An O’Connor Summit: Mayor to Visit Moscow to Plan Arts Festival

San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor on Friday reached agreement with Soviet diplomats to travel to the Soviet Union in late March to arrange to bring a monthlong festival of Soviet arts to San Diego sometime in 1989.

The mayor advanced her plans for an arts exchange, which she announced during her State of the City address Monday, at a two-hour lunch meeting with Soviet Consul General Valentin Kamenev and Vice Consul Sergei Aivazia at the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco.

The two diplomats “have agreed to help us,” O’Connor said after returning to San Diego on Friday evening. “We are going to Moscow during the last two weeks of March. The Soviet Minister of Culture has agreed to the idea.”

O’Connor, City Attorney John Witt and Press Secretary Paul Downey met with the diplomats to discuss plans for a swap of films, paintings, musicians, dancers and other artists, but did not settle specifics of the exchange. While the Soviets appear committed to holding an arts festival here in 1989, no dates for performances by San Diego artists in the Soviet Union were established, O’Connor said.

A delegation of San Diego arts leaders, to be chosen soon by O’Connor, will meet with Soviet officials in San Francisco before the March journey to help select the arts groups that would travel to San Diego. They will accompany her on the trip, which O’Connor said could take her to Moscow, Leningrad and--if Kamenev’s recommendations are accepted--the Soviet Republic of Georgia.

Kamenev told O’Connor that the Soviet Union is home to “a lot of great talent that we don’t necessarily know of,” O’Connor said. “They’re looking at sharing that with us.”

The Soviet diplomats suggested housing their artists in private homes during the proposed monthlong stay in San Diego, an idea that O’Connor endorsed, she said. The Soviet officials also discussed staging some performances in Tijuana. Sending the festival on to other American cities would be “up to them,” O’Connor said.

The proposed arts festival was the centerpiece of a State of the City address in which O’Connor declared 1988 the “Year of the Arts” in San Diego. The idea is modeled on a similar festival staged in Edinburgh, Scotland, which O’Connor attended last summer.

The idea for a Soviet-San Diego arts exchange began there, when O’Connor and two Soviet culture officials met at a concert and later discussed the idea over vodka and Pepsi. Since then, Downey has been quietly conducting the preliminary work on an arts exchange.

“This celebration of the arts will rival the music festivals of Edinburgh and Salzburg, the painting exhibits of the New York Metropolitan and the Getty Museum in Malibu and the dance and folk concerts of the most classical regions of Europe,” she said in the speech.

While arts leaders have been enthusiastic about the money and visibility that a major festival could generate for local arts organizations, they say it remains to be seen whether O’Connor can deliver on the grand promises. They said it remains to be proven whether she can attract exhibits prestigious enough to put the festival on the artistic map and attract art lovers from out of town.

City and Soviet officials did not discuss a price tag for the festival Friday, but O’Connor said that the event could be financed by the city’s transient occupancy tax and private and corporate donations.