ART BEAT : CITY CALLING FOR PORTRAITS.

Byline: Lori Moody

The Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department has put out a call for contemporary portraits by Southern California artists.

All artwork for the open-call exhibition ``About Face: All City Open'' must be delivered to the exhibition sites - the William Grant Still Arts Center, 2520 S. West View St.; Watts Towers Arts Center, 1727 E. 107th St.; and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and Barnsdall Arts Center Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd. - beginning at noon on June 30.

The exhibition will open July 10. All entries must be original and completed since January 1994. For further information, [phone].

Black history exhibit The California Afro-American Museum is hosting a Smithsonian traveling exhibition that looks at the life of African-Americans before the Civil War.

The exhibit, ``Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South,'' which runs through June 23, features tools, musical instruments, household items, objects of spiritual significance, engravings and photographs of African-Americans living in urban and rural areas.

There also are dramaticized interviews with former slaves taken from transcripts of the 1930s Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration. For information, call [phone].

Make kids art-smart The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino is looking for volunteer docents to lead art gallery tours for schoolchildren.

An orientation meeting is scheduled 1 p.m. Tuesday at the Huntington. Applications will be accepted at that time. Training begins in the fall.

For further information, contact the Huntington's Education Department at [phone].

Festival for summer If you need some ideas for summer vacation, the annual Festival of Arts and Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach is just around the corner.

This year's festival runs from July 7 through Aug. 31. The famed Pageant of the Masters, which will be staged daily at 8:30 p.m. during the course of the festival, features a series of artworks re-created in detail with real people taking the roles of characters in a painting or sculpture.

For general Festival of Arts information, call [phone]. Order forms for Pageant of the Masters tickets are available by sending your name and a postcard to: Festival of Arts, P.O. Box 1659, Laguna Beach, Calif. 92652. For phone orders, call [phone].