the Arboretum’s artist in residence, Leigh Adams.

“We lost some 235 trees, and several hundred more were damaged,” says Arboretum CEO Richard Schulhof. “Some were total losses, and a lot of that wood has been chipped and is being returned to the soil as mulch here at the Arboretum.

“But we also had piles of tree branches—eucalyptus, oak, coral trees, fig trees. Some of it was very interesting wood that doesn’t grow anywhere else. So after the storm, we had people come up to us and say, ‘What are you going to do with this beautiful wood?’

“And we thought, ‘Why not ask some artists and artisans to do something that speaks to the next generation being planted, and that commemorates the trees that were lost?’”

Because the wood stockpiles are limited, Adams will invite artists to contribute: “We’re looking for people who know and visit the Arboretum, for whom it means something personally,” Schulhof says.

He adds that the auction will be held on the weekend of December 1-2, which is the anniversary of the devastating windstorms. Proceeds will go to the Arboretum Tree Fund established by the nonprofit Los Angeles Arboretum Foundation.

“It will help buy new plantings to replace what was lost,” says Schulhof, “and bring in the Arboretum’s next generation of trees.”

Posted 3/14/12

From pain, pure poetry in Room 219

The players included a teenager from El Salvador missing her faraway mom, a boy from Africa’s Ivory Coast telling a family secret, a girl from Israel wrestling with what it means to be real, not “plastic.”

They spoke their lines with honesty and transparent emotion. Dressed all in black and moving about a spare stage, they took turns in the spotlight, young faces aglow.

Was this a pitch-perfect ensemble created by a Hollywood casting director? Or maybe an off-Broadway troupe preparing for a long theatrical run?

Hardly. This group came together in Karen Ritvo’s English as a Second Language class at Fairfax High School.

And the words they spoke were true—wrenched from the struggles of their real lives and spun into autobiographical poetry as part of a special collaboration with the Music Center.

When the students took the stage recently for a one-time-only performance at the Greenway Arts Alliance theater on the Fairfax campus, it was the culmination of a creative and transformative process that had started months ago with studying the art of others: Pablo Neruda’s Poetry and Alvin Ailey’s Revelations.

Soon, the students were coming up with revelations of their own, as they began crafting poems based on real experiences of struggle and change.

Some grappled with universal experiences of being a teen—a first kiss, or the heartache posed by a girl wanting to be “just friends.” But many sketched a very specific reality of being young, separated from loved ones and trying to make it in a strange land.

…All I have is her voice on the other
end of the line telling me “Baby everything is gonna be okay.”
That doesn’t take away the pain so I go to bed and wait for the
lights to go down so I can start to cry…
—“How it feels to miss my mom” by Daisy Juarez

Others wrote of the pain of dislocation, and of trying to make sense of a strange new language.

Some strangers just glance at me
This town is a maze
This foreign language sounds like unknown magical words
Colored signs make me confused
I need a new map
To go home to my adorable family
—“A New Map” by Yunha Kim

They described feeling invisible—or, even worse, too visible.

How shy she is in the center of this strange land
Everything she sees is unusual and unfamiliar
No one pays attention to her but she feels only tons of stares on the back of her head
—“Nothing Can Stop Me” by AiLing Lu

So why do you choose to be so rude
If all we want from you is your help to open up
I know you think I’m an alien
But like you I’m from earth
—Untitled, by Sheyla Jordan

Then it was time to move from writing to performing. Madeleine Dahm, a Music Center teaching artist from London, (yes, she’s from someplace else, too) worked with the students to stage a unique production that melded their original poetry with dance moves from Revelations and some recited lines from Neruda.

The show ended with each student speaking their name and where they’d come from: China. El Salvador. Ethiopia. Guatemala. Ivory Coast. Israel. Korea. Mexico. Uzbekistan.

The families, friends, fellow students and well-wishers who’d packed the small theater applauded enthusiastically, some wiping away tears.

“This is as good as education can get, I don’t care what level,” Fairfax principal Ed Zubiate said during a brief Q & A with the performers after the show.

Then it was over. The next week, the end of the semester would scatter the students, breaking up the world they’d formed in Room 219 and bringing down the curtain on all they experienced together.

But not on what they’d learned.

“After the performance, I realized that I don’t need to be afraid of anything,” said Natanel Giladi, 17, of Israel, whose poem “Who I really am” dealt with how hard it is to find one’s true self.

