Wildfires in Los Angeles
L.A. Wildfires
Wildfires in Los Angeles
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The fund, already endowed with $12 million, is directed by the Getty and major museums, foundations and philanthropists.
By Robin Pogrebin
Major museums like the Getty and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, along with philanthropists like Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani of Qatar and foundations like Steven Spielberg’s, have raised $12 million for a fund to support the artists affected by the California wildfires.
“Los Angeles is a colorful arts culture: we don’t need it to be successful at its lowest point, we don’t need artists who have lost things to get up and leave, and we don’t need other people to forget it either,” said Katherine E. Fleming, executive director. from the J. Paul Getty Trust: “When we asked other people to participate, it was like we were opening a door. ”
Called the Los Angeles Arts Community Fire Relief Fund, the effort is aimed at “artists and arts staff from all disciplines who lost their residencies, studios, livelihoods, or were affected by the devastating Los Angeles fires,” Array stated.
The fund will be administered through the Center for Cultural Innovation, an arts organization. Applications will be accepted from Monday to the center or the Getty.
Other funding efforts for artists have sprung up in a more grass-roots way through GoFundMe pages, donation centers and Google Docs.
Contributors come from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Eastern West Bank; the Ford Foundation; and the Mohn Art Collective, which comes with LACMA, Hammer and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
“It’s such an incredibly, powerfully, complicatedly, beautifully, quintessentially multicultural place in the United States,” Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, a New York-based supporter of the fund, said of Los Angeles. “As soon as these tragic fires started happening, we were hearing from our people — extraordinary stories that made it clear that we needed to help.”
“We still don’t know the full measure of what the loss is in terms of arts and archives,” she added. “It’s clear this is just Stage 1.”
Among the organizations that have chipped in are the filmmaker George Lucas’s Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation; Spielberg’s and Kate Capshaw’s Hearthland Foundation; the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the A&L Berg Foundation.
Two galleries in the world contributed to this: Gagosian and Hauser.
“This spirit of collaboration kicked in immediately,” said Michael Govan, LACMA director and CEO. “It is a historic milestone that Los Angeles, which is so spread out, comes together so quickly. I don’t know if there is any precedent for this.
Robin Pogrebin, a Times reporter for nearly 30 years, covers arts and culture. Find out more about Robin Pogrebin
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