L.A. Craft and Folk Art Museum to Close Down

Ending a nine-year struggle to rejuvenate itself with ill-fated expansion schemes--and rejecting a last-ditch effort to merge with its much larger neighbor, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--the Craft and Folk Art Museum is calling it quits. The Wilshire Boulevard institution--a fixture of the local art scene for 32 years--has run out of funds and will close its doors at the end of December.

Its best known and most popular program, the International Festival of Masks--an annual October celebration of ethnic arts in Hancock Park alongside LACMA--will continue, however. The museum building and art collection will be sold to pay off $500,000 in debt and to establish a fund to endow the festival in perpetuity. The endowment is expected to amount to about $1 million.

The impending closure has drawn mixed reactions from those closely involved with the museum.

“This is tragic, and it’s very painful for me,” said Edith Wyle, who founded what was to become the museum in 1965 as a commercial gallery and restaurant called The Egg and the Eye. “But it has happened because of a set of circumstances. There’s no one to blame.”

Putting a positive spin on the situation, Wyle’s husband and museum board chairman, Frank, said: “The museum had a good run for about 25 years” before it got bogged down in overly ambitious expansion plans. “Now we will take a program that represents the essence of the museum and see that it continues, so that’s good.”

But the museum’s executive director, Paul Kusserow, a marketing specialist whose one-year contract expires at the end of the month, is distressed about the turn of events.

Charged when he came on board last January with either turning around the financially troubled facility or finding a way to merge it with another institution, he says he could have saved the museum with more time and financial support. Lacking both, he and Deputy Director Martha Drexler Lynn spearheaded a plan for the building to be given to LACMA and used for multicultural programming.

“That would have been within the [craft] museum’s mission,” Kusserow said. “The museum could have survived, although it would have been different.”

But 2 1/2 months after voting to proceed with arrangements for a LACMA takeover, the craft museum’s board voted Thursday to scrap that plan and sell the building instead. The Wyles say there was no reason for the craft museum to donate the building, and apparently most of the trustees agreed.

However, longtime board member Jim Pieper resigned in protest over the decision. “I think the LACMA proposal was a way with dignity to wind down this institution while providing a continuing venue for people who have put a lot of hours and money into it,” he said.

John Walsh, who directs the J. Paul Getty Museum and is not affiliated with the craft museum, also voiced strong regret that Kusserow’s plans were not accepted.

“Kusserow was the brightest light in town,” he said. “He’s a prime example of someone with a marketing background who has a real eye, ear and nose for museums. I’m sure he could have made it work.”

Andrea Rich, president of LACMA, took the situation in stride. “These things happen,” she said. The change of plans is not a loss to the county museum, she said. “We have plenty of space for our programs.” The craft museum’s library has gone to LACMA, however, and the archives are now housed at UCLA.

The impending closure marks the passing of an institution that lost its way in the art boom of the 1980s. While investing its energy and resources in a $5.5-million expansion, the museum lay relatively dormant from 1989 until the renovated and enlarged facility was unveiled in 1995.

During the lag time, other museums--notably UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History--and other cultural centers sprouted locally, effectively usurping part of the craft institution’s purpose.

When Edith Wyle opened The Egg and the Eye in 1965, it filled a niche because Los Angeles then had relatively few outlets for international folk art and high-quality handcrafted products.

In 1973, she reorganized the enterprise as a nonprofit museum to exhibit the same type of works and changed the name to the Craft and Folk Art Museum. She served as director until 1985, when longtime Deputy Director Patrick H. Ela took charge.

He left in 1996, at which time the museum was bankrupt, and with renovation stopped, the facility’s plans were never fully realized. It still has no elevator, and plans for a new restaurant--the old one had been a major source of income for the original museum--never evolved.