Community Collagist

The meeting was not going well.

On a chilly evening in November, a handful of officials from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and citizens of Hollywood gathered around a table in an empty theater, borrowed for the evening, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

The occasion was a meeting of the fledgling Mid-City Regional Arts Council, one of nine new community groups established by Cultural Affairs in hopes of breaking down the vast area the department serves into more manageable parts.

Adolfo V. “Al” Nodal, general manager of Cultural Affairs, does not attend every meeting, leaving that duty to deputy Roella Hsieh Louie, but he came to Mid-City--which includes Hollywood and Mid-Wilshire--because, as he frankly admitted to the group, “This is a troubled one; this isn’t coming together.”

While things have gone smoothly in other geographic areas, talking culture in the heart of Hollywood led to a clash between Nodal and Nyla Arslanian, the president of the existing Hollywood Arts Council. Everything from how to celebrate the millennium to who would print the new regional council brochure was seized on as an opportunity for dispute. (Nodal observed later that it’s easier to work in communities with no established arts councils of their own.)

It ended up with a frustrated Nodal begging the small group who showed up to “hang in there and not give up” during the formative stages.

It’s not as though Nodal expected instant success with this new venture. This year, celebrating his 10th anniversary on the job, Nodal, 48, is used to growing pains overseeing the cultural development of a diverse region.

“I think L.A. culture is a combination of this sort of vanguard American culture that we had here in the ‘50s and ‘60s: car culture, the Valley, the pinstripers, guys who work out on the beach; very different from East Coast culture,” Nodal mused. “And it’s now mixed with this kind of immigrant culture. And I guess the third element of it is the entertainment industry, which is part and parcel of it; everyone is touched by it.

“That’s L.A. I think it’s neat. I think it’s great.”

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Nodal often uses the word “neat” to describe the department’s neighborhood-based projects and cultural centers.

It’s a small, vernacular word, but peculiarly appropriate for projects and programs often dwarfed by flashier symbols of progress in the arts world, such as Brentwood’s 1-year-old, billion-dollar Getty Center.

Recent “neat” efforts include returning paddle boats to downtrodden MacArthur Park (Nodal lives in a penthouse apartment mere blocks away); relighting some of the city’s historic neon signs; and the Nov. 22 opening of the Mariachi Plaza--a pale-pink stone gazebo that looks out of place in a rundown Boyle Heights business district.

“That’s our role, to provide grass at the sidewalk level, I mean, art at the sidewalk level,” Nodal said, excitedly mixing metaphors during a discussion of some sidewalk-level, grass-roots arts projects at the Cultural Affairs Department’s downtown offices on Spring Street. “That’s really what we’re about.

“I love this big stuff, I think it’s really neat, I am a supporter of every one of these big buildings. But we need the whole thing. Our centers are sort of neat because they are arts centers, but they are also community centers.”

What Nodal--and other city cultural affairs officials across the country--do is less visible than edifices like the Getty Center. Their job is to funnel the money set aside in the city’s annual budget--in L.A., $12 million--into hundreds of arts and cultural activities. It means fighting for a portion of the same pot that pays for police, schools and trash collection.

It’s about “partnerships,” “coalitions,” “infrastructure,” “development,” “outreach”--the kind of in-house jargon that doesn’t mean much to a layperson. Pieces of the department’s $12-million budget turn up everywhere from big, downtown performing arts companies such as Los Angeles Opera to a neighborhood dance troupe in Pacoima.

Right now, Nodal is pushing to establish a formal arrangement with arts-starved Los Angeles public schools to have local arts organizations adopt a school, to provide artists in residence and other services. Four years ago, the department contributed $50,000 toward adding the Department of Cultural Tourism to the existing Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau. And among Nodal’s other ongoing projects is establishing partnerships with arts organizations in Mexico, including Tijuana’s Casa de Cultura.

Cultural affairs departments are the glue, not the parts. And with few exceptions, the general public doesn’t know what they are. Some inside this circle observe this is particularly true in star-struck L.A., where the entertainment industry eclipses all else.

