Fort Lauderdale News from Fort Lauderdale, Florida • Page 71

1 1 ft 1 mil NewsSun-Sentinel, Sunday, May 22, 1988 Section JACKZINK The Arts Column By VALERIE HILL-MORGAN Staff Writer fir m. ilver is the color that goes with a 25th anniversary. But a quarter of a century after radio station WRBD (AM 1470) began, it celebrates the color A resignation by any other name is a firing WRBD disc jockey Maree Kelli directs DJ "Rockin' Ross Alan as he plays Happy Birthday on harmonica. "1 he official statements call them resignations, but don't be fooled. The revolving doors spinning uncontrollably at the main entrances of South Florida's arts organizations are fueled with blood.

.000 WATTS OF deal with getting crack cocaine dealers out of black neighborhoods. Mitchell says the station strives for variety to keep WRBD ahead of its main competitors WEDR (FM 99.1) in Dade County, and WPOM (AM 1600) and WYFX (AM 1040), both in Palm Beach County. All three of those stations also have predominately black listening audiences. "Our main mission is the community, says WRBD owner John Ruffin, who bought WRBD two years ago from Sconnix Broadcasting. "We try to get involved in every aspect of it and to be responsive to its needs." Last year, the station sponsored more than three dozen events and charities, ranging from a drive for the United Negro College Fund to a Broward beauty pageant, which preceded the 20th Annual Miss Black America Pageant.

The station also provided to its listeners a number of innovative giveaways and prizes that have included the payment of utility bills and trips to the Bahamas, and is doing more of the same this year. "We wanted to be a role model, to make this one of the most outstanding small businesses in South Florida," Ruffin says. The station's work already is paying off: This month, WRBD was named the Small Business of the Year by the Greater Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce. In a market that includes nine AM radio stations in the Fort Lauderdale-Holly-wood-Pompano Beach area, WRBD ties with WINZ as the second-most listened to AM radio station, according to the fall Birch Radio Reports. Ruffin credits his staff with keeping WRBD a well-oiled machine, but his employees say he is the driving force behind the station.

"In the beginning, we did very little business with major retailers we mainly focused on the small 'mom and pop' businesses because there were so few white businesses that were willing to do business with blacks," says Henry Mosby an advertising salesman who was recently honored as Employee of the Year because his SEE WRBD 5F BLACK black. The black community was the sole source of support when the Lauderhill-based station started in 1963, and it has been that way A broad spectrum of programs. 5F all these years. WRBD, whose listening audience stretches from Palm Beach County to the Bahamas, is the only radio station in Broward that offers news strictly from a black perspective, and plays rhythm and blues, rap, jazz, reggae and gospel music. "When you tune in to WRBD you are tuned in because you want to hear the best possible music that reflects the black lifestyle," says WRBD vice president Charles Mitchell, "and you want to know what is going on in the black community." Mitchell, who is in charge of programming and works as one of the station's nine air personalities, points out, however, that the black lifestyle isn't only reflected through the music of black recording artists.

That's why the station plays records by white artists as well. "We play music by Madonna, Hall Oates, George Michael and a number of others," Mitchell says. "They all have sounds. If it's a hit, we play it regardless of the artist's race. Our goal is to serve our listeners." The station's programs range from local disc jockeys playing rhythm and blues to syndicated programs that include interviews with top recording artists.

Programming also includes talk shows on issues of interest to blacks. Recently, on one of WRBD's morning talk shows, listeners called in to express their views on how law enforcement and the community should D) OWE! A commitment to serve the black community from Palm Beach County to the Bahamas has helped radio station WRBD to last 25 years. 4 if -4 Top level administrators and artistic directors in Broward, Palm Beach and Dade counties have been cut apart in increasing numbers throughout most of this decade, fed like meat into food processors. The past year in particular has been a cultural Grand Guignol with far too many disappearances to be explained away by the euphemism "resigned to pursue other interests." Anyone who has ideas about becoming a director, manager or producer for a South Florida arts organization needs to keep an overnight bag in the top desk drawer. The lucky ones with their eyes open see the thunderclouds brewing and bail out before their resignation is demanded.

The naive workaholics and there are many are caught unaware by board room environmental changes they mistakenly thought were unimportant Typically, the hatchet men are presidents, chairmen and board members either disgruntled with programming not to their liking or a far more chilling prospect who are power brokers with ambitions of their own. Some actually see themselves as back-room impresarios, others use cultural activism as a steppingstone from the business world to social prominence. National experts claim such priorities result in lower artistic standards; South Florida's virulent strains are eroding years of artistic development. Code of silence forced on victim For the arts professional who dreams of building vistas for artistic expression, "resigned to pursue other interests" has become an almost universal pass to oblivion. The secrecy behind what are really board room coup d'etats often is enforced by conditional severance agreements that can be revoked if the real chain of events is made public.

Some agreements string out contract payments for years after the bloodletting, to ensure that the trail is cold by the time anyone is willing to talk. But a few arts professionals are fighting back from the gallows. George Bolge, veteran director of Fort Lauderdale's Museum of Art, refuses to take a demotion and has caused a backlash among museum supporters now fighting to save his job. This is the rarest of South Florida arts exhibits. In West Palm Beach, Julie Webb is the second executive director to quit the Armory School and Visual Arts Center since March.

