FIVE ON ART INSTITUTE STAFF LAID OFF

The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA) has dismissed five of its six staff members in the wake of losing its new director, selling its building and trying to come to terms with its longstanding financial problems, The Times has learned.

“Last week we reached the point at which it was clear that there was no other way to handle things,” LAICA board Chairwoman Judy Spence said in a phone interview. “Our hopes for realizing funds to operate at the same level unfortunately fell through.”

Last month, the board announced that Ben Marks, who had served as director for seven months, had resigned, and that the institute had sold its facility at 2020 S. Robertson Blvd. At that time, Spence told The Times that the institute, a nonprofit alternative space for avant-garde art funded by memberships and private and public donations, would relocate, and the staff remain intact.

But due to what Spence describes as “the terminal gravity of our finances (slapping) us in the face,” the 17-member board voted in a late-night meeting April 14 to dismiss the staff the following day, giving them four days’ notice. Only Lane Relyea, editor of LAICA’s Journal, remains. (According to Spence, Relyea was retained because the “Journal is the one aspect that operates independently.”)

Marks’ resignation in mid-March was cited by Spence, Relyea and former staff members interviewed by The Times as the catalyst forcing the board to confront the institute’s financial problems.

“Without a director at the helm, the board had, to put it kindly, an incomplete understanding of the daily runnings of LAICA,” Spence said. “It’s not a board’s job to run the institution.”

Institute treasurer Murray Gribin said that despite the tenuous financial web that began to unravel when Marks left, the board believed LAICA could “squeak by” with money from various sources until the close of the 60-day escrow period at the end of May. But that didn’t prove to be the case.

Administrative director Kathy Galloway said that though she “wasn’t surprised” that she was let go, “the board alluded to the fact that it would keep us on. Maintaining the staff was supposedly the board’s No. 1 priority.”

Gribin says that the board is expecting to receive funds within the month that will help revive the organization, including money due at the close of escrow, and a letter of confirmation from the National Endowment for the Arts for a $35,000 grant that will enable AICA to receive funds from an unnamed arts funding resource. The institution’s deficit, Gribin said, is between $70,000 and $75,000.

Spence denies that the recent events signal the end of LAICA. “It’s clear that we have a major reorganization ahead of us, eight or nine painful months to realize,” she said.