L.A. Grants Make a Splash in ‘Waterworks’ Exhibit by Artist Blue McRight and Students

Anyone interested in seeing city grants in action should visit the current exhibition at the Lankershim Arts Center, where artist Blue McRight has completed a collaborative installation with 12 North Hollywood High School students. The installation is one of the first projects funded under the new Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts grant program, which earmarks money raised partly from development fees for new building construction to support the work of arts groups and individual artists.

“Waterworks” is an installation of 24 14-inch-square oil paintings, all addressing the theme of water using individual subject matter and painting styles. Anonymously mixed in with the work of the students--who range in age from 16 to 19--are three paintings by McRight.

“We were all working together,” McRight said. “I told the kids from the beginning that this was about all of us being artists.”

McRight received $4,490 in grant money to launch the three-month project, which was conceived both as an experimental extension of her own work and as a way of interacting with a larger community than the one generally encountered by a lone painter in the studio. “I just wanted a change--something different,” she said.

Her own recent work revolved around “ideas about sequence and how to create a narrative that is not linear,” McRight said. She had already been producing a series of simultaneous episodes revolving around the same theme. The next logical step, she said, seemed to be to work with not just different images but with different people creating the images.

McRight said she chose high school students rather than adults or young children for her first collaboration because “it’s my favorite age--high school kids are on the edge, and it’s an important time to find out what they’re thinking.” She chose water as a theme because she had worked with it before and because “it’s an important and immediate social issue--but it’s also very poetic.”

The water scenes depicted in the two dozen paintings--which were done in discussion-laced sessions after school or on weekends--range from a steaming cup of coffee to a fish swimming in a glass of water set under the evaporating glare of desert sunshine. Adjacent pieces are often linked by related palettes, paint applications, horizon lines, or forms.

McRight said the collaboration was a bracing exercise for her as an artist (“The kids kept coming up with things I would never have thought of”) and a tremendous boost for the students--who even received achievement awards from Mayor Tom Bradley. “And these are kids,” McRight said, “who do not get mayor’s awards very often.”

“It was so much work but it was so worth it,” she added. “I feel like people’s lives were changed by this in some small way--including my own. The kids really challenged me to be open and flexible--and that’s good for everyone, not just an artist.”

“Waterworks,” installation by Blue McRight in collaboration with North Hollywood High School students, through June 30 at the Lankershim Arts Center, 5108 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. (818) 989-8066. Open noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday.

NO SURRENDER: Late last year, Kevin Wallace took over half of the Renegade Gallery on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills to show the quirky mix of outsider art--made by self-taught artists who develop far from the art scene--and contemporary art that he had developed a taste for as a collector.

It was a low-key gallery venture in a decidedly off-the-beaten path location--and it didn’t quite work financially. “I haven’t given up, however,” Wallace now reports.

Wallace and his wife, Sheryl Reiter-Wallace, have converted an outbuilding behind their Westside home into an exhibition space for works by Howard Finster and other artists whom Wallace represented. (The Renegade Gallery will continue to show the work of artist/owner Gary Soszynski.)

Reiter-Wallace Contemporary and Outsider, as the new gallery is called, will be open by appointment only, but Wallace said he hopes that won’t perturb art viewers and collectors.

“I want to be able to do this for the long term and really support the artists--this way I can do it without making a lot of money,” Wallace said.

In particular, he added, “I want to help the outsiders--because most of them tend to get ripped off” in their transactions with the art world.

Reiter/Wallace Contemporary and Outsider, (213) 470-1306.