Art for San Diego’s Sake : Community: Despite a lack of funds, the new public art coordinator is making her presence felt.

Thanks to Gail Goldman, public art in San Diego is gaining visibility--even though there’s little yet to see.

Until now, the city has purchased only one work of public art, Roberto Salas’ “Night Visions,” a series of colorful signs along park boulevard. But Goldman, the new coordinator of art in public places for the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, is starting to turn a low-priority program into one with a high profile.

Goldman moved to San Diego from Denver, where she had been working at the Colorado Council on the Arts and Humanities, directing the state’s Art in Public Places Program as well as fellowship programs for individual artists.

It was during her seven years with the Colorado council that Goldman, trained in metal smithing and jewelry design, became “obsessed” with public art. That obsession is getting her noticed here in San Diego and elsewhere, since her arrival here last November, she has been invited to chair a national task force on public art and to advise a state agency on the formation of a new granting program in the design arts.

Her personal vibrancy and zeal to better the built environment have set her personal star aloft. Day to day, however, Goldman is deeply rooted in the earthly--if not earthy --politics of planning a public art policy for the city.

“It’s emotional, it’s a cause ,” she said recently in an interview in the Commission’s downtown office. The same aspects of public art that first seduced her into the field have increasingly been bringing others into the field of public art in recent years. In 1984, she said, there were 24 public art

programs in California. Now there are 85, including active agencies in Carlsbad and Escondido.

At a time when government sponsorship of the arts has become embroiled in controversy, Goldman defends the city’s involvement in public art with ease.

“Government is, ideally, attempting to give back to its taxpayers something that contributes to the overall quality in a person’s life. That affects everything, from feeling protected by having an appropriate number of police to creating something worth protecting.”

“Cities now are feeling a real responsibility to the overall fabric of the city, and public art has become very much a component of urban planning. It becomes an effective tool in creating a sense of place.”

The homogenizing forces of popular culture have presented a challenge to Goldman, by causing people to lose touch with the distinct qualities of their communities. San Diego’s Public Art Master Plan, now Goldman’s primary focus, attempts to address this issue and to reacquaint city dwellers with the individual nature of their neighborhoods. Over a five-year period, teams of artists, planners and community members will scrutinize 10 segments of the city and identify areas that would benefit by physical change.

“The whole intent is to work with as many members of each community as we can,” Goldman said, “to ask them to identify a profile of their community, to talk about what it’s like to live and work there, to think about what distinguishes it from other communities and to start a dialogue on public art, to help expand the vocabulary so that it’s understood that public art is really about designing a sense of place.”

The plan, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, where Goldman worked from 1977 to 1982 as a program officer, is now in its pilot phase. Public meetings in each community are expected to begin in October. At least one work of art will be created in each of the 10 targeted communities, which include City Heights, Golden Hill, Ocean Beach and San Ysidro. A total budget of $72,500 has been allocated to pay for the works.

Close community involvement in the plan will help nurture a more positive attitude toward public art, Goldman feels.

“We, in the visual arts, like in every other profession, be it law or politics, have devised a certain vocabulary that has become imposing and has really alienated most people. When they approach a work of art, they’re not so much reacting to what they see but perhaps to a feeling of being imposed upon, and that’s emotional, it’s psychological. It’s a feeling of inadequacy. That’s why we have a responsibility to put the public back into public art.”

“The goal is not to get everybody to like everything, but to help people support the idea of having a choice, and of being open to having an enriching visual experience. That’s an obligation we have as administrators, and that’s where the Public Art Master Plan comes in. It’s a step toward getting people to feel a sense of involvement.”

Chicano Park, she said, is an excellent example of a community that shaped its own identity in response to outside challenge or change.

“It was a very spontaneous effort, where members of the community rallied together to establish a sense of place after there had been a disruption to that very community by the construction of (Interstate 5) and the Coronado Bay Bridge. What has resulted is a phenomenal tribute that is living history. The murals continue to be developed and painted. It has become a tremendous landmark and a real point of pride, a gathering place for people who live there and who visit this area.”

Smaller, community-oriented projects like those that will be realized under the Public Art Master Plan, will complement the Commission’s more monumental project known as “City Gates,” which has been in the planning stages for more than three years. Last December, after a juried competition, local artist Ellen Phillips and the team of Robin Brailsford, Ysela Jacques Chacon and Roberto Salas were commissioned by the city to create public art projects along Interstate 5. But financing remains a problem: Although the San Diego City Council approved the plans for gates in La Jolla and Barrio Logan, funds that had been allocated by the Commission for the for the project were diverted out of last year’s budget, and now the Commission must raise the $350,000 to finance the works.

Because, to date, funds for public art have been minimal or lacking altogether, Goldman is seeking to develop partnerships with other city and county departments, such as Parks and Recreation, City Planning and the city architect. She is also directing her abundant energies toward designing a formalized percent-for-art ordinance for new construction projects and an artists’ slide register with a computerized data bank.

“The bottom line is that we’re trying to create a comprehensive and responsible public art program that provides real opportunities to artists and to the community, and to build a collection and be responsible to that collection.”

For those familiar with local lore, especially the Port Commission’s prolonged struggle to spend its sizable art budget, or the city’s near-withholding of funds from an organization that sponsored a controversial work of public art, Goldman’s cause may appear more like an uphill battle.

“The experience in public art here has been fairly underdeveloped,” she said. “The Stuart Collection (at UC San Diego), the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art’s public art collection and Chicano Park are all stellar, in terms of resources here, but it seems that the community has not had positive experiences on which to base their points of view.”

Nevertheless, she said, since she moved here from Denver she has been impressed by the receptivity of the audience and the city’s awareness of its own potential.

“There’s a pioneer spirit here that’s very contagious and a hopefulness that’s conducive to change. People are starting to say, we’ve grown 58% (in population) in the last 20 years. How can we provide an identity for ourselves that makes us feel a sense of community, and makes us feel that we’re really directed?”