Tina Knowles’ nonprofit cultural organization — Where Art Can Occur Theater Center — has a shiny new home in bustling Leimert Park: the 95-year-old, Art Deco, Spanish Colonial Vision Theatre, which is officially reopening to the public this weekend after a $40 million, 20-year renovation.
The neighborhood is a place where Knowles has long wanted to be. She co-founded WACO in 2017 to support performing and visual arts in the Black community. That same year, she attended the inaugural Wearable Art Gala — which benefited WACO. The party’s theme was “Coming to America,” and Knowles found a shop on Degnan Boulevard in Leimert Park that sold authentic African jewelry and headpieces for the event. (Today, Sika and Queen Aminah’s both fit that bill.)
“I fell in love with the area because there was this bookstore there, a Black bookstore, that was just unbelievable,” Knowles said on a phone call from the Hollywood Hills. “So I used to drive out there to go and eat and to go to the bookstore and to go to the African store, and I just thought it was the coolest place. And actually, my friend Mark Bradford took me in for a sneak peek of the Vision.”
Bradford, a visual artist, was born and raised in South-Central L.A. He used to work in his mother’s Leimert Park hair salon; he later co-founded the art and social services collaboration Art + Practice there. Years ago, he and Knowles slipped through a side door into the Vision Theatre, then sitting unused and in disrepair. “So it was music to my ears that the city took it on,” Knowles said.
WACO officially moved from its North Hollywood headquarters into Vision Theatre last year and is now gearing up to celebrate the reopening in grand style. A string of events, including the premiere of “A Proud Family Wizmas” Christmas special, will serve as something of a homecoming celebration for the Art Deco gem, which is being unveiled after five phases of renovations.
Designed in 1931 as a neighborhood movie palace, the building opened on April 21, 1932, with 1,100 seats. It featured (and still does, now painstakingly restored) a rich-toned ceiling mural by interior designer Anthony Heinsbergen, known for designing movie theaters and painting ornate murals. (Heinsbergen also worked on the Hollywood Pantages in 1930, and the theaters feel like cousins.) A 115-foot steel frame tower and stucco base originally featured the theater’s name.
That tower, with “V-I-S-I-O-N” spelled out in seafoam green, has been an iconic piece of the Leimert Park skyline for almost a century. After a ribbon-cutting ceremony in August, the public will finally be able to step inside for screenings, panels, live theater, youth programming, educational programming and more. (WACO manages this front-of-house programming, while the city handles the back-of-house facilities.)
The theater stayed open as an independent cinema (Leimert Theatre) from 1932 to 1968, when it closed with Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” as its final film. From 1968 to 1977, it remained empty. Then it reopened as a Jehovah’s Witness chapel, known as the Watchtower.
In 1990, the actor Marla Gibbs — known for her role as George Jefferson’s maid, Florence Johnston, on “The Jeffersons” — purchased the property and renamed it the Vision Theatre. (Gibbs is now 95, the same age as the building itself.) She dreamed of an 850-seat performing arts theater and arts education center — but two years later, the theater fell on hard times during an economic recession. (This was the same year as the 1992 riots, which began after four police officers were charged with using excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King and acquitted.) The bank foreclosed on the property in 1997, and the city took it over two years later, at the turn of the century.
“The time that I went in to view it after the work had been done, oh, my God, I cried,” Knowles said. “Because I just thought about Marla and the vision that she had. … I thought about her … and I just vowed to myself that we can really do this and we can really make a change in the community.”
WACO Executive Director Shay Wafer now co-directs the Vision Theatre Performing Arts Center alongside Department of Cultural Affairs arts manager Yvonne Farrow. Wafer used to work for Gibbs and helped her open the theater in the ’90s. Thirty-five years later, Wafer discovered the city was looking for a partner to co-operate and co-manage the theater.
“Leimert Park is world-renowned as a mecca for Black arts, and for entertainment and culture,” said Daniel Tarica, Department of Cultural Affairs general manager. “We’re able to provide a state-of-the-art facility for dance, for music, for theater, film and for arts education in a way that this community deserves, and that South Los Angeles deserves.”
That film programming will include the premiere of “A Proud Family Wizmas” Christmas special on Saturday. “The Proud Family” — a groundbreaking animated series that helped redefine Black representation on TV — originally ran from 2001 to 2005, then returned for the “Louder and Prouder” reboot in 2022. This screening marks a few firsts: “The Proud Family’s” first Christmas special. Its first time using stop-motion animation (both Christmassy and nostalgic). And the Vision Theatre’s first public opening in 20 years.
Kyla Pratt has voiced 14-year-old main character Penny Proud since she herself was 14 (she’s now 40). Walking by the Vision Theatre, she said, people used to think: “‘Oh, that’s another building that someone’s not using. It looks like it used to be beautiful. It looks like it used to be something.’”
“It’s like ‘The Proud Family,’” Pratt continued. “It’s something that we filmed years and years and years ago, and now we restored it and we were able to reboot it and bring it for generations to come. So we get the same opportunity for a piece of property that has meant so much to the neighborhood.”
“Proud Family” executive producer Ralph Farquhar, who wrote the script for the special, is also the co-creator of three sitcoms set in South-Central: “South Central,” “Moesha” and its spinoff, “The Parkers.” (“The Proud Family” is set in fictional Emilyville, Calif. — but it does have a character named LaCienega Boulevardez.)
“I shot the main title for ‘Moesha’ on the street right in front of the theater,” Farquhar said. (That iconic fountain is in Leimert Park Plaza.) “I’d been inside when Marla owned it, but I wasn’t prepared when I went in to see — just the meticulous refurbishing, if you will, of that space along with the additions they did to the back of the house. It was just done with such care and love that it kind of makes you emotional.”
“The Proud Family” creator Bruce W. Smith, who co-directed the special alongside David H. Brooks, has witnessed the highs, lows and evolution of Leimert Park and South-Central. He remembers the Watts riots, the 1992 riots, the rise of the Comedy Act Theatre and the neighborhood as “the cultural heartbeat of Black Los Angeles.”
“So now when you think about the rebuilding, it feels like we’re so resilient as a people, we’re always rebuilding,” Smith said. “We’re not afraid of rebuilding and reshaping ourselves, and I think that that’s what the Vision Theatre represents.”
“It represents that vision of true history and our existence, our culture, our arts, and how important that is to us as a people,” he continued. “Ralph and I are giving more art to the community, and that’s what keeps the community beautified. That’s important for us.”
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