Webb charged the board of directors "is a vicious, vicious board" that meddles in daily operations. Webb's statement is one I've heard often off the record from disillusioned artists, executive directors and from other, concerned board members shocked at their peers' behavior. At Broward Community College, Cultural Affairs Director Ellen Chandler-Manning has proved grittier in the trenches than her executioners. Chandler-Manning has filed a multimillion-dollar discrimination suit and courted sympathy from bloc-ticket buyers thus drying up a key source of BCC's Bailey Hall sales for whomever will be her successor. 'Resignations' from the past Other departures, all explained as resignations, include Burt Reynolds Jupiter Theatre Producer' Joe Vispi who quit last week before his first show; former Palm Beach Festival director John Audette in April; Broward Performing Arts Center director Sid McQueen last summer, Joseph Conlin of the Palm Beach Opera last spring.

There's more, from 1982-85: another Reynolds theater producer, Dudley Remus; the late Dale Heapps, under whose direction the Palm Beach Festival reached its greatest artistic heights; Coconut Grove Playhouse managing director G. David Black and, before him, Grove artistic director David Robert Kanter. Jan Van Der Marck, the respected artistic director of Miami's Center for the Fine Arts, was gored by board members who didn't like his taste in art. "Resignations all," some were later exposed as sacks. Most remain a mystery, especially since the "other interests" seldom became apparent.

Many arts executives harbor lasting allegiance to the jobs and staff members left behind. They keep silent rather than "hurt the project," a phrase used by two recently beheaded executives who have never met. Board members usually know that; it's a powerful tool at the armistice table. Executives on outbound freights occasionally believe they can make the press releases about moving upward come true. They find out quickly that culture in South Florida is a buyers' market often comprising the same kinds of dilettantes who so "regretfully accepted" their resignations.

1 Li-Li' i i i -rl vL ft 1 1 Hi it -1 it fc i v. rift fl Staff photos JUDY SLOAN REICH WRBD's Employee of the Year Henry Mosby an ad salesman whose 20-year tenure has been under four different owners. Artist' floating in dreamy landscapes. Almost no work of his is without his block-printed exhortations to find God, forsake drugs, be faithful in marriage and control nuclear power, among other mes- In 1976, Howard Finster had a vision from God to make art. Now, that is how he spreads the Gospel.

i By CANDICE RUSSELL Entertainment Writer T'7 has had more recent ex-I hibitions than any other living American artist. I His 1985 jacket cover for XL the Talking Heads' al INSIDE ART The Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, uses Walt Disney to draw patrons to a more diverse display. 3F There is only so much time and Finster feels the world is sorely in need of saving. "That's the way I reach atheists and infidels and people who don't go to church," he says. His visual genius, divinely inspired, will be on display this summer at Atlanta's High Museum of Art in a 60-artist exhibit called Outside the Mainstream: Folk Art in Our Time, which opened Thursday and runs until Aug.

12. Finster is represented by Travelling Show, an autobiographical, multimedia mas-terwork, 8 feet long and 4 feet high with a 120,000 price tag. It has occupied a year of his life, on and off, with time out for surgery in the winter. In many ways, this phantasmagoric work is the summation of his life. It contains wood cutouts of animals and Adam and Eve, paintings, photographs of friends and relatives, and myriad earrings, buttons, and other doodads he nails carefully wherever there is white space to be filled.

i SEE FINSTER MF PhotoCANDICE RUSSELL On the side of Howard Finster's garage are three 1987 self-portraits showing him in three different years from left, 1950, 1944 and 1937. BOOKS Surrogate parenting may be a controversial topic, but one writer finds few problems in spite of the celebrated "Baby case. 8F bum Little Creatures won a Grammy Award. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., bought some of his paintings. So did Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

And he can't churn the work out fast enough to satisfy his legions of fans, including a woman willing to pay $20,000 sight unseen for his biggest, most personal assemblage yet. Galleries from Key West to New York City to Seattle represent him. Yet in contrast to established art circle practices, he gladly welcomes guests to his home in rural Georgia, where he sells his paintings and wooden cut-out angels and winged figures of Elvis Presley for considerably less money than established outlets. The Rev. Howard Finster, 72, the country's premier folk artist, is this idiosyncratic character.

He prefers to call himself a preacher. A lot of things have happened since he saved 22 souls in Miami in 1950. He was a composer, musician (he still plays a mean banjo at impromptu concerts at Movie Times 7F his home), a maker of dolls and clocks, and a repairman of televisions and bicycles. In 1976, he had a vision from God to make art. Now, that is how he mainly ministers, spreading the Gospel through such favorite images as Henry Ford, UFOs, George Washington, prehistoric monsters and William Shakespeare, all Arts Letters 2F Best Sellers 9F Crossword Puzzle 10F Sound Judgment 3F Arts Agenda 3F Critic's Choice 3F Bridge 10F.