Overdue Fanfare for the Common Artwork : SAN DIEGO COUNTY

Public art in San Diego has nearly become synonymous with three thwarted projects. The city never got its Ellsworth Kelly, Vito Acconci or Roberto Salas works--all proposed for sites along the harbor but rejected by the Port Commission--but San Diego has become home to several permanent works of public art in recent months.

None will arouse a flap equal to that surrounding the Port Commission’s proposals, but several do deserve fanfare.

“Crown Lair,” by Los Angeles-based artist Lloyd Hamrol, launches the city of Carlsbad’s Art in Public Places program with understated elegance and integrity. The work’s five curving sandstone walls seem submerged in a grassy slope at Stagecoach Park (on Mission Estancia off Rancho Santa Fe and La Costa Avenue). Above them on the slope stand the crumbling adobe walls of Rancho Ybarra, a 19th-Century stagecoach stop. Both Hamrol’s walls and those of the adobe ruins emerge from the earth as fragmented emblems of shelter and protection. Their intimate partnership with the land is beautiful, but obsolete. Unfortunately, a more common land use is found across a ravine where endless clusters of cookie-cutter condominiums are planted on shaved, leveled plots.

“Crown Lair” is simple, but rich with associations and possibilities for use. Leaning into the hill, the walls offer a private, sheltered space within their arching grasp. At the same time, the dynamic rhythm of the walls and their flat upper surface invite movement and play. Hamrol’s work, dedicated last weekend, spurs a stimulating physical and historical dialogue between the public and the site.

In the new Whittier Institute building on the Scripps Memorial Hospital campus (9894 Genessee Ave., La Jolla), a mural by DeLoss McGraw physically encompasses visitors with buoyant imagery and fresh, searing color. A copy of the John Ciardi story that served as inspiration for the mural is mounted nearby. It tells the story of an ant that hordes food for the winter but doesn’t stop long enough to enjoy it, and a grasshopper that doesn’t plan ahead but instead makes music all day on his fiddle.

While not a direct illustration of the story, McGraw’s mural captures the spirit of the tale, and especially its moral to seize life, taste its sweetness and soak in its melodies. McGraw, formerly of North County and now living in Claremont, Calif., fills the high walls of the reception area of the Institute’s Children’s Center with whimsical figures on cutout wood panels and explosive bursts of pure primary colors. McGraw dismisses gravity, naturalistic scale and perspective as he sets his creatures afloat on this glorious, vibrant field. Defying the stark sterility of most medical environments, McGraw’s mural encourages visitors and patients to bask in the beauty and wisdom of a well-told tale.

Two works commissioned last year by the county’s Public Arts Advisory Council (PAAC) adopt a “feel-good” approach to public art, but neither has the power or presence to make a difference in its space. Both are the work of local artists who were awarded Community Art Project grants.

Helen Redman’s “Wall of People” spans a 60-foot-long concrete-block wall in a multipurpose room at Fallbrook Community Center (341 Heald Lane, Fallbrook). Painted with all the earnest clumsiness of a high school art project, the work’s six cutout panels depict children and adults engaged in typical activities at the center, such as aerobic dancing, gymnastics and easel painting.

Despite their dynamic intent, the panels are dismally static, the figures stiff, their expressions forced. Mounted above eye level, they deny contact and interaction with the users of the room, just as they make no concession to the architecture of the site. Because it is upbeat and exuberant, “Wall of People” will meet few detractors, but those who expect more from a work of art than a saccharine smile will be offended by the work’s mediocrity.

Another innocuous, PAAC-sponsored work adorns the South Bay District Office of the Department of Social Services (1355 3rd Ave., Chula Vista). High on each wall of the bustling waiting room, Leslie Nemour’s four panoramic landscape paintings emit a remote beauty that is even more problematic than Redman’s work, for Nemour’s site poses a tougher challenge.

About 600 people pass through the room daily, many waiting for food stamps, Medi-Cal assistance and other forms of financial support. If art has any power to teach or inspire, this dank, humbling room would be the place for it. Instead, Nemour’s “Seasonal Borders” attempts a form of visual crowd control, soothing anxious minds by offering a momentary escape to a distant, calm, unpeopled world.

Such an admittedly challenging commission deserves more than this facile solution. Facing similar challenges, Theresa Mill, another PAAC grant recipient, adopted a far more constructive approach in her mural for the lunchroom at Rachel’s Women’s Center, a day shelter downtown (759 8th Ave.).

Mill first conducted classes with the women who use the center for such basic support services as showers, medical screening and meals. She then incorporated their drawings into a quilt pattern that bridges two scenes in the mural, titled “Reflections.” On one side, the sea spreads across the sand like a delicate lace handkerchief, and a woman sits alone, in private meditation. On the other side of the soaring quilt, three women of different ages and races hold hands in a circle. An urban neighborhood recedes behind them.

Mill’s imagery appeals to facets of health and survival that can’t be administered--a sense of potential, self-worth and community.