Art in Bloom

Bringing arts and culture to everyone is a lofty goal, even in Pasadena, where opportunities abound.

Here in the Rose City — the home of the Rose Parade, Caltech and JPL — imagination and innovation are almost expected to thrive. Storied institutions stand next to the new and cutting-edge, creating a palette of artistic offerings unique for a city of fewer than 150,000.

See a Rembrandt today at the world-renowned Norton Simon Museum, or explore the Pasadena Museum of California Art’s current exhibit, a contemporary take on race and identity.

Catch Angela Bassett later this month in a classic August Wilson drama at the historic Pasadena Playhouse, or show up there this weekend for the new Furious Theatre Company’s latest play, a provocative examination of civil liberties in the age of Homeland Security.

Hear the Grammy-winning Southwest Chamber Music perform Mozart this weekend, or jam to the sounds of Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis with the Pasadena Jazz Institute.

So many choices!

The flurry of activity in the local arts scene drove discussion at a meeting hosted by the Weekly last month at the Holly Street Bar & Grill, where a group of cultural leaders were considering how best to spread the good word. These members of the Pasadena Arts Council, a nonprofit organization that promotes and supports area cultural institutions, were struggling to find a catchy, precise, almost magical tagline that could, as Arts Council Executive Director Terry LeMoncheck put it, “really go out to the world as a statement about what we’re doing and what we feel strongly about.”

That challenge to capture in one fell swoop all of the culture — visual and performance art, music, literary happenings, science — blossoming in Pasadena clearly indicates that the city is making great strides in offering diverse arts programming.

At the same time, that diversity was not reflected in the cultural leaders in the room, most of whom were white men and women.

“It’s tricky,” said Eileen T’Kaye, executive director of The Theatre @ Boston Court, “because the kinds of things that we do at our theater are very eclectic, and the writers and the directors and cast are very diverse, but our staff is not.”

Not that it’s for any lack of effort, though. Boston Court, said T’Kaye, is currently trying to build a more diverse board of directors and is openly calling for minority job applicants.

So, just as important as reaching the largest possible audience with the arts is the need to bring young people in as stakeholders. And that begins in the schools — where many Pasadena arts organizations play a vital role in exposing youth to the arts through their outreach programs — and continues with internship programs.

The city’s executive director for the arts, Jonathon Glus, is in charge of implementing the ambitious 10-year Cultural Nexus Plan, which was adopted by Pasadena City Council members one year ago to achieve several goals. Those include increasing arts education opportunities, attracting arts-based tourism and, as a guiding principle, making the art world accessible to all of the city’s residents.

Under Cultural Nexus, the Pasadena Arts Commission was renamed the Arts and Culture Commission in an attempt to be more inclusive of minority contributions and pay better attention to cultural as well as artistic diversity in the city.

This year, the Nexus subcommittee of the Arts and Culture Commission has been concentrating on the development of access and equity standards that will guide further work toward diversity, Glus explained. “Every person in Pasadena should have equal access to all of our cultural offerings. So then the question is: What are the real barriers, and what are the perceived barriers?”

Identity crisis

For the most part, the Pasadena Arts Council meeting was a business lunch, with a focus on finding a brand or identity for marketing and tourism.

After all, it was in the pages of last year’s Fall Arts Preview feature that Maribeth McGinley, a graduate of the Art Center College of Design and presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts, described Pasadena’s wealth of art and cultural activities as “one of America’s best-kept secrets.”

“We find with our visitors that they have this perception that Southern California has no culture and no history,” said Theresa Santoro, marketing director for the Pasadena Convention & Visitors Bureau. “And we are constantly amazed at the visitor [survey] comments that they are in awe at the architecture they see throughout the city, the culture, the scientific endeavors and the collaboration between all areas in the city.”

Aside from questions of a target market, it became apparent to the group that they would first have to figure out how to describe what is unique about Pasadena as a cultural environment.

