PUBLIC ARTS BOARD ASSESSES 1ST YEAR

The art camel’s nose is inside the tent at City Hall, and already there are problems--at least for some council members who created the creature in the first place.

Twelve months ago the San Diego City Council amended the Municipal Code and established a Public Arts Advisory Board (PAAB) to advise the mayor, council and city manager on programs “designed to promote the arts in public places” and to “encourage the private sector to include the arts in private developments.” Initially conceived as a broad-based commission that would create a general arts plan and prepare an annual budget for its implementation, the board was reduced in the enabling legislation to a much narrower focus.

Despite its restricted scope of duties, the board has had the temerity to voice its opinions on a wide range of arts-related issues. The PAAB has backed projects by local artists, supporting David Beck Brown’s offer to donate a sculpture consisting of trolley rails to the Metropolitan Transit Development Board, and Joyce Cutler Shaw’s environmental installation (Thursday’s ground breaking has been postponed) for a vacant downtown lot. The board gave its unsolicited opinion that the City Council delay a decision to condemn the Balboa Theater, an action that reportedly riled some council members.

“The board is nobody’s puppet. We don’t jump to anybody’s tune,” PAAB member George Driver said. Driver, an insurance executive, said that because of the board’s makeup, the PAAB members function more as arts advocates than as experts. The 11 board members come from a diversity of callings including painters, sculptors, architects, businessmen and professionals active in the arts. “We have our own beliefs and own agendas,” Driver said. “We’re trying to find out how those agendas come together.”

For the PAAB, the year has been a period of adjustment, a time of defining roles and getting acquainted with the workings of City Hall. It has also been a time of adjustment for council members, who previously had no advisory body on the arts. In addition, the coincidence of Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays hampered progress during the board’s initial meetings. Still, according to Chairman Ed Pieters, they have developed public projects including a display by local artists at the Civic Center concourse beginning Oct. 1; a joint television program funded jointly with KPBS-TV that would document art in San Diego, and a “percent for art” ordinance that would require that 2% of the city’s annual capital budget go for public artworks. The “percent for art” ordinance is being reviewed by the city manager’s office.

“I had no idea it would be so difficult (working with the city bureaucracy) learning the lines of authority and where they run,” Pieters, a sculptor and gallery owner, said.

PAAB members are happy that the city has received a year’s funding from the state to create a staff position to assist the board. That such a position was not set up initially is more evidence of the arts board’s reduced scope. Clerical staffing has been supplied the city’s Intergovernmental Relations Department on a part-time basis.

Recent complaints from Councilmen Mike Gotch and William Jones, who drafted the legislation creating the PAAB, have centered on the board’s not focusing on neighborhood art projects. “We had to start somewhere,” said attorney John Howard, board vice chairman, referring to the art in the concourse project. “I don’t know what would have made some people happy.” One neighborhood project is the brainchild of PAAB member Rob Wellington Quigley. Known as Citygates, it would include sizable sculptures placed near the major thoroughfares.

“One of the things we know is that San Diego needs a create a cohesive, citywide arts identity. We have set up those definitions. But the act of defining a city arts milieu is a long process.”

POSTER ART: The Centre City Arts Advisory Board, the same group that attracted criticism of local artists and others angry with its selection of the Ellsworth Kelly sculpture for Embarcadero Park, has made another selection.

The five-member group has reviewed portfolios of 10 San Diego graphic designers for a poster commemorating the cultural aspects of Horton Plaza (the downtown shopping center opening Aug. 9), and recommended Calvin Woo. The Centre City Development Corp. has commissioned Woo to produce two editions of a poster. Three hundred 26-by-40-inch posters, which depict the word “Horton” spelled in various typefaces and colors, will be sold for $75 each. A commercial edition of 10,000 posters at 18 by 26 inches will be sold for $1.

POPS OUT: The Aug. 1 concert by the Boston Pops Orchestra is a likely sell-out. The sponsoring San Diego Symphony Assn. had already sold more than 90% of the Civic Theatre seating two weeks before the concert--including all of the $47.50 seats. To celebrate its 100th anniversary, the nation’s most prestigious and most-recorded pops ensemble is making a 14-city tour, underwritten in San Diego with a grant from The Signal Cos., a longtime supporter of the local orchestra.

Resident conductor John Williams, successor to the late Arthur Fiedler, will be on the podium conducting some of his own works, including “Olympic Fanfare and Theme” and the Suite from “Return of the Jedi,” and other customary Boston Pops fare.

ARTBEATS: Fans of actor Thom Murray may have had their last view of the talented performer in San Diego Rep’s “Cloud 9.” Murray has passed the audition to enter the North Carolina School of the Arts’ four-year program to learn his craft. . . . After Christopher Durang’s “Baby With the Bathwater,” opening Aug. 2, San Diego Rep will open “Rapmaster Ronnie,” the Garry Trudeau-Elizabeth Swados musical revue, on Sept. 27. . . . Another talented theater type who’s leaving is David McFadzean, the Lamb’s Players’ resident playwright (“Deep River,” “A Proud Look at a Lying Tongue” and “Waking Dreams”) who’s taking a position at Judson College in Illinois teaching drama.