“I feel like wow, I finally said it,” said 17-year-old Kevin Miranda, of El Salvador, who wrote about losing his aunt and grandmother to cancer.  “Because I didn’t even talk to my mom about what happened. It was just something I had inside that I didn’t have the opportunity to express. It was my first time on stage.”

“I learned that I’m not the only one who feels weird or feels sad in this country,” said Daisy Juarez, 19, also of El Salvador, who’d written about missing her mom. “They have their problems, too. It’s not only me. I learned not to judge.”

Posted 2/14/12

New library tells Topanga’s story, too

It may not be easy to tell a book by its cover, but when the county’s newest library opens this weekend, visitors will have no trouble knowing which community’s stories are surrounding them.   

From the design to the public artwork, the long-awaited Topanga Public Library, which will be dedicated on Saturday, is an organic outgrowth of the community it will soon serve. 

“They tried to make it as homegrown as possible,” says Topanga artist Matt Doolin, who, with his brother Paul and his mother Leslie, created a circular tile mural of an idyllic Topanga landscape that will anchor the library’s main room.

The 11,293-square-foot, silver LEED-certified building broke ground in 2008 and has been in the works for more than a decade; for generations, residents of the mountain community had made do with other towns’ libraries and a visiting bookmobile. (Click here for a gallery of early construction work.)

Although Los Angeles County funded the $19.6 million project, it was clear from the start that the iconoclastic community, filled with environmentalists and artists, would insist on weighing in on the building’s aesthetic and carbon footprint.

“There are a lot of stakeholders in Topanga,” laughs Rebecca Catterall, former president of the Topanga Canyon Gallery and a 30-year-resident of the rustic enclave.

“There’s a sense of a spiritual connection there that’s not like any other place, and I think it’s important to the people,” agrees Norman Grochowski, who spent most of his career in Topanga and whose massive-yet-whimsical steel-and-ceramic book flowers bedeck the library’s entry.

“Topanga is a land within a land, a place far away.”

So a local design advisory committee was convened to determine the rustic “lodge” look of the North Topanga Boulevard building, and the library was built to the latest green construction standards.

Meanwhile, in accordance with county policy, one percent of the cost of construction was allocated for the incorporation of civic art into the project. A second local committee, this one pulled from the local art scene by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, commissioned pieces by four local artists. (Click here for an extensive photo gallery of the of the library’s artwork on Green Public Art’s Flickr page.)

Catterall, who sat on the arts committee, says the group methodically culled 29 entries in search of artists who were both representative of the community and who worked on an architectural scale. Patricia Correia, a Topanga-based art dealer and former gallery owner who served with Catterall, says the artists were chosen first and then asked to make pieces for specific areas of the building.

“A lot of times in public art, people pick a beautiful sculpture and then find out it’s too small or too big.”

Some aspects of the new library ended up being literally rooted in Topanga: A podium, two Adirondackchairs, two rocking chairs and a picnic table were made from trees that had had to be removed during construction. That work, set in motion by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky’s office, was done by Don Seawater, whose California-based Pacific Coast Lumber Co. is a leader in the use of reclaimed wood and urban forestry.

Artist and art teacher Megan Rice, who did two papier mache sculptures for the library’s children’s section, also honored the fallen trees—two oaks and two pines—by using one of the stumps as the base for “A Great Tale,” which depicts a little boy reading to his faithful dog.

“I’ve lived in Topanga since 1956, and when I heard they were looking for artists with a vested interest in Topanga, I felt, ‘That’s me’,” says Rice, who was 5 when her parents moved to the community.

“My mother was the children’s librarian at Topanga Elementary School for eight or ten years, and I grew up with the bookmobile—in fact, in my early childhood, it was a very big part of my life because we had few neighbors, and for a long time my mother didn’t have a car, so getting a big stack of books there was a source of great excitement for me.”

Local potter Jim Sullivan, a resident since the early 1960s, remembered the Topanga childhood of his now-grown daughter when he designed the ceramic tile “rug” just inside the front entrance. “When she was in fourth grade, she went to the Adamson House inMalibu, and the docent stopped them at the front door and pointed to the threshold,” says Sullivan. “She said, ‘Does anybody know what that is?’”

Only Sullivan’s daughter, the child of a ceramist, knew that the design on the floor was a broken tile mosaic. When the guide explained that broken tile was often used in doorways because of ancient lore that it kept out evil spirits, Sullivan says his daughter became so excited that she begged him relentlessly to install similar mosaics in their own house.

