Arts Panel Gets Leader

Victoria L. Hamilton, executive director of the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission, has been selected by the city of San Diego to head the city’s newly created Commission for Arts and Culture, an organization that will be responsible for distributing about $4 million annually to the local arts.

City officials said Thursday that the 36-year-old Hamilton was selected for the $52,500-a-year job of executive director of the arts commission from among about 200 applicants. She begins the job June 1.

“I see San Diego as an international cultural destination,” Hamilton said in a telephone interview Thursday.

Salvatore Giametta, an aide to San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor, said Hamilton’s efforts to promote Santa Barbara as a “cultural destination” jibed with the mayor’s own desires to see culture become a stronger part of San Diego’s economic-development strategy.

One of Hamilton’s first assignments will be to formulate a new program for granting the annual $4 million in hotel bed tax funds to arts and cultural institutions.

Since the formation of the private arts funding agency, COMBO, in the early 1970s, both city and county funds have been funneled through different channels to arts groups.

“I want to create a program that is more responsive to the arts organizations’ needs,” Hamilton said.

One way to accomplish that, she said, is to hold monthly round table discussions with arts managers as she did in Santa Barbara. Hamilton authored that city’s arts granting plan which has become a model for local governments in California.

The Santa Barbara County Arts Commission recently created a regional arts master plan, a goal of the San Diego cultural commission.

“She did a wonderful job of blending the county’s needs with the city’s,” said Santa Barbara County Chief Administrator David Elbaum. “She really helped pull the whole arts community together. She makes things happen.”

Before taking the Santa Barbara post, Hamilton worked with the City Arts Commission of Tacoma, Wash. and, before that, for a museum of history in Bellingham, Wash.