Port Again Takes Stab at Public Art : Aesthetics: Board hires local company to create a master plan for acquiring artworks for the waterfront.

The Board of Port Commissioners decided Monday to tread back into an arena where it has taken more slaps than the Three Stooges: public art.

The commissioners, who in the past unleashed a torrent of recriminations by first creating a blue-ribbon committee of art experts and then rejecting its recommendations, have agreed to start all over.

This time the commissioners voted to hire the San Diego husband-and-wife team of Carole and Thomas Hobson, and their Management for the Arts company, to help prepare a Public Arts Master Plan that will eventually lead to the acquisition of art to be placed along the waterfront.

While the amount of the Hobsons’ contract has yet to be negotiated, it is expected to be a relatively small portion of the nearly $2 million that the Port District has set aside for public art on the bay side tidelands the agency controls.

As a matter of policy, commissioners have for years earmarked 0.5% of the district’s revenue for public art. But because of ongoing controversies, it has spent little of the money.

The Hobsons were recommended by a commissioners subcommittee, which sifted through nearly 30 proposals. Carole Hobson told reporters that she has worked in the San Diego arts community for several years and was executive director of the county’s Public Arts Advisory Council in 1987-89.

She also has provided organizational planning, staff development and other services for groups such as the San Diego Area Dance Alliance and the African-American Museum, and she said she organized the competition that led to the painting of a large mural on the wall outside the Ramada Inn downtown, which had been criticized as drab.

Thomas Hobson said his skills lie in business management and development planning. They have been working together for about four years, he said.

The Hobsons said they are aware of the public art problems that have dogged the Port District for five years.

“We don’t want to repeat the history of public art at the port,” Carole Hobson said.

She also said she knows about the commissioners’ distaste for contemporary sculpture, perhaps best characterized by Commissioner Dan Larsen’s statement that good public art should be the equivalent of a man on a horse.

Questions about whether the port’s public art should be “safe and traditional” or modern art will be addressed during the year it takes to draft the master plan, she said. The plan, according to the Hobsons, will attempt to reflect the views of the commissioners, artists and the community.

One obstacle the Hobsons are almost certain to face is skepticism from the arts community. Just two years ago, the six members of a blue-ribbon panel of artists and art museum experts resigned en masse in protest over the Board of Commissioners refusal to accept the committee’s recommendations.

At that time, the panel conducted a national contest and selected a playful landscape of airplane designs by Brooklyn artist Vito Acconci at a cost of $325,000 as well as an 18-foot blue concrete palm tree by La Jolla sculptor Roberto Salas for $75,000. The commissioners turned down Acconci even after he had made dramatic revisions to his design.

The Acconci-Salas debacle was preceded two years earlier by the commissioners rejection of another major art work recommended by its arts committee.

The committee had proposed a design by internationally noted minimalist sculptor Ellsworth Kelly.

Kelly designed a stainless steel obelisk and a prow-like concrete structure that was rejected by the commissioners. Kelly then submitted a modified plan, which commissioners approved. But before the sculpture could be built, the artist backed out, saying he was uncomfortable with the compromise.

The board also voted to spend $51,600 to free a staff person, William Winchell, to work on the new public arts project.