Escondido’s Budding Public Art Program Is Pretty Plucky Itself

ESCONDIDO — Artist Marjorie Nodelman was feeling pretty good.

One of three finalists selected for a $45,000 public art project in Escondido, Nodelman was looking ahead to the final judging Monday, when she learned that one of her two competitors planned a victory celebration a week before the judging.

“Maybe he knows something that I don’t,” Nodelman said. “My first reaction--I thought it was funny. Then I was annoyed. I didn’t believe it was true.”

Art Cole, one of the three finalists, did hold a party, which the other finalist, Ellen Phillips, said gave her “a good laugh.”

To be sure, Cole, an outspoken local artist who slapped an official city of Escondido decal on the front of his scale model artwork for good measure, is known for such brashness. In a way, Cole’s pluckiness mirrors the self-assurance of Escondido’s budding Public Art Partnership Program.

Since its first meeting in February, 1988, the Public Art Partnership Panel has designated or approved sculptures for four city sites while torpedoing as unacceptable all proposals in a competition for another site.

Two more projects are in the final stages of selection, and after the panel makes its recommendation on the $45,000 project at Quince Street and 2nd Avenue downtown, the panelists will take a tour of public art sites along I-15.

“We think (the art program) creates ambiance,” Escondido Mayor Doris Thurston said. “It provides a certain amount of graciousness. Even with good architectural design, art in public places is the finishing product” to an urban center.

Thurston, who is one of the nine members of the city’s arts panel, says the program “places art conspicuously in major thoroughfares of the city so, if young people are never exposed to art except what they see in Escondido, they will be exposed to it.”

Although there was an outcry a while back that money spent on a temporary public artwork at the Mathes Cultural Center could have been better spent on the homeless, Thurston does not expect hostility toward future public art projects.

“We have a high cross-section of the community serving on (the panel), so it is not the City Council which chooses the piece,” Thurston said. “As long as the citizens are represented, we won’t have a hostile controversy.”

Indeed, under Escondido’s public arts ordinance, enacted in late 1987, the City Council is actually discouraged from making “independent judgment on artistic matters” recommended by its art panel. The council retains the authority to conduct independent reviews when council members wish, however.

The heart of Escondido’s program is diversity, Thurston said, from realistic human figures to abstract sculptures and environmental art. The panel can choose art through a variety of competitions and by direct commission. Just entering a competition can lead to a commission.

T. J. Dixon won a commission from the city after losing a competition to place art in the Escondido Transit Center. Dixon’s style intrigued the art panelists, who commissioned a lifelike bronze of a mother and children as part of the city’s efforts to rejuvenate downtown.

The art panel, which reviews and approves artworks proposed for the program, is composed of nine members--three from Escondido’s Felicita Foundation for the Arts, three city employees and three members of the Chamber of Commerce. Additional temporary members, such as arts professionals, are added to the panel when required.

Escondido’s art-in-public-places program is underwritten by a fee for public and private building projects. Except for single-family houses up to 1,400 square feet in size, every new building in Escondido is assessed a fee of 0.25% of its construction costs, which goes for public art.

“The city did not want to place a large burden on developers, but we wanted to have enough to do a worthwhile program,” said Randy Mellinger, a city planner who studied public art programs in other cities and wrote Escondido’s ordinance. “We are investigating whether the fee of one-quarter of 1% should be raised or lowered or whatever.”

The city so far has collected $700,000, with about $300,000 of the money committed to projects. That money can be used either at each site or turned over to the city, where it is pooled with other fees, enabling the city to choose quality local, national or regional artists for sites selected by the art panel.

As the city places more artworks in public places, the art panel hopes that more developers will be encouraged to commission public artworks.

“Many of the developers are a little nervous about public art,” said attorney Sheila Muldoon, chairwoman of the art panel. “They’re worried about public reaction. So they’ll watch the city do this. That way, they’ll know whose works are approved, and the developers will start contacting them, although it usually costs the developer more to put a piece on a site rather than pay the fee.”

The city allowed a group of automobile dealership owners to pool fees retroactively. The dealers chose an angular, 12-foot high, cerulean blue abstract sculpture that will be installed next month in the Escondido Auto Park in the southwest part of the city.

“We thought it was an excellent opportunity to partake in the enhancement of . . . the Escondido Auto Park,” said Harvey Rogoff of Sunroad Enterprises, which owns four dealerships in the Auto Park. Rogoff worked with consultants from the Art Annex in San Diego who submitted designs by three artists for his approval.

The city’s first public art piece is an abstract bronze and stone fountain, commissioned privately and installed in April by Trinity Episcopal Church. The art panel reviewed the church’s fountain, by Julian artist James Hubbell, and designated it as one of the city’s public artworks.

That kind of flexibility is a hallmark of Escondido’s Public Art Partnership Program.

The city worked in partnership with the county, approving Peter Mitten’s 20-foot-long, 14-foot-wide abstracted concrete landscape for the interior of the new Escondido Transit Center, which will be completed later this year.

The sculptures approved so far in Escondido are medium-size, medium-cost pieces. A major artwork with a major-league price tag by an artist with commissions around the world is planned for City Hall. The art panel, using three consultants, has narrowed its choice of artists to three and will select one of them for the final piece, Mellinger said.

For all the art panel’s eagerness to place art throughout the city, it is not an anything-goes program. Earlier this year, the panel rejected every proposal in a competition for a $35,000 project for Kit Carson Park.

Although the proposals for the park were judged to be weak, the panel also decided that the site, with a giant playground sombrero and snake, was not ideal. The art panel chose another site in the park near towering eucalyptus trees. The budget was raised to $50,000, and the original competitors and 10 more artists were invited to submit proposals before June 30.

The final jurying for the 2nd Avenue and Quince Street projects, originally scheduled for Monday morning, has been postponed because of the funeral of Assemblyman Bill Bradley. A new date has not yet been announced.

Meanwhile, the artists’ models are on view in the City Hall lobby. And viewers are filling out the comment forms, heaping praise and invective on the pint-sized editions of the art.

Phillips’ entry, titled “Oasis,” is an environmental piece that refers to Escondido’s role as an oasis of palm trees in a dry valley, she said. Her design calls for the addition of a dozen palm trees to the six standing in the traffic median. Her plan calls for mounds of dirt around each palm to symbolize the hills around Escondido.

Nodelman also uses the palm motif for her “Three Windmills.” She envisions 25-foot high, red steel, palm-like windmills for the site. The curving high-tech-looking windmill stalks are topped with five abstracted blades, two of which turn. The blades resemble stretches of road complete with yellow highway striping.

Nodelman says the windmills, aside from their beauty, suggest both the frontier with open spaces as well as the industrial technology that is a part of Escondido’s growth.

Looking to the mountains that ring Escondido for inspiration, Cole designed an environmental artwork featuring 6-foot-high mountains of reinforced concrete covered in a sandstone-like ceramic material.

Titled “Through the Passes Into Town” Cole’s proposal retains the six existing palms and two groups of ornamental fruit trees planted in the island. The “mountains” form vehicle barriers to convert the median into a pocket park, he says.

All the pieces will be lighted at night.

The final decision, however, may not be based on the artwork so much as on the models and the artists’ skill at presentations.

The artists will give a presentation, Mellinger said. “We’ll ask them a simple question: Why should we pick your artwork? A good job of presentation may sway the panel.”

Mellinger says any of the pieces may stir up some controversy, but that doesn’t bother him. He even welcomes it: “Controversy will be good. It will let the people know that a city is made of things besides curbs, sidewalks and gutters.”