Stephen Nowlin, director of Art Center’s Williamson Gallery, mentioned that the Arts Council members had long been talking about Pasadena’s “cultural renaissance.” He explained that the term came out of a period of collaboration and growth beginning in 1999 that spawned ArtNight and the Arts & Ideas Festival.

“It’s a raising of cultural awareness amongst those of us involved in the arts and science community. We all got to know each other … and a sense of what a unique community and of who we are began to develop,” Nowlin said.

The argument that Pasadena’s scientific community should be included under the umbrella of arts and culture greatly pleased Caltech Assistant Vice President for Public Events Denise Nelson Nash. Nash, who was the only African-American present at the meeting, preceded Glus as the city’s arts director.

“The founding of Pasadena is so well-integrated with science you can’t uncouple the two. There are many ways to experience the sciences here,” said Nash, noting that Caltech holds a number of public lectures, tours and performance events each year.

As Nowlin pointed out, science is also a part of places like the Huntington Library, Art Collections,

and Botanical Gardens, Descanso Gardens and the Arboretum. Plus, 2005’s “AxS: At the Intersection of Art and Science” at the Armory Center for the Arts is one example of a collaboration, along with Art Center and Caltech, that explicitly bridged art and science.

But, more generally speaking, “all of these entities have to do with innovation and experimentation,” said Jan Sanders, director of the Pasadena Library. “What I hear all the time when I come to these meetings is this is what we’re doing that’s new, that’s leading edge, that’s different from what we might have experienced before — new playwrights, new forms of music. You’re talking about the Pasadena experience, but it’s also about the Pasadena experiment. That’s the commonality I see as an observer.”

With so much going on in the arts — not to mention restaurants and other forms of entertainment — just how to market it all is “a great problem to have,” said Ted Bosley, director of the Gamble House. “We do have those pods of market niches, but we have them all, it seems.”

Actually, Greater Pasadena is one of the top areas in the country in terms of arts-related commerce, according to the Creative Industries 2006 Congressional Report, a publication by the nonprofit Americans for the Arts.

In a ranking of congressional districts, Pasadena’s district — which also includes Glendale, Burbank, Alhambra, Altadena and other parts of the San Gabriel Valley — ranked 17th in the nation in terms of total arts-related businesses and an astounding fifth in terms of the amount of people who are employed in the field. That analysis, Americans for the Arts acknowledged, likely is under-representing nonprofit arts groups, which in Pasadena are numerous.

Outside looking in

Even with the abundance of opportunities, many people have yet to experience the arts that are thriving all around them. That’s why another part of the Arts Council and Cultural Nexus mission is reaching out to those community members.

“Because of the demographics, there are still plenty of people that don’t feel they have access to our institutions; they don’t know it yet,” Glus explained. “There are real barriers, and there are perceived barriers. … There are financial and language barriers. There are barriers of having children and working hours that don’t give you access.”

Perhaps the most successful way cultural institutions have attracted new fans, especially from close to home, is with ArtNight Pasadena — a citywide arts open house. During ArtNight, which happens twice a year in April and October, participating venues open their doors free to the public and offer free shuttles between locations.

The next ArtNight takes place from 6 to 10 p.m. on Oct. 13. The Armory Center for the Arts, Art Center, Norton Simon Museum, Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena Conservatory of Music, Pasadena Symphony and others have already signed up.

“On ArtNight at my venue, the audience is entirely different from the audience that usually comes to other receptions or openings, so I think ArtNight has been very effective in connecting with this larger and more diversified audience,” said Art Center’s Nowlin.

Pasadena Arts Council members are planning to take the concept of ArtNight up a few notches next year with the triennial Art & Ideas Festival in October 2007. Members of Pasadena’s cultural community will stage various activities over a three-week period and work together to create several public events and dialogues relating to and interpreting the theme, which is “Skin.”

“Every time you put that many creative people in a room, really exciting things happen,” said LeMoncheck, who imagines the theme will lend itself to discussions of cultural identity, gender identity and aesthetics.

