San Diego

The San Diego Unified Port District’s five-member Arts Advisory Committee voted unanimously Friday to recommend that the proposed $450,000 waterfront sculpture by renowned Minimal artist Ellsworth Kelly. If approved by port commissioners, the large-scale untitled work could be installed before year’s end at Embarcadero Park, which consists of two man-made spits of land extending into the harbor and facing the Coronado Bridge. The Kelly design features two elements--a 68-foot-high monolith of stainless steel to be placed on one end of the park, and a sail-like wedge of concrete, approximately half the size of the monolith, to be placed on the other. Committee chairman Gerald Hirshberg called the proposed art work “an aesthetic logo, a gateway for San Diego” and noted that it would not only be Kelly’s largest work to date but marked the artist’s first use of an asymmetrical vertical shape and his first use of concrete. The committee will forward engineering and cost specifics to the port commissioners, who probably will vote on the proposal in the next several weeks.