An exception is Chicago cultural affairs commissioner Lois Weisberg, but she said her high public profile followed her from a former post as director of special events for the city of Chicago. “We are considered bureaucrats; it may not seem so sexy,” acknowledges Victoria Hamilton, Nodal’s counterpart in San Diego.

But as the millennium approaches, perhaps it’s time for Los Angeles to sit up and pay attention. And not just because the department is, for the first time, trying to raise its own profile by introducing a new logo.

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In 10 years, L.A.’s cultural affairs budget has quadrupled and is now the second-largest in the nation behind behemoth New York City ($108 million). In 2000, all eyes will be on Los Angeles as it hosts the annual convention for Americans for the Arts, a national alliance serving local arts organizations.

This year, the National Endowment for the Arts gave the department a $120,000 grant to lay the groundwork for one of Nodal’s latest projects: the establishment of nine volunteer regional arts councils to better serve the 3.7 million people, spread out over 469 square miles, that is Los Angeles. “A commitment of $120,000 in this day and age is extremely significant to this agency,” said Patrice Walker Powell, the endowment’s director of local arts agencies. And, according to representatives of other major cities, what’s happening as Nodal’s department grapples with the challenges of L.A.’s huge diversity and geography is seen as a model for the future.

“Al [Nodal] and his council are considered to be leaders in the country,” said Michael Spring, executive director of the Miami-Dade Cultural Affairs Council, and president of the United States Urban Arts Federation, a group that includes the cultural affairs leaders of the country’s 50 largest cities. “When Al tells us what he’s doing out there, it is groundbreaking in all respects.

“We hear a lot of comparisons of Los Angeles and Miami--most often, that Miami is L.A., 20 years behind,” Spring said. “You guys are churning through issues way ahead of some of the other cities in the country.

“We all aspire to enormity. Al’s there.”

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In 1987, Nodal--a Cuban immigrant who formerly served as executive director of Washington, D.C.’s Washington Project for the Arts, executive director of the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center, and in leadership positions with arts organizations including Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and Otis/Parsons School of Art & Design--took over as cultural affairs manager. He got the job just as the city’s economy took a nose-dive, and what Nodal calls “the holy wars” over art and obscenity began heating up in Washington.

Despite those pressures, Nodal has managed to persuade the city’s leaders to increase the cultural affairs budget from $3 million to $12 million (including community and corporate partnerships, support groups and fund-raising, and the city’s arts development fee of 1% of the cost of all new construction, Nodal said the actual amount is closer to $20 million). And he survived a contentious in-house battle between the old guard and the new guard within the department.

That included a major departmental restructuring in 1993. While only a few jobs were lost, the process caused much grumbling, as some were shifted against their will into new slots.

In 1995, the department underwent more change with the launch of ArtPartners, a program allowing local nonprofit arts agencies to operate city community arts centers, in partnership with Cultural Affairs and corporate sponsors, including Target/Mervyn’s, American Express and the Los Angeles Times. The program, while widely praised, also resulted in some changes in job categories within the department.

Nodal acknowledges that some in-house tension still remains. “That has probably been my biggest source of disappointment,” he said. “I can face the City Council, I can face an angry constituent, I can face what comes from outside of us, but not when we are not together.”

Nodal also survived a major flap over his 1991 cultural master plan, an unwieldy, 182-page document encouraging the social responsibility of artists. He introduced civic grants to individual artists in 1990--only to have the attempt to ensure equitable division of those grants among the city’s ethnic groups attacked as “the new tyranny” and “the new racism” in the arts.

Critics of this so-called social engineering were somewhat mollified in 1996 when the department devised a new crop of visual arts grants that did not require the artist to actively perform social services, recognizing that an exhibition represented a service in itself. “To ask [abstract artist] Mark Rothko to go out and work in a detention center--what a waste,” Nodal observed.

