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calendarlive.com
The school, a spiritual heir to the famed L.A. art college, struggled from its 2003 start to attract students and funds
were so caught up in the dayto-day demands of running the nonprofit institution that they didnt have time to build a broader donor base to back their vision of an art school run by artists. The school failed to generate the $360,000 a year in tuition and donations needed to meet expenses, he said, and the directors wound up floating annual deficits of $180,000 out of their own pockets. The decision to stop came after a fundraiser raffle and art auction, scheduled for Saturday, had to be canceled because of tepid response. A panel discussion the same evening also will not take place. It was a pretty impossible task, Tourj said. We knew what we were getting into. This kind of project can only survive with massive support. We have very illustrious artists on our advisory board, but we ask them for advice, not money. The effort to reestablish Chouinard began in 1999, when
Tourj teamed with artist Robert Perine to create a foundation to fund and operate the school. Perine was a Chouinard Alumnus who felt dispossessed after the original debt-ridden institution closed in 1972, subsumed by Walt Disney in a financial bailout that eventually resulted in the creation of the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. In 1985, Perine published a history of Chouinard and its demise, titled Chouinard:
An Art Vision Betrayed. His death at age 81 in 2004 was a difficult blowHe was a prime mover in the whole project, said Tourj, who is not an alumnus of the old Chouinard but became fascinated with its history when he bought a fixer-upper in South Pasadena that had been the home of Nelbert Chouinard, who founded the college in 1921. Although the school will die, Tourj said that he and the other board members planned
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