Catering to a college crowd

For some, art museums can be valuable venues of cultural,
historical and artistic achievement to be cherished for many
generations. To others, art museums are forbidding enclaves of
hoarded, ancient relics accessible only to a select group of
fanatics in stuffy rooms behind thick, uninviting walls.

Inviting friends to Westwood Brewing Company, Starbucks or a
movie is a more common occurrence for most college students rather
than deciding to attend a lecture on a Friday night highlighting
the UCLA Hammer Museum’s latest exhibition and symposium. But
this is the goal of several L.A. art museums interested in
continuing to be relevant by actively engaging younger crowds.

With last year’s showcase of new and relevant L.A.
sculptors and this year’s exhibition of the long-unrecognized
genre of comic art, the Hammer Museum is at the forefront of
museums worldwide in appealing to and engaging with its surrounding
community.

“The (Hammer) Museum is not a place that’s so
esoteric,” said Trinidad Ruiz, education assistant and
advisor to the Hammer Museum’s emergent Student Advisory
Committee. “The Hammer is one of the few museums in the
country that tries to break with that stigma. We have writers like
Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace (give readings). We’re
always looking for ways to make the museum more transparent.

“When I think comics, I think hotdogs,” Ruiz added,
referring to “Off the Page,” the second event organized
by SAC that is scheduled to take place at the Hammer Museum on
Friday. The event is inspired by Hammer’s current exhibition
““”Masters of American Comics.” “Off the
Page” is partly meant to break down the stigma among
college-students of the museum as an unapproachable venue meant
only for the uber artsy.

“Because the Hammer is a university museum, they share a
symbiotic relationship. We want to include the students of the
highest caliber into the museum,” Ruiz said.
“(“˜Off the Page’) is a way of introducing the
Hammer to students.”

The free event will have Pink’s hotdogs, student DJs from
UCLARadio, and then at 9:30 p.m., there will be a musical
performance by “The Movies””“ voted “Best
Rock Pop Band” by L.A. Weekly in 2005.

“Regardless of what you want to do on a Friday night,
we’ve got a little bit of everything. It’s got the
social atmosphere of a bar, movies (from Windsor McKay’s
comics and Charles Schulz’s “˜Charlie Brown and the
Great Pumpkin’) for those who want to relax and watch
something, and food and art for people who are into that. The
bookstore will be open, so there’s some shopping too,”
said Samantha Rose, a fourth-year art student and SAC member.

SAC’s first event last year, “It’s A Student
THING,” was the unexpectedly successful beginning to a
now-annual program. “Last year we were really surprised by
the attendance. We were thinking 300 students would attend, but we
got over 600 students,” Ruiz said.

Because of its success last year, much of the structure of the
upcoming event remains the same. Last year’s event featured
several bands and In-N-Out burgers to go along with
“Breadface,” the flag-bearer sculpture of the
Hammer’s “THING” exhibition.

This year, SAC decided to focus on one featured band in order to
make room for film screenings of Windsor McKay.

Modeled after a Berkeley committee used to represent an
on-campus museum, SAC was formed last year as the brain-child of
former Head of Academic Initiatives at the Hammer Museum, Cassandra
Coblentz.

“For a university museum, we weren’t getting as many
students as we wanted to get,” Ruiz said.

“The fact that the Hammer is not on campus like the Fowler
Museum of Cultural History, which students have classes in, makes
student representation on campus that much more essential for the
Hammer,” Rose said.

Surprisingly, outreach programs aimed at college-aged students
have not been initiated by many L.A.-area art museums. The Hammer
Museum’s events mark some of the first efforts, along with
the Museum of Contemporary Art, which started a similar program
last year called “Night Vision: MOCA After Dark.”

MOCA’s program lasted 12 weeks last summer and featured a
different musical performer each night. Like “Off the
Page,” which coordinates programs to thematically complement
the current art exhibition, “Night Vision” had events
relating to its exhibition of ’80s graffiti-artist turned
“high” artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat. MOCA also tapped
into the ’80s theme with a performance by Thurston Moore of
Sonic Youth.

MOCA, however, modeled its program after a similar Texas museum
program that invited a twenty-something crowd to late-night events.
Like the Hammer Museum’s 13-member SAC, MOCA formed its own
support group of younger museum-goers ““ the MOCA
Contemporaries.

While the name of the group is catchier than that of the Hammer
Museum group, Ruiz puts it best when he said, “We’re at
the gateway between the university and L.A.”

Because of the Hammer Museum’s proximity to UCLA, more
students have the opportunity to attend this event rather than
going downtown and paying $5 per night for MOCA’s summer
festivities. MOCA’s entire summer series drew in about 20,000
people and about 1,900 people per night, according to Lauren
Reilly, marketing coordinator at MOCA.

Last summer, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a college
night, and even the Getty Center is trying to reach out to younger
crowds with its free monthly “Fridays Off the 405″
program mostly marketed as an “after-work event.”

But Getty Center performances by Dreadstarr, which mixes reggae,
dance hall, hip-hop and rock, and by classical musician Christopher
O’Riley, who interprets the music of Radiohead and Elliot
Smith, may interest a college crowd as well.

Speaking about “Off the Page,” Rose said, “The
individual aspects of this (event) are something people have seen
before. We wanted to provide something that’s a little
different from the normal movie, bar or concert. But as a whole,
adding that art element and that gallery element, it’s
something new. For some people, it’s a place that they
haven’t been. It’s not a place you immediately think of
to go to (for fun).”

This reflects the goal of other L.A.-area museum programs as
well. Many clubs in Los Angeles only get started at midnight; this
is about the time when museum weekend-night events come to a
close.

By providing opportunities for fun on weekends, these L.A.
museums hope to get the college crowd interested in going to
museums for their exhibits and symposiums as much as for the film
screenings, rock bands and liquor.

College students in particular have great energy and ideas that
the Hammer Museum would like to explore further. For that reason
alone, Ruiz hopes “Off the Page” will bring students
through their doors.

“The (Hammer) Museum has rock-star status,” he said.
“It’s pretty cutting edge. We have contemporary events
and it links it to a history through the permanent collection. If
you can’t access the art just by looking at it, you can come
to the events.”