Nodal noted the rhetoric has cooled somewhat. In 1997, however, the department still asks for artists and organizations applying for grants for information regarding race and gender. “I think the whole city has become more of a politics of geography rather than ethnic groups,” Nodal observed. “But we still maintain multiculturalism, whether people like it or not.

“It has become a passe word, but the elements of it are very much alive. I have not really been able to find another word. It is an attitude about culture, caring about different cultures, putting value in cultures other than your own. It’s good business practice, in L.A.; to be a businessperson in L.A. and not understand that, you wouldn’t survive.”

Cultural Affairs’ Louie, who along with overseeing the regional groups is director of the grants programs, public art and cultural planning, said that, while time has taken the edge off the debate, the politics of Los Angeles still demand the multicultural approach.

“I’ll tell you why we have to do all of those things. We’re a city that is culturally diverse, we have a governance that is culturally diverse,” she said. “And they are the ones who decide what our funding is going to be. And you’d better believe that not us, but these City Council people ask, how many green peas did we serve, and how many orange peas did we serve? You can’t come back to them and say, ‘I don’t know.’

“[The questions] are voluntary; if you don’t want to answer them, you are not helping us. Period.”

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Then there was the minor matter of Nodal’s cellular phone bill. In a 1996 investigation of city and county officials’ telephone habits, Nodal’s monthly bill ($685) was second-highest in a poll of 3,000. While at the time Nodal explained this by his many hours on the road, now he points out that figure was a mistake in the first place. “I was told it wasn’t all my fault, it ultimately came down to a matter of tracking, something between the General Services Department and the phone company,” he said. “My phone had been cloned for about three years.”

From the standpoint of local politicos, Nodal has been calling the right people. In May 1997, Nodal received his annual Mayor’s Committee review. He got an A--and a raise, from $93,000 to $112,000 annually.

“Al has been fantastic--he took a stodgy, unimaginative, very, very limited sort of department, and understood what could be done with what I still think are minimal resources,” said City Councilman Joel Wachs, who was on the committee. “Sure, there are a lot of people who haven’t gotten what they wanted, but his heart and his head are in the right place.”

It will probably be another decade before the grade comes in for Nodal’s latest brainchild, the regional arts councils. The groups are already winning praise, and causing tension, depending on which region you happen to visit.

As one skeptical member of a regional council observed: “I don’t know how a bureaucracy can form a grass-roots organization.” By phone after the contentious meeting in Hollywood, Arslanian praised Nodal’s vision but added “that there are a lot of questions involving the process we are going to use to get the Cultural Affairs Department and the community where it wants to go.”

Far away in the West Valley, however, Suzanne Hackett, executive director of Valley Cultural Center in Woodland Hills and a participant in the area’s regional arts council, was ecstatic in her praise. “In our area, because there has been really no viable body serving the function of an arts council, everything that they have done has been very welcome,” she said.

“I worked in Montana and the rural states for a long time, and when I came out here to the Valley, I saw a lot of that isolation here,” Hackett said. “What we used to do in Montana was hold powwows, where we got to see each other face to face; maybe it was only once a year, but it made relationships start.”

Each of the regional arts groups will participate in the department’s planned millennium festivities by working with producers, probably from the Hollywood special effects industry, to create a local street party, involving a pyrotechnical show in the sky.

Yet it remains a sore point that, unlike Chicago, this Cultural Affairs Department has not been given oversight over L.A.’s millennium celebration events. According to Nodal, L.A. is still struggling to establish a millennium plan.

Nodal is pretty satisfied with his first decade. He doesn’t plan to stay forever, still dreams of returning to Cuba, but wants to remain through 2000. During his first six weeks, Nodal made a list of all the things he wanted to do, and the only one that didn’t get done was to establish an emergency preparedness cultural plan. “When there’s a fire, or an earthquake, people move out to the public spaces, to the parks,” he said. “There’s a great role for the arts there, to get people to deal with grief, address issues.”

Added Nodal: “Most of the public doesn’t know who we are, but within the city, I think we have a reputation as a ‘can-do’ department. We are a small department, we are certainly not a rich department. But we do what we set out to do.”