Arts San Francisco

The California Attorney General's Office is joining the chorus of people scrutinizing Festival 2000 by launching an audit of the ambitious but botched multicultural arts event that ended $500,000 in debt. "Yes, indeed, the Attorney General's Office is doing an audit," said Audrey Conkright, supervising auditor, days after San Franciscans demanded the city's Board of Supervisors reimburse artists for losses incurred during the failed October festival.

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Festival 2000, a Bay Area multicultural arts festival running through Sunday, is $500,000 in debt and is strongly considering bankruptcy. But many of the presenting organizations in the $2.3-million festival are going ahead despite the loss of financial backing. Al Williams, vice president of the Festival 2000 board of directors, said the organization's outstanding financial obligations include $170,000 in contracted fees to a variety of arts groups.

Omar Vizquel dangles a paintbrush in his throwing hand as he leans against the railing and admires the spectacular view of San Francisco Bay from his Russian Hill penthouse, where the walls and floors are covered with his works in progress: a tribute to the pope, a Christlike figure and a reclining nude. Not a bad setting for an aspiring artist who also happens to be the city's star shortstop.

At precisely 8:33 Friday night, visiting conductor Gunther Herbig took the podium at Davies Symphony Hall here, raising his baton to begin Mozart's Symphony No. 25 in G minor before what would ordinarily have been a disappointing crowd. Bunches of empty seats dotted the orchestra and balconies. Only about three quarters of the hall was filled. And for those people who did attend, the strictly musical result was unspectacular.

The War Memorial Opera House has never really been thought of as one of the world's most splendid opera houses. It has a certain traditional grandness, but in a stolid WPA sort of way. It is acoustically undistinguished. Still, it is something not very common in America--a genuine old-fashioned opera house as home to a major opera company. And San Franciscans, who are opera mad, love it. Now, San Franciscans love it even more, because it is new again. After 18 months of work and $86.

A secretary at a San Francisco law firm was sentenced to a year in jail for grand theft after pleading guilty to embezzling $250,000 from trust accounts and giving most of the money to the arts. Eve Stodard " saw herself as a patron of the arts, supporting everybody from piano players to jewelers, actors and people who knitted hand-made sweaters, " said producer Joseph Lillis, who did not receive any of the money . The money was taken over six years from various trust accounts at the law firm.

The next performance of Festival 2000, the Bay Area's three-week multicultural artistic venture that staged hundreds of shows and arts events but ran up $500,000 in debts, could be in bankruptcy court. Today, the festival's 11-member board of directors is expected to announce what many in the arts community here already anticipated: a declaration of bankruptcy despite a $100,000 city bail-out of local artists owed money from the festival.

A San Francisco private-sector arts coalition said Wednesday it would reject a $75,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant--striking a new direction in the national protest over NEA requirements that grant recipients certify they will not produce obscene work. The rejection was announced by Northern California Grantmakers, an umbrella organization of 89 Bay Area corporations and foundations.

Unveiling the American Conservatory Theater's 24th season last September, Edward Hastings, the company's artistic director, promised theatergoers that the coming months wouldn't "just startle and delight them . . . but shake and disorient them by the unexpected. . . ." When the unexpected took grim form in the Oct. 17 earthquake, Hastings' hopeful puffery became ironic prophecy.

Phyllis Wattis, one of the nation's most influential cultural philanthropists whose generosity over five decades established her as San Francisco's patron saint of the arts, died Wednesday of natural causes. She was 97. A great-granddaughter of Mormon leader Brigham Young, she contributed $150 million to cultural institutions in Northern California, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Opera and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

The War Memorial Opera House has never really been thought of as one of the world's most splendid opera houses. It has a certain traditional grandness, but in a stolid WPA sort of way. It is acoustically undistinguished. Still, it is something not very common in America--a genuine old-fashioned opera house as home to a major opera company. And San Franciscans, who are opera mad, love it. Now, San Franciscans love it even more, because it is new again. After 18 months of work and $86.

Dressed in all black, 32-year-old Japanese artist Kazue Mizushima moved across a sweeping lawn, between trees connected by taut silk strings that wire the landscape into something resembling a giant outdoor harp. With gloved hands, she plucked an acoustic "Bolero," part of her original composition called "Eve of the Future." The sound plinked into the air, aided, in theory at least, by paper cup amplification, as in the string-and-cup game of telephone.

The American Conservatory Theater has been homeless since 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake severely damaged its Beaux Arts Geary Theater. Oh, there have been plenty of temporary lodgings: The curtain rose at the barn-like Orpheum Theatre, for instance, and Hamlet played the Marina District, at the hard-to-find Palace of the Fine Arts.

Casual observers who check out the high-tech aluminum sign over Capp Street Project's door and peer through windows at a floor-to-ceiling display of three-inch-square paintings by Korean artist Ik-Joong Kang may think the intriguing new show space is nothing more than the latest addition to a burgeoning business district known as Multimedia Gulch. San Francisco's art crowd knows better. By moving to a renovated warehouse at 525 2nd St.

Three Los Angeles artists have won a tentative San Francisco commission for the largest public art project ever mounted in the city, but the project could be in jeopardy because some politicians are objecting to its central phrase. The commission, a $500,000 project involving the entire city block fronting San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center, has been put on hold. It was tentatively awarded last month to artists Daniel J. Martinez, Renee Petropoulos and architect Roger F. White.

Casual observers who check out the high-tech aluminum sign over Capp Street Project's door and peer through windows at a floor-to-ceiling display of three-inch-square paintings by Korean artist Ik-Joong Kang may think the intriguing new show space is nothing more than the latest addition to a burgeoning business district known as Multimedia Gulch. San Francisco's art crowd knows better. By moving to a renovated warehouse at 525 2nd St.

San Francisco will host next year the first-ever "Festival 2000: A Celebration of Cultural Diversity," a $2.2-million, 23-day arts festival highlighting the Bay Area's non-traditional musicians, actors, dancers, film makers and artists. The festival is scheduled to start Oct. 6, 1990, and will take over many of San Francisco's concert halls, galleries, theaters and public areas for 45 events featuring about 1,000 artists.

The California Attorney General's Office is joining the chorus of people scrutinizing Festival 2000 by launching an audit of the ambitious but botched multicultural arts event that ended $500,000 in debt. "Yes, indeed, the Attorney General's Office is doing an audit," said Audrey Conkright, supervising auditor, days after San Franciscans demanded the city's Board of Supervisors reimburse artists for losses incurred during the failed October festival.

The next performance of Festival 2000, the Bay Area's three-week multicultural artistic venture that staged hundreds of shows and arts events but ran up $500,000 in debts, could be in bankruptcy court. Today, the festival's 11-member board of directors is expected to announce what many in the arts community here already anticipated: a declaration of bankruptcy despite a $100,000 city bail-out of local artists owed money from the festival.