The Schindler House in West Hollywood, designed by architect Rudolph M. Schindler, is among the properties operated by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles. (photo courtesy of the MAK Center)

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles has announced that the MAK Center has been awarded a General Operating Support Grant from the Perenchio Foundation to be distributed over the next three years.

The significant unrestricted grant is a major benchmark for the MAK Center, providing sustained support to strengthen the institution’s organizational capacity and long-term resilience. The funding will enable the MAK Center to invest strategically in the people, core resources and institutional infrastructure necessary to sustain its presentations of dynamic residencies, exhibitions and programs traversing the intersections of art and architecture.

For more than 30 years, the MAK Center has operated as a Los Angeles-based nonprofit cultural institution and the California satellite of the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna. The MAK Center has provided a space for artists and architects that is focused on the local community of Los Angeles and conducive to global cultural dialogue. Across its three landmark buildings, all designed by Austrian émigré Rudolph M. Schindler, the MAK Center provides a unique foothold for creative exchange and offers a platform for work that challenges disciplinary boundaries. With this multi-year grant from the Perenchio Foundation, the MAK Center will deepen the reach of its enduring work within Los Angeles and build on more than three decades of discourse between Los Angeles, Vienna and beyond.

“This grant is an extraordinary vote of confidence in the MAK Center and our place within Los Angeles’s cultural landscape: in our commitment to creating meaningful access to art and architecture, supporting artists and architects both locally and internationally and activating our historic Schindler-designed sites as places for experimentation, exchange and new ideas,” MAK Center Director and Curator Beth Stryker said. “It gives us the opportunity to strengthen that work for the long term, while building on the remarkable relationship between Los Angeles and Vienna that has shaped the MAK Center for more than three decades.”

“With this support, the Perenchio Foundation is recognizing our work at our American satellite in a special and generous way, for which I am very grateful,” added Lilli Hollein, general director and artistic director of the MAK-Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna. “For 30 years now, the MAK – as an Austrian federal museum – has been operating this independent satellite, housed in three architecturally significant buildings in the U.S., which is particularly important at present. In the 1920s, the U.S. was a land of opportunity, not only for the designer of these buildings, the Austrian-born architect Rudolph M. Schindler, but also for many other artists. The Perenchio Foundation’s grant supports the continued development of the MAK Center and its role in reinforcing these values in a major U.S. metropolis.”

The grant provides unrestricted, multi-year funding.

“Permanence in the arts is not an accident. It is the result of organizations that have built real governance, real financial discipline, and real community trust – over years, sometimes decades – often without the kind of sustained investment that would make any of it easier,” Perenchio Foundation CEO Stephania Ramirez said.

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture oversees the Schindler House (1922) in West Hollywood, the Fitzpatrick-Leland House (1936) in Laurel Canyon and the Mackey Apartments (1939) in the Miracle Mile. Offering a year-round schedule of exhibitions and events, the center presents programming that challenges conventional notions of architectural space and relationships between the creative arts.

For information, visit makcenter.org.