Jurors Select First Works for ‘City Gates’ : Public Art: The project is designed to boost cultural identity through the incorporation of major transportation arteries.

Jurors for the “City Gates” public art project have selected the winning proposals for the first two of seven sites in the program, which is designed to strengthen San Diego’s cultural and artistic identity through artworks incorporating major transportation arteries.

Selected for the North Gate project--the Interstate 5 and Ardath Road intersection--was Ellen Phillips’ “Light Passage,” which will use lamps and filters to create subtle hues of blue, red and green on the overpass.

The South Gate site--at the I-5 and Coronado Bridge intersection--was awarded to the team of Robin Brailsford, Ysela Jacques Chacon and Roberto Salas, whose project is titled “Los Portales de Chicano Park” (The Entries of Chicano Park). However, the jurors stipulated that the team should incorporate the ideas of two other finalists for the site, muralists Mario Torero and Victor Ochoa.

The artists for each site will be awarded $12,000 in honorariums, and each project has a $100,000 construction budget, although funding has not yet been secured.

The final proposals were originally scheduled to be announced in September, 1988, but the process was delayed more than a year because of a transition period while the city was creating the Commission for Arts and Culture and hiring staff. A further delay was caused by the City Council’s scuttling of the commission’s $250,000 public-art budget for the 1989 fiscal year.

“We’re looking at state and federal support for the project,” said Victoria Hamilton, executive director of the arts commission. “We’ll see how enthusiastic the City Council is about these designs. Maybe they’ll be supportive of city funding for implementation of these two proposals.”

Artist Helen Harrison and architect Rob Quigley conceived the project more than four years ago while members of the city’s Public Arts Advisory Board,

the body that has since become part of the city’s arts commission.

The jurors for the competition were Harrison, an art professor at UC San Diego; Al Nodal, director of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and former director of exhibitions at Otis Art Institute Parsons School of Design, and Sally Yard, an art historian and curator of contemporary art who lives in San Diego.

The South Gate proposal utilizes the entrance and exit ramps to the Coronado Bridge as the canvas for a four-part, highly graphic series of images painted on porcelain steel enamel. Northbound travelers will see “El Portal de Saludos” (The Entry of Greetings), a series of welcoming hand signals, and “El Portal de los Milagros” (The Entry of the Miracles), contemporary representations of the traditional Mexican votive objects. The images for “Milagros” will be determined by the community through a series of public workshops with the artists.

Southbound travelers will see “El Portal de la Raza” (The Entry of the People), a series of silhouetted figures conceived as a tribute to the residents of Barrio Logan--the neighborhood intersected by the interstate and bridge--and “El Portal de la Historia” (The Entry of History), a red- and white-patterned Pre-Columbian motif.

The jurors’ recommendations will be considered Monday by the art commission’s public-art committee, which will in turn make its recommendations to the full commission Friday. The commission’s recommendations will then be forwarded to the City Council for final approval. At that time, debate is expected on the financing of the projects.

The other five sites in the City Gates project are East Gate, I-8 at College Avenue; West Gate, at the western end of I-8; Southeast Gate, on California 94 between I-15 and I-805; Border Gate, at the I-5 entrance to Mexico, and Center Gate, I-5 at the Civic Center exit.