O’Connor’s Trip Yields Harvest for Arts Festival

They told Mayor Maureen O’Connor not to count her Soviet arts festival before her eggs were hatched, or something like that. Well, the eggs have hatched, with jewels on them. The mayor’s eggs, it turns out, are by Faberge, Carl Faberge, the decorator to the czars, whose bejeweled ornamental eggs are apparently on their way to San Diego.

Mayor Mo returned Tuesday from an 18-day arts-finding venture with a signed, though non-binding agreement, in which the Soviets say they will send over an exhibition of religious icons and a clutch of the fabulous Faberge eggs for her honor’s proposed Soviet arts festival, now scheduled for October and November, 1989.

Call it the eggs and icons show. The Soviets also agreed to include the Tblisi Marionettes troupe and a conductor and half a dozen singers for a San Diego Opera production of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” as part of the festival.

There could also be performances “by or for the symphony, folk dancers, other visual and performing artists, jazz musicians, cinema, photographic exhibits and other museum exhibits” according to the non-binding pact co-signed by O’Connor and Soviet Deputy Minister of Culture Vladislav I. Kazenin.

The San Diego City Council also has to sign off on the festival, estimated by O’Connor to cost about $3 million, by Sept. 30, or the bottom line is nyet.

In the meantime, if you’ve never seen an icon, a cruise by the Timken Art Gallery in Balboa Park might be in order. The Timken’s Russian icons make up “one of the more more important collections in this country, certainly on the West Coast,” said A. Dean McKenzie, a medieval art scholar at the University of Oregon and one of the country’s top authorities on icons.

“The Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow has the finest icons, but that’s closed for renovation for the next two years,” he said. The festival icons, puppet troupe and opera professionals are from the Soviet republic of Georgia.

The Timken icon collection, which once numbered 400, including many small “family” icons, has been winnowed down to 14 “exceptional” 15th and 16th century church pieces, McKenzie said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

Icons, by the way, are images, usually of religious figures, painted in a complex process on wooden panels, using gesso, cloth, encaustic (hot wax), tempera (egg yolk), and sometimes gold and silver. They are characteristic of Eastern or Orthodox Christian churches. The likenesses of Christ and the saints tend to be formal and stylized. Although icons emphasize the spiritual over the material, the craftsmanship and materials such as the gold backgrounds (symbolizing heaven) make them extremely valuable.

With or without an impending Soviet arts festival in San Diego, the Timken’s impressive collection of Russian icons, always on view for free, rates a visit anytime.

About 150 resumes were sent to the mayor’s office by those eager to be on the city’s new cultural arts commission, making it far and away the most popular of the city’s myriad volunteer committees and boards.

“It was probably five or six times the normal number we get for any board or commission,” said LaDonna Hatch, assistant to Mayor O’Connor. “Normally, if we get 20 or 30 we consider ourselves doing well.”

The figures mean that there’s probably a lot of public interest in the panel, which has been given the task of creating a comprehensive cultural arts program for the city and distributing about $5 million a year in city money to the arts.

One hopes that those chosen will participate, and not be names that look good or amount to a political payoff. Attendance at meetings is important.

Between January and December, 1987, attendance by the 11-member Public Arts Advisory Board, which the new commission replaces, was impressive. With two exceptions, all members made at least two-thirds of the meetings. But those two--artists Francoise Gilot Salk and Helen Harrison--were absent on business eight and nine times respectively.

No matter how well-intentioned the members, if they are not at the meetings, it’s difficult to contribute.

It appears that there may be some politicking going on regarding council members’ nominees. Bruce Henderson named only one nominee, Scripps Institution of Oceanography founder Roger Revelle, a thinker who would certainly be a welcome addition to the arts commission. But Henderson did not nominate anyone else.

It’s orchids and onions time again, when San Diegans nominate their favorite (orchid) and least favorite (onion) designs. Sponsored by five professional design organizations, the design awareness program includes categories in architecture, city and regional planning, “environmental solutions,” historic preservation, interior design, landscape design, graphic design, signage and fine arts.

Once the nominations are in--the deadline is Friday--a jury of design professionals and lay panelists review them and select several winners in each category. Awards will be made to the winners and losers at a November ceremony.

If you do not have a ballot form, it is not too late to make a nomination. Write your nomination, its category, whether orchid or onion, nearest cross street and reason for nomination on a piece of paper. Mail it to Orchids & Onions Community Awareness Program, 233 A St., Suite 200, San Diego, 92101.

Sponsors are the American Institute of Architects, the American Planning Assn., the American Society of Interior Designers, the American Society of Landscape Architects and the Assn. of Environmental Professionals.