Not just once a year, but all year-round, arts organizations welcome newcomers by offering free concerts or programs, such as Cal Phil’s Family Night; and the Levitt Pavilion offers free entertainment all summer long.

“I think all of us are trying to make our product as accessible as possible, so there are the very inexpensive or free events, and then there are the premium events, but you try not to exclude anyone simply because of not having enough disposable income,” said Pasadena Symphony Executive Director Tom O’Connor.

For that reason, the Norton Simon Museum takes part in Los Angeles County’s Advantage Program, which issues low-income families a card for free access to participating cultural institutions.

“Even though we have a low admission rate, again, it’s that perceived barrier of really understanding how affordable we really are. So we decided to participate, and I think it’s a great program,” said Leslie Denk, the Norton Simon Museum’s marketing and communications manager.

Larger missions

As the Pasadena arts community seeks a wider audience, efforts are also underway to foster more diverse participation in the arts-producing community itself.

Several cultural institutions, including the Pasadena Conservatory of Music and Southwest Chamber Music, run education programs in local schools, reaching thousands of disadvantaged students.

The Pasadena POPS Orchestra operates residency programs at Blair High School in Pasadena, at John Adams Middle School in South Los Angeles and at The Sycamores home for at-risk youth. Next year, the POPS is starting another music training program at Pasadena’s Wilson Middle School.

“For me, the social responsibility of a nonprofit is critical,” said POPS Music Director Rachael Worby. “If one is not as committed to the students at Blair and Wilson as it is to an audience at Descanso Gardens, then it is all hopeless.”

Worby was not at the lunchtime meeting, but the POPS is one of the 90 members of the Pasadena Arts Council. She feels that Pasadena’s nonprofit arts community is remarkably committed to increasing the accessibility of art, but also added that the basic challenge of survival can sometimes overshadow that larger mission.

“Being a nonprofit right now is terribly challenging, and the requirement for board members and staff members right now is primarily to raise money. … That has perhaps gotten in the way of looking at some of their larger challenges and central missions,” she said.

Another successful arts education initiative is participation in internship programs that train students for careers in the art world, LeMoncheck said.

Two major internship program sponsors are the Los Angeles County government, which sponsors a program open to all area students, and the Getty Museum, which specifically targets multicultural youth. An LA County intern, Joanna Sese, works at the Pasadena Arts Council and helps with the publication of their arts magazine, Folio.

These programs address the lack of diversity in arts management, which Glus explained is an industry-wide issue.

“We have an African-American artistic director — maybe the only one in the country of a theater of our size and stature, and we have a deep, deep commitment to diversity in our core values and on stage, yet we still have a problem of who applies,” added Brian Colburn, managing director of the Pasadena Playhouse.

Change is on the horizon. Graduates of these internships are nearing 30, “so
in five years, you’ll really see that blossom,” Le-Moncheck said.

“The most important thing that organizations or anyone who really wants to [promote diversity] can do is listen, listen to your own community and pay attention to what it is the community wants to know about, who should be included, who are the voices that need to be heard, and then it will happen on its own,” said LeMoncheck.

So far, the Theatre @ Boston Court is finding that to be true.

“Our theater is new, and people have been asking ‘Who’s your audience?’ I keep saying it’s a mish-mash of everybody,” said T’Kaye. “Come to the theater on any given night and there’s young, there’s old, there are different ethnicities.”

The kind of idea- and resource-sharing nurtured by the Pasadena Arts Council could be the key to Pasadena’s success in marketing the arts. Working together to draw larger crowds, attract a more diverse audience and communicate Pasadena’s cultural experience to the world has already shown great promise.

“I think what’s encouraging is that it’s a collaborative spirit. I came around the time when they just started meeting and immediately was accepted into the fold. … It’s not about competition. More really is good,” said T’Kaye.

“We’re all sort of working together because if people have a good experience at whatever cultural or scientific institution they go to, they’re going to end up doing more, not less,” she said.