Art College Celebrates Opening in Westchester

The Chamber of Commerce president looked at the students and staff of the just-opened campus and saw customers for the long-struggling shops and restaurants along Westchester’s main drags.

The Los Angeles councilwoman who represents the district hailed the “recycling” of a seven-story building that had stood largely vacant since IBM moved out in 1992. And the mayor spoke enthusiastically of cutting-edge arts and entertainment industry jobs that can be kept in Los Angeles.

When the sun came out in Westchester on Monday, it shone on the opening ceremonies for the Otis College of Art and Design’s new Westside campus--and quite possibly a good deal more.

“We’re seeing a burgeoning area of educational and artistic endeavor,” Councilwoman Ruth Galanter told dignitaries and students at the campus north of Los Angeles International Airport.

The five-acre site on Lincoln Boulevard is smack amid a region laid low by recession and aerospace industry decline. But as Galanter pointed out Monday, the area begins with the Santa Monica-Venice art scene on the north and includes an expanding Loyola Marymount University, the anticipated DreamWorks entertainment media project at Playa Vista and the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Plus, Galanter added only half-jokingly: “The parking is better than in Santa Monica.”

Parking benefits aside, location has much to do with why trustees of the venerable school--founded in 1918 as the Otis Art Institute--chose a discarded office building with a view of LAX runways over a Mid-Wilshire, museum-linked site in the historic Art Deco May Co. building.

In May 1995, Otis officials, looking to replace the school’s cramped, county-owned campus near crime-ridden MacArthur Park, tentatively agreed to lease space in the old May Co. building next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But renovation costs, a shortage of parking and other issues plagued the prospect from the beginning, and the Westchester site offered the school its first-ever shot at owning its own campus as well as locating within a growing arts community.

“It puts us in a community of art-making, rather than art history,” one Otis official said when the purchase of the Westchester site was announced in November 1995.

Monday’s celebration included a tribute to Beverly Hills philanthropists Elaine and Bram Goldsmith, whose names the new campus bears.

The Westchester campus boasts a new parking structure and a two-acre expanse that officials plan as the future site of an administration and student services building. The just renovated office building boasts galleries that will include shows of community members’ art, a library, a student lounge, and video and book arts laboratories.

The Hollywood-based American Film Institute has teamed with Otis to teach digital artists in a new digital media laboratory at the Westchester campus. The program will train them to create special effects in the newest technology that is transforming the entertainment and communications fields.