MARCH 15th NOHO ARTS DISTRICT
MEETING TO SAVE CAD

Monday, March 15th., 5 - 6 p.m.
The Lankershim Art Gallery 5108 Lankershim Blvd. NoHo Arts District (818-760-1278)
RESERVATIONS: Call: 818-506-3132 or email: lisa@nohoartsdistrict.com

NoHo Arts District.com also maintains an excellent page on their website that discribes the economic advantages of supporting the arts..."the arts are not a luxury, but an economic engine to
revitalize our neighborhoods."

http://www.nohoartsdistrict.com/new/arts_advoc_call_2_action.htm

Background:
The L.A. City Mayor's office intends to dismantle and eliminate the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department (CAD). If Mayor Hahn's gray-suited Philistines have their way $3,500,000 in grants to 250 arts organizations and individuals will disappear!

Excerpts from a March 9th. Los Angeles Times article on the elimination of the Cultural Affairs Department.
March 9, 2004 Tuesday - Home Edition

The Cultural Affairs Department grants about $3 million each year to the arts, offers neighborhood classes for adults and children, oversees a city-owned gallery and theaters, and is in charge of the landmark Watts Towers.

In the Cultural Affairs Department, which has an annual budget of about $12 million, general manager Margie J. Reese said, "What a shame it would be for this city to ... send a message to the world that the arts in Los Angeles have had to take this kind of blow."

Reese said that mayoral staffers met with her Thursday at City Hall and outlined a rough plan in which some of the work now done by Cultural Affairs would be parceled to two other departments: Recreation and Parks, and Planning. She said it appears that "the lion's share" of the grants program would be lost. Under that program, the city gives cash awards to nearly 200 organizations and individual artists who prevail in a competitive peer-review process.

Beneficiaries include prominent institutions such as Los Angeles Opera, Center Theatre Group and the Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as grass-roots programs aimed at bringing arts programming to poor neighborhoods, such as the skid row theater troupe the Los Angeles Poverty Department.

Robert Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group that represents local government arts agencies nationwide, predicted that if L.A. eliminated its arts agency, "it would be not only a major embarrassment but a very bad policy decision, which will be seen as such by cities all across the country. Besides the money," a city agency that makes arts grants "is a symbol that a great city thinks enough of itself to invest in beauty and learning and culture."

Government arts grants programs are especially important, Lynch said, because they serve as a "seal of approval" that can help groups attract much bigger amounts from corporations, private foundations and individual donors.

Mayor Tom Bradley and the City Council created the Cultural Affairs Department in 1980 to establish a central agency to help fund the arts and strengthen L.A.'s nonprofit cultural institutions. Eliminating the department, which currently is allotted 93.5 staff positions, would deprive the city of a "central hub" for culture, said Leslie Thomas, its assistant general manager. "You lose a point of reference. You lose that place where you can call and find out what is happening with regards to art and culture in our city."

Arts advocates already are smarting from a drubbing they took in Sacramento last summer and vow increased activism to prevent further losses. Funding for the California Arts Council plummeted from $21.1
million to $3.1 million, dropping California to last place nationally in per capita state funding of the arts and virtually doing away with arts grants on the state level.