Public Art Is Alive in S.D. : Show: University of San Diego exhibit demonstrates that it can thrive in the midst of controversy.

Because bruises seem to loom as large in the memory as soothing strokes, the first thing that comes to mind when the words public art are spoken in San Diego is the Port District’s rejection that doomed a Vito Acconci proposal here in 1988. The district said Acconci’s design for a harborside park (near the airport), with its play area shaped like airplane fragments, brought back too many painful memories of the 1978 PSA disaster in North Park.

That rejection doesn’t define the entirety of San Diego’s experience with public art, but in polarizing the community into groups for and against the proposed artwork, it did define several of the key issues surrounding public art’s creation: Who should make it? Who should choose it? And who should pay for it?

“Place and Presence: Studies of San Diego’s Art in Public Spaces Since 1980”--at University of San Diego’s Founders Gallery--neither asks nor answers these questions directly. Instead, the show presents a small sampling of public-art projects--through drawings, slides and models--that reach high and, for the most part, attain their goals.

This is a show of the winners, the proposals and projects that sneak or strut into the public’s consciousness and make a difference. Most of these projects were realized, some for temporary installations throughout the city--such as on backs of buses and bus stop benches. Others are permanently installed--such as the sculptural works in the Stuart Collection on the UC San Diego campus and the murals at Chicano Park. Most of the works included in the show were the result of private initiatives rather than public sponsorship, although some of the artists received public funding.

Each project bears its own lesson about the public-art selection process and the vagaries of public versus private funding, but these lessons remain in the background, alluded to in the show’s small catalogue or abbreviated even further on the works’ identifying labels.

Sally Yard, assistant professor of fine arts at USD and organizer of the show, demonstrates amply that public art is not as endangered a species in San Diego as one might think. In fact, there is much more out there than Yard acknowledges in this show.

For every astute social critique included here, there are a hundred static and lifeless monuments, plunked down in parks and other public spaces. For every work of poetry and meditation referred to here, a hundred bland but well-intentioned murals have been painted to give meaning and character to a place.

The omissions from this show tell as valid--though certainly not as heartening--a story as its inclusions. What is missing here is the contrast between the vibrant and the lackluster, the challenging and the predictable, for it is the struggle between these two forces that best characterizes San Diego’s experience with public art in the last 10 years.

For all of the limitations of Yard’s approach, however, her optimism is hard to resist. By singling out a dozen of the richest, most provocative public-art statements in the city, she temporarily erases the air of hostility that clouds local debates on the subject and affirms the breadth of expressions possible here.

There is room in this city, the show demonstrates, for monumental odes to the family and to the Mexican Revolution, represented here by studies for Chicano Park murals by Salvador Torres and Victor Ochoa. There is room to share personal histories, as documented in the photographs of Suzanne Lacy’s performance, “Whisper, the Waves, the Wind,” which joined 150 older women in conversation on the beach in La Jolla.

There is room for poetic intervention in everyday life, which is what Terry Allen’s talking trees provide on the campus of UC San Diego, part of the Stuart Collection of outdoor sculpture.

And there is room--but not quite as much--for criticism of government policies and entrenched public attitudes.

David Avalos’ “San Diego Donkey Cart,” Avalos,’ Louis Hock’s and Liz Sisco’s “Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation” bus poster and Hock’s, Sisco’s, Scott Kessler’s and Deborah Small’s “America’s Finest?” bus bench art all delivered stunning punches to the local public’s sense of superiority, security and righteousness. All were highly controversial, and Avalos’ solo statement was squelched almost immediately by a federal judge who called “Donkey Cart,” a life-size installation in front of the Federal Courthouse downtown, a safety risk. But the presence of these works here, in original form or as models, assure that public art is public dialogue when the art has something to say.

Ultimately, “Place and Presence” is a celebration of persistence--the persistence of artists who ask tough questions of an often “unwitting” public (as Yard describes it), and the persistence of administrators who help push those visions into place in the public arena.

Founders Gallery in Founders Hall, University of San Diego, through May 26, open weekdays 12-5. In conjunction with the show, Gail Goldman, coordinator of public art for the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, will present a free slide lecture today at 7 p.m. in Camino Hall, Room 153.

CRITIC’S CHOICE: Local artist Peter Stearns has a sense of humor. It can be found somewhere in between the chain saws, knives and scenes of immolation and bondage that he paints in his recent work at the David Lewinson Gallery in Del Mar Plaza, through May 5. Stearns’ show, “Encounters With Worlds,” can be disturbing and offensive, but it can also evoke sly smiles and nods of acknowledgement. It’s worth seeing, if only to help determine how far one’s tolerance stretches.