Since then, he says, he has done a number of such installations, and when he heard about the library commissions, he felt a piece of broken-tile floor art would be perfect for Topanga’s new landmark. His 8-foot-wide piece, made entirely by hand, he says, depicts a spark growing into a flame of intellect and community.

All the artists who contributed work are established and well known in Topanga. The Doolins have done murals at local landmarks ranging from Disneyland California Adventure to public pools in South Los Angeles. Grochowski, who now lives in Crescent City, Ca., but visits Topanga several times a year, has shown work at LACMA and the Laguna Art Museum.

Rice’s work has been exhibited throughout California, and Sullivan, whose ceramics are in a number of private collections, has done historic restoration work from Malibu to Pasadena; for many years he co-owned Malibu Ceramic Works, a Topanga tile company that replicated historic tiles.

Correia says the work by Sullivan and the Doolins echoes Topanga’s long history as a center for ceramic artwork and the sculptures by Rice and Grochowski brought variety.

“There aren’t a lot of libraries getting built anymore,” she notes. “It was exciting, and we wanted to bring a three-dimensionality to the space, take it beyond just a big painting or a big mural outside.”

The new library “is incredibly important,” adds Correia.

“We don’t really have an everyday kind of communal place that isn’t a commercial space,” she says. “This is going to bring the community together in a way that deals with knowledge and culture and imagination. I can’t wait.”

The library’s grand opening will take place Saturday, January 21, at 11 a.m. The address is 122 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd.

Posted 1/17/12

Ansel Adams and a vanished Los Angeles [updated]

He gave the world majestic images of Yosemite, not to mention the unforgettable “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.” But Ansel Adams was no sentimentalist when it came to disposing of his old work.

In the early 1960s, the celebrated photographer happened upon a trove of negatives and small contact prints dating back to an assignment for Fortune magazine in Los Angeles. Some of his photos ran in the magazine’s March, 1941 issue with a story on the aerospace industry’s WWII buildup in Los Angeles.

But Adams had photographed far more during the assignment—bowling parties, quirky architecture, trailer park life, a cemetery reposing next to oil wells. So he wrote to the Los Angeles Public Library offering the images not as art but as a slice of the city’s history. (His letter is here.)

“The weather was bad over a rather long period and none of the pictures were very good,” he wrote. “If they have no value whatsoever, please dispose of them in the incinerator.”

Fortunately, the city did not put the images out with the trash. The library accepted the photos and gave Adams a letter valuing them at $150 for his income tax purposes—more than the $100 valuation he’d suggested.

Since then, the photos have periodically been “rediscovered” and given a public viewing. (Here’s a link to Huell Howser’s “California’s Gold” segment; a Flickr gallery is here, and NPR’s online feature “The Picture Show” has featured them as well.)

Fans of photography and Los Angeles history had a chance to learn more about the images during a free presentation last year at the library’s Los Feliz Branch. The presentation by Richard Stanley was part of the library’s “Architecture & Beyond” lecture series. (See details in update below of a gallery exhibition of the images that begins Feb. 18, 2012.)

“He photographed virtually the whole city, from Santa Anita to the Santa Monica Pier,” said Stanley, who’s a realtor as well as an Adams admirer and frequent photography lecturer in the series. The images demonstrate that Adams “was a working photographer, not just a fine artist.”

Christina Rice, acting senior librarian for the Los Angeles Library, last year initiated a three-month project to better present the images online and to research the historic (and often vanished) locations where the photos were made. But some of the details seem to have been lost to the ages—like the location of that cemetery by the oil wells.

Still, Rice said, “”from a Los Angeles history viewpoint, I think they’re amazing.”

Posted 2/17/11

Updated 2/1/12: L.A. Observed reports that the photographs will be getting a gallery show, with sales benefitting the Library. The exhibit opens Feb. 18. Details are here.

Changing of the guard at Watts Towers

Minding a masterpiece isn’t easy. The Watts Towers have been among Los Angeles’ great public treasures, but their upkeep has been a full-time challenge almost since they were finished in 1954.

Rattled by earthquakes, assaulted by rainstorms, the fantastic, filigreed metropolis erected by an Italian-born amateur stonemason in a South-Central barrio is perpetually in a state of deterioration. The mortar cracks. The tiles are forever falling. The joints are damp with seepage and rusting from within.

Late last month, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced plans to lend a hand to the recession-slammed city in ensuring that Simon Rodia’s renowned public sculpture is preserved. The art world is applauding the one-year agreement, in which LACMA will contribute expertise, staff and — most crucially — fundraising assistance.

