New Visions of Public Art in San Diego

A seasonal malaise commonly overtakes the art scene this time of year, with college galleries shut down and others airing out their schedules with long summer group shows. But sleep is the time for dreams, after all, and, while San Diego galleries appear to be settling in for their summer rest, artists and city planners are busily spawning visions of a more artistically vital urban landscape.

Two nascent projects now hovering in their fertile imaginations may help transform San Diego’s experience with large-scale public art from a nightmare to a vibrant, positive dream. One, still in a very amorphous state, is a plan to integrate a work of art or art treatment into the Martin Luther King Jr. Promenade downtown, formerly called Linear Park. The other, formalized in a city document but not yet approved, calls for numerous sculptural and environmental elements to be incorporated in the future development of the Miramar landfill.

Both plans and processes reflect a generous degree of social sensitivity that may help protect the projects, if realized, from the community-based wrath that has soured several efforts at installing public art locally. The most notorious example is the Port Commission’s 1988 rejection of a Vito Acconci proposal for Spanish Landing. The most recent is the continuing flap over Andrea Blum’s “Split Pavilion” in Carlsbad.

Sensitivity to the community of nearby residents, workers and users of the site characterizes the plan for development of the Miramar landfill. Written into the plan are ways to empower landfill workers to feel more ownership of the site as well as ways to make the facilities more accommodating and educational for its users. An unusual level of respect for the environment itself, however, is what makes the plan most interesting and most promising.

The city’s only landfill occupies more than 1,500 acres on the southern end of the Miramar Naval Air Station. Though the land is owned by the Navy, the landfill itself is operated by the city of San Diego’s Waste Management Department. To comply with new state regulations requiring diversion of greater and greater proportions of the waste stream, the city intends to build numerous recycling, composting, processing and disposal facilities at the site. The project is expected to take five to seven years to complete, at a cost of $150 million.

A February draft of the landfill’s general development plan--scheduled to be voted on by City Council’s Public Facilities and Recreation committee in late July--begins, surprisingly, with a poem. Written by artists Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, who teach at UC San Diego and who have created plans for environmental works worldwide, the poem sets the tone for a document remarkable in its approach to the land as an active, living entity, not merely a passive receptacle for waste.

The Harrisons (who, along with artist Paul Hobson served on the landfill’s design team headed by Martinez Cutri & McArdle) have proposed the restoration of part of the landfill to its native condition with “Ridgebacks, Saddlebacks and Muscular Hills.” Twenty million cubic yards of dirt need to be removed from one part of the landfill to create space for more trash. The Harrisons recommend that the dirt be placed atop another area of the landfill that is already full, then sculpted and planted to match the surrounding, natural terrain.

“Such folding of the earth is good ecologically and it saves money that would be used to cart away the dirt. The shapes echo the far mountains,” said Newton Harrison. “Most importantly, the work is a critique of the ruthless treatment of the landscape by San Diego developers, where the tops of hills are cut off, valleys are filled, riparian habitats ended and flat surfaces constructed with the only intention of housing and profitability.”

The new landscape would create a series of “views and screens” of the various facilities located on the site, and restore continuity to a “nature corridor” now interrupted by the landfill itself. If implemented, this plan for “part landscape, part landfill, part service facilities, part earthwork and part reclamation” would be the first work by the Harrisons in San Diego.

Although the work would bear the signature of time and weather more than of the artists themselves, several other areas of the landfill would receive more conventional art treatments. Hobson, for instance, has designed a series of sculptural signs to be placed at the entries to the different landfill facilities. These would be made with materials reclaimed from the landfill and would refer to the activity that takes place within in an exaggerated fashion along the lines of Claes Oldenburg’s monumental sculptures.

The greens and wood waste area, for example, would be marked by giant logs being sliced by oversized saw blades. At the composting buyback station, a massive shovel would be stuck into a huge pile resembling compost.

“I was trying to reach out to the staff that works at the landfill and the visitor there with a whimsical approach that would direct the users of the facility with visual cues but also expand their experience of the landfill so it’s more than just a dirty old dump. We started with the idea that we could educate through art,” Hobson said.

Hobson also proposes an “Earthwindow Walk” allowing visitors to compare a cross-section of a conventional dump with the new variety of more environmentally sound landfills, and an artist-in-residency program, where artists would create art from reclaimed materials, curate exhibitions on site, or present performances.

Paul Gagliardo, deputy director of the city’s waste management department, refuse disposal division, has worked closely with Hobson and the Harrisons to develop an impressive and ambitious plan. It goes beyond “a bureaucratic job well done,” as he puts it, to embody a holistic vision of art, nature, and functional design.

“The government has a lot of responsibility, and it goes further than just taking care of business,” Gagliardo said. “It goes to taking care of and educating future generations. In a purely aesthetic manner it just makes good sense.”

Aesthetic, educational and social concerns also coalesce in efforts to commission a new work to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the downtown park that bears his name. The King Promenade’s art advisory committee has a bit of history to overcome, however. It bears faint scars from a troublesome art commission that ended in rejection.

New York artists Dennis Adams and Andrea Blum (the same artist responsible for the Carlsbad work) were part of the original design team for the 12-acre, $20-million park that runs parallel to Harbor Drive. Their proposed installation for three large walls with photographic images of a young Latino man scaling a fence ignited a firestorm among representatives of the local Latino community, who felt the image was an offensive reference to illegal border crossing.

The Adams/Blum proposal was rejected by the Center City Development Corp. in 1990, the day before groundbreaking of the park. Both CCDC and members of the park’s art advisory committee seem to have learned a lesson from the experience and are now seeking to commission another artist or team to design a work for the park. The park was renamed after Dr. King in 1991, and a series of at least 13 granite slabs inscribed with quotes by the civil rights leader are to be inset into the walkway of the park. The first of these panels has already been installed at the foot of 1st Avenue.

According to Max Schmidt, vice president of planning and engineering for CCDC, art is now being sought “to complement or supplement the flat tableaux with something vertical, either literal or abstract sculpture.” Roughly $