City Hall may have dug itself a hole over an artwork on a shovel. Los Angeles artist John Outterbridge is unhappy that a piece the city commissioned for an exhibition four years ago was given as a going-away present last summer to Margie J. Reese, former general manager of the city's Cultural Affairs Department.
Meanwhile, leaders of citizens' groups devoted to the Watts Towers and the adjacent Watts Towers Arts Center are wondering whether it was proper for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to bestow an apparently city-owned artwork on an outgoing employee -- not to mention "a travesty" from an artistic point of view, because it offended a respected artist and compromised the unity of a group project created to mark a public occasion.
Karen Constine, the Cultural Affairs Department's interim general manager, said Thursday that officials are still trying to determine "who are the rightful owners" of the Outterbridge work and are determined that it will end up in its "rightful home." The work is assumed to be with Reese, who could not be reached for comment.
Outterbridge's shovel was one of 13, each by a different L.A. artist, that the arts center commissioned for the Feb. 6, 2003, ceremonial groundbreaking for the Charles Mingus Youth Arts Center, now under construction next to the existing facility.
On its blade, Outterbridge depicted the A-frame shotgun house that served as the Watts Towers Arts Center until it was demolished to make way for the city-run facility that opened in 1975.
Outterbridge, the center's director from 1975 to 1992, made the piece from acrylic paint, wood fragments, bits of jewelry and broken pottery pieces. He intended the shovel to remain "part of the archival holdings" of the arts center, and he thinks it should never have been separated from the others. Artistically, he said, the group of shovels constitutes a single, selfcontained document of a moment in the cultural history of Watts.
"My shovel is one of the children of the groundbreaking," he said, and removing it from its kin "would be like separating a mother from the child."
That officials in the Cultural Affairs Department and the mayor's office apparently didn't understand this is troubling, Outterbridge said.
"I think the city fathers should be much more aware of the essence and importance of the arts," he said. "They are people who are charged with developing that sensibility, and they don't have it."