And cheering the loudest are Zuleyma Aguirre and Virginia Kazor.

For some 20 years, Aguirre and Kazor have tended the towers. Before her retirement this summer, Kazor spent 19 years as the historic site curator, managing the conservation effort for the city’s cultural affairs department.  Aguirre, her lead conservator, handled all the on-site restoration, tending every inch of concrete, tile and metal until she was sidelined two years ago by an injury on the job.

Together, the two women – one an art historian raised in Los Angeles, the other an El Salvador-born expert in the restoration of pre-Columbian artifacts – have shepherded the landmark through the Los Angeles riots, the Northridge earthquake and countless storms and budget woes. This week, they sat down with ZevWeb to talk about the labor of love that became not only Simon Rodia’s life’s work, but theirs as well.

“The first time I came to the towers,” Aguirre remembers, “it was 1988. They were just – oh! Amazing! Rodia’s work made me feel like I really had not done too much in the world.”

She had come to the United States in the early ‘80s on a grant to visit museums, and remained, reluctant to return to her country’s civil war. The Watts job became hers after she hired on with a city consultant working on the towers’ preservation. The project, she immediately realized, would be like no other.

“I had come from working in museums,” she says, “and the towers were just so different. There were no drawings we could find, no blueprints. We had to do X-rays to learn how he did the connections on 5,000 joints.”

In 1991, Kazor became Aguirre’s supervisor on the project. Already a longtime curator for the city, her relationship with the towers was more than three decades old. As a student in 1958 at the University of Southern California, she had been assigned to report on them by her design teacher.

“I was so fascinated that after that, when I met someone and found him interesting, I’d always take him first to the Watts Towers,” she remembers, laughing. “And if — and only if — they liked them, then I’d go out with them.”

Then and now, she says, she was moved by the assemblage – a collection of 17 structures, built over 33 years by an eccentric handyman. Constructed by hand out of scraps and castoffs, the towers’ famed spires soar up to 99 feet over their impoverished surroundings.

Kazor, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s shortly after being assigned to Rodia’s project, connected with the resolve that fueled it: “They’re ours and they’re absolutely unique. And they are a testament to what one person can accomplish, if they just set their minds to it.”

That determination, the women say, was what most impressed them, day after workday.

“Rodia was a common laborer who took part-time jobs,” Kazor says, “but he was sort of intuitively brilliant. He took any steel he could find — rebar if it was available, but he’d use water pipe or anything he thought would work.

“And he didn’t weld. He overlapped the pieces, wrapped the overlapped portion with wire to hold them together, and then covered that with chicken wire. Then he took a very dry concrete mix — you could pick it up by the handful and it would hold its shape — and he’d press that into the chicken wire. Then he would press into that the decorative elements he had chosen. Seashells or tile or the impression of a tool or broken glass.”

But his work didn’t end there. “After that, he would have to keep the concrete moist by spraying it with water for more than a week,” Kazor says. “And he did this by climbing up the towers as if they were scaffolding. And he would carry on his arm a bucket with whatever materials he needed. And every time he needed more materials, he had to go all the way back down to the ground and then all the way back up again.”

Honoring that artistic commitment has required its own brand of determination. After every Santa Ana wind or winter rainstorm, tile and bits of concrete shower from the structures onto the ground. Moisture is a constant challenge.

“Once water gets past the decorative surface and through the concrete, the steel inside it rusts,” says Kazor. “And then the rust expands. And the cracks get larger, and more water gets in, and eventually the interior steel structure rusts away.”

Part of Aguirre’s job, she says, was to walk the site with her crew daily, picking up fragments and carefully documenting where they had fallen and where they belonged.

“Early on in the project, the whole structure was completely photographed, and broken down into a 4-foot grid,” says Kazor. “So each worker, every day, would be assigned a certain area, and at the end of the day, record what he did there.”

That painstaking documentation, she says, has been the key to FEMA and other grants that have underwritten tower restoration again and again.

The work hasn’t always been safe.

“Once,” Kazor says, “one of our construction workers was on the scaffolding 40 feet in the air, and an earthquake hit. And he said, ‘Please don’t fire me, but the scaffolding was shaking so hard, I had to hang onto the tower.’ When he looked down, he said, he could see the wave of the earthquake come down the street, lifting the backs of the parked cars.”

