San Diego arts organizations more creative than ever

Their biggest fundraising events have been postponed. Their galleries and classrooms are closed. Their public-art projects will have to wait until it’s safe to go out in public again, and who knows when that will be?

From the halls of Point Loma’s Arts District Liberty Station to the National City classrooms of A Reason to Survive (ARTS), San Diego’s community-based arts and culture organizations are dealing with the challenges of serving their communities during a worldwide shutdown the way they do everything else.

With passion, ingenuity and a strong sense of creative responsibility.

At A Reason to Survive (ARTS), which uses art and mental-health support to help young people in the South Bay, this new reality meant moving its spring session of after-school classes from its 20,000-square-foot classroom space to the Zoom video-conferencing platform. The new venture is called “Arts@home,” and while the classrooms are now virtual, the lessons have a real-world

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the lessons have a real-world ring to them.

The ARTS artists-inresidence will help students find comfort and creative release by building in-home “dream forts,” creating comic-book characters that are also public-health heroes, and chronicling their strange new reality by taking photos and writing songs. The hope is that art can still provide a helping hand, even as the artists are practicing socialdistancing.

“If you think about silver linings, creativity is what we do,” said James Halliday, the organization’s executive director. “We have a responsibility to our own community and to the young people we serve and their families to

answer the question, ‘What were you doing during these times?,’ and to show that the role we played was a significant one.”

For the Media Arts Center in North Park, the coronavirus pivot came at whiplash speed. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s call for postponing all non-essential gatherings came on March 11, the day before the opening of the organization’s 27th San Diego Latino Film Festival.

The film festival — which was scheduled to screen more than 175 films over 11 days — had to be postponed, and the Media Arts Center had to figure out how to cope with the loss of its premier fund-raising event. The state order also meant that revenue from the center’s nowshuttered Digital Gym movie theater and its video-production unit would not be coming

in either.

Necessity led to the invention of “DGC@HOME,” a virtual theater experience that brings the foreign, independent and offbeat films that would have screened at the Digital Gym to your in-home device. During the run of the film, viewers can go to the Digital Gym website (digitalgym.org), click on the “Virtual Ticket” link, and purchase a multiple-day digital pass to the film. Ticket prices generally run around $12. A schedule of current and upcoming films is on the website.

The Media Arts Center is also putting its current Teen Producers Project and Moviemaking Workshops online while grappling with the question of how to provide these opportunities to at-risk young people who may not have computer access.

“Very quickly, you realize that your whole business plan is based on gathering people. The immediate closure hit us really hard,” said Media Arts Center executive director and founder Ethan van Thillo. “That being said, the staff is resilient. We are moving forward virtually as fast as we can.”

Community engagement is also taking new forms at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park , which is offering two Facebook programs to help them stay on the public’s radar until the museum’s doors open again.

In “MOPA in Focus,” which streams live on Fridays at 10 a.m., adult educator Kevin Linde combines short art talks with in-home projects like making your own pinhole camera. And on Fridays at 1 p.m., the museum posts “Through My

Lens,” which features handson, family-friendly art projects from youth program manager Chantal Lane.

“Unlike larger museums, we don’t have an endowment to keep us going, and we rely every year on visitors and donations,” said Joaquin Ortiz, MOPA’S director of innovation. “That’s why it was so imperative to have an online presence so quickly. It’s critical to keep people engaged and to show that we can still reach them.”

The real need to reach an audience that can’t come to you was also the inspiration behind “Virtual First Friday,” a digital version of the Arts District Liberty Station’s monthly showcase of its arts and culture groups.

During the April 3 event, which was put together in less than a week, there were classes from the San Diego

Ballet and Malashock Dance, a documentary from the New Americans Museum, a teen film-making workshop from Outside the Lens, and a chance to play virtual curator at the Women’s Museum of California.

Everything was free, none of it was happening in real life, and all of it gave Naval Training Center Foundation president and CEO Lisa Johnson hope for the future of San Diego’s creative community.

“In the beginning, it was really heartbreaking to see what was happening. But I feel like we turned a corner with this,” Johnson said. “People are continuing as best they can to do what they do best, and the creativity that I have seen is truly heartwarming.”

karla.peterson@sduniontribune.com