County Draws on Artists to Enliven Rail Stations

There’s a new “art gallery” planned for the South Bay, an expansive museum stretching from El Segundo to Lennox to Inglewood. It also will double as a mass transit system.

As part of the construction of the countywide Metro Rail, the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission is hiring artists to create public art projects for the train stations. The commission is also seeking area residents to volunteer as advisers.

“We all get caught up in a 9-to-5 existence, and we sometimes don’t smell the roses,” said Charles Dickson, a sculptor from Compton who is designing a station in El Segundo. “The stations to me are like tremendous flowers.”

Art-for-Rail-Transit Administrator Jessica Cusick said the program will produce more than murals or paintings on barren station walls. She made it clear that the type of art sought could include sound or lights, for example.

“What we’re trying to do is build a new set of cultural landmarks for Los Angeles,” she said. “. . . Without trying to sound too grandiose, what we might end up with is a countywide museum.”

In some instances, the artists will work with the architects to incorporate the art into the station design. At the four stations planned for El Segundo, which will be used heavily by commuters, the artists have come up with creations whose subjects will not be instantly obvious, even to repeat users.

The Douglas Street station, for instance, will feature an abstract pattern that is based on a map of the area with constellations superimposed.

Passengers using the station at Aviation Boulevard and Imperial Highway will trigger a sound recorded in outer space--Cusick said it is reminiscent of whale “songs”--by stepping on a particular unmarked area of the station floor. A rush of commuters, triggering many of these sounds, is expected to produce a sort of extraterrestrial symphony.

Another El Segundo station, the one designed by Dickson, will have a butterfly theme in honor of the endangered El Segundo blue butterfly. A huge sculpture will show a metamorphosing butterfly juxtaposed with an airplane under production. The station will be at Nash Street and Mariposa Avenue. (Mariposa is the Spanish word for butterfly.)

“I think every artist longs for this opportunity,” Dickson said. “The freeways of today are very much like the pyramids of yesterday. This is giving me a feeling of longevity and great accomplishment. I can’t wait to go up my elevator . . . to see the butterflies.”

There will be 14 stations on the Green Line, which will run along the median of the Century Freeway from Norwalk to Los Angeles International Airport. Seven of the stops will be in the South Bay. Although the new freeway will end at LAX, the Green Line, scheduled to open in 1994, will run on an elevated guideway through El Segundo to the northern boundary of Redondo Beach.

In addition to the El Segundo stops, other South Bay stations will be in Lennox, and one each on the Hawthorne-Redondo Beach line and the Hawthorne-Inglewood line.

The other three artists for the El Segundo stations will be Daniel Martinez, Renee Petropolos, and Richard Turner, and Carl Cheng will do the Hawthorne-Redondo Beach station.

In an attempt to involve residents of Gardena, Hawthorne, Inglewood and Lennox in the public art for the other two stations, the commission is seeking volunteers to serve on an advisory group that will write a report on the history and cultural heritage of the area surrounding the stations. The report will go to the art experts on the artist selection committee and to the artists themselves.

Two members of the community advisory group will also serve on the panel that selects the artists.

Community volunteers do not need a background in art, according to transit officials.

The transportation commission has allocated .5% of its construction budget for public art. Although the total construction budget is still tentative, officials said art budgets will probably range from $45,000 to $100,000 for each station.

At a public meeting held Tuesday in Hawthorne to attract community volunteers, Cusick explained the variety of forms that public art has taken in other cities’ transportation systems: holograms in Miami; in New York, a statue of a man hailing a cab has fooled many a cabdriver; and in Boston, a subway platform allows commuters to play musical instruments that are suspended in the air.

Tuesday’s meeting drew only a few area residents. Transit officials said they will hold additional informational sessions in the coming weeks for interested community groups.

“We don’t expect everybody to love everything we do,” Cusick said at the meeting. “I don’t expect to love it all. What we do expect is that all of you will find something you love.”