In fact, Aguirre has been unable to work for more than two years, after having been struck by a piece of scaffolding that damaged two cervical vertebrae in 2008. It was not her first on-the-job injury. In 2001, she says, she was mugged as she arrived for work early one morning, carrying her purse and her laptop.

“This young fellow asked me for the time, and when I didn’t know, he went with his fist in my face,” Aguirre remembers. The blow broke six of her teeth and severed an artery, and Kazor says Aguirre nearly bled to death before she was found.

Yet for all the challenges, the women say, the towers have been deeply rewarding.

“It’s magic there,” says Aguirre. “I felt I could hear Rodia’s steps some days, when everybody went to lunch and I stayed there alone. From the top, you can see all over the city. It’s gorgeous. You have a whole other vision of Watts. Or just sitting there below, looking up. Hearing all the Watts sounds. The neighbor sounds – the rap, the Mexican music, the lambada, the smell of the materials. The mix. Everywhere you look, it is art.”

This fragile, unconventional beauty, Kazor says, is why LACMA’s involvement is so welcome.

“The city does not really have the resources any more to do what needs to be done,” she says, noting that by the time she retired, the manpower the city had committed to the towers had fallen from about 14 full- and part-time workers to two.

“The Watts Towers are as important as any work in a museum. They are like the Eiffel Tower, or the Millennium Wheel in London. They’re a great gift to Los Angeles.”

Watch this short film on the Towers

Posted 10/28/10

Twinkling YOLA stars

Like its young participants, Youth Orchestra Los Angeles is growing. Check out the magic moment in this video (see below) when the kids at the organization’s latest outpost first receive their instruments.

YOLA’s newest program–the second of its kind–is jointly sponsored by Heart of Los Angeles and the L.A. Philharmonic and serves children in the Rampart District.

Read Zev’s blog on this innovative program, modeled on Venezuela’s legendary El Sistema, which produced Gustavo Dudamel (you may have heard of him.) And check out our other coverage here.

Posted 10/15/10

Learning lessons by HeArt

Brendy Giron, a.k.a. “Jinxie,” ditched school daily to tag with her boyfriend. Her classmate, Janette, cut class to chill by the gym.

Miguel Hernandez was so brazenly truant that sometimes as he sneaked out the school door, he’d pass his own mother, who would stake out the campus entrance in a vain attempt to intercept him. Outside, his girlfriend, Elizabeth, would be waiting, having blown off her classes as well.

This is how high school kids end up in alternative and continuation schools in Los Angeles County, which is where all four teenagers eventually landed. Their new classroom, however, is no ordinary alternative.

Every morning, they get five hours of regular classroom instruction; then, in the afternoons, artists come in to teach painting, photography, video production, dance, water color and other arts courses. If they show promise—and stay in class—they have a shot at internships at production companies and art institutions.

“This is an arts high school specifically for alternative education students,” says Cynthia Campoy Brophy, proudly striding down a bright blue hallway in the Hollywood Media Arts Academy.

Jointly run by the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) and The HeArt Project, a nonprofit founded by Campoy Brophy that has offered arts programs to at-risk students in the county for 18 years, the academy is the newest—and smallest—public school of the arts in L.A. County.

The academy has been open for a year and a half, although the HeArt Project took over the arts component only a few months back; an open house to celebrate the new school year was held in September. Current enrollment is around 30 students, but officials hope that, as the word gets out, that number will increase.

“What we’re trying to do is use The HeArt Project and artists who work with the kids to inform and really engage them at a deeper level of career opportunities in the entertainment industries,” says Gerald Riley, assistant superintendent of educational programs at LACOE.

Situated in a low-slung building off Santa Monica Boulevard, the school looks a lot like the show business warehouses that surround it. Inside, however, its rooms are spacious and airy, the walls freshly painted in bright colors and covered with words intended to inspire ambition: sound engineer, director, percussionist, cartoonist, costume designer. The lettering over the doorway in the bright yellow lobby warns, “You are entering a creative space.”

Campoy Brophy, executive director of The HeArt Project, said the split school day is modeled after the more renowned Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, colloquially known as LACHSA. : “The students here have 10 hours of arts programming a week,” she says. “They do their core curriculum in the mornings and we get them in the afternoons.”

Unlike LACHSA students, who must audition and submit portfolios of artwork, however, the Media Arts Academy kids usually have no prior art training and find the school via guidance counselors or word of mouth. Often, Campoy Brophy says, they’re the sort of students “who only come to school on the arts day”—creative but struggling kids who, for a variety of reasons, are failing to thrive in conventional high schools.

Some have had chaotic home lives. Some have trouble saying no to peer pressure. Some have just sold themselves short or missed too much school or fallen in with a bad crowd.

“They aren’t necessarily problem kids, they just need a smaller setting,” says Principal Jennifer Flores, who oversees the academy and six other alternative schools for LACOE.

Student poetry on the walls of the dance room hints at their journeys: I am random and loud/I pretend I’m a makeup artist… I am handsome and nice/I pretend to be Ronaldinho… I am funny and nice/I worry about my homies…

“They come from all over,” smiles Elizabeth Meza, who works in the school office. “Koreatown. Santa Monica. Pacoima. One boy came in every day from Norwalk on public transportation. He said he liked it because it was a safe place for him and the art kept him out of trouble. He’s going to graduate in December, and he’s going to community college, I hear.”

Brendy Giron says she was a middle school student in the San Fernando Valley when her mother began moving around in search of a better job. They ended up in Koreatown, and Giron enrolled at Los Angeles High School, where she met a boy in her second period class who shared her fascination with graffiti art, or, as they termed it, “graf.”

“He had this thing on his notebook, and I go, ‘Oh, you’re a graffer,’ and he’s like, ‘Yeah, what do they call you?’ And I told him what they call me, which was Jinxie. And he was called Obie. And we were all in, like, the love zone, and when he would go writing, I would go writing, too.”

But their habit took on a life of its own, she says. She spent less and less time in classes. She switched schools, but jumped the fences to be with him. She tried independent study and ditched the test days.

One night, she says, she got caught tagging on a mid-city rooftop. Meanwhile, her boyfriend was getting into his own scrapes. Eventually, their pastime became less novel. When her boyfriend told her about the academy, where he had been enrolled for a time, she begged her mother to let her go there. The boyfriend ended up in a juvenile probation camp, but Giron, now 18, says she hopes to study fine art someday.

“I don’t want people to look at my art and be, like, ‘Oh, that’s just tagging.’ I want to do it right, you know?”

Other students see the academy more as a place to learn a new skill. Janette—who school officials insisted be identified only by her first name because she is 16 and a minor—says the promise of art at the end of the day kept her in the classroom: “There was nothing at my other schools that I was that interested in.”

For Elizabeth, 17, the academy has been a lifeline: “I don’t know where I’d be if I didn’t come here. It got the point where my old school didn’t want me and I just didn’t care anymore.”

The school was reluctant at first to admit her to the same school as her boyfriend, but she has applied herself, and for the first time in her life she is earning As and Bs in academic classes. “I just entered the 10th grade, which for me was a big deal. I have a lot of catching up to do.”

Her boyfriend, 18-year-old Miguel Hernandez, says he has stopped cutting class (a relief to his parents) and is hoping to win an internship after he graduates in December. Campoy Brophy says she has been talking to a commercial television production company about the student. As it turns out, she says, he has a knack for cameras.

“Honestly, I didn’t want to come here at first,” he recalls. “I thought it was going to be just another continuation school where they give you a packet of work and tell you to sit down and do it.” But during the summer, he learned photo editing and photography, “and I loved it.”

“It’s like, you can pass by someone or something a thousand times and you wouldn’t pay attention to it. But with pictures, you learn to pay attention. You see things in a different way—a better way.”

Posted 10/7/10

Local arts grants ripple out

Money’s tight these days—which makes being on the receiving end of a grant from the Los Angeles County Arts Commission that much sweeter. That’s doubly true of some of the non-profit organizations receiving funds for the first time.

The grant newbies include the Buzzworks Theater Company, the Invertigo Dance Theatre, the Los Angeles-St. Petersburg Russian Folk Orchestra and the Madison Project, an independent nonprofit that puts on cultural programs at the Broad Stage on the Santa Monica College campus.

“We weren’t sure, with times being what they are, that we were going to get anything,” said Deborah Reed, Buzzworks’ director of development, which will use its $4,000 grant to pay its artists. “We’re just thrilled.”

In all, the commission awarded $4.1 million in two-year grants to 166 organizations across the county. The grant amounts are smaller this year, but were enhanced somewhat by the Board of Supervisors, which recently voted for a one-time infusion of funds from county reserves to help bridge the shortfall.

The full list of 3^rd District groups receiving grants is here. They range from the Topanga Symphony, which received $3,500 for its free concert series, to the Skirball Cultural Center, granted $141,682 to support its Sunset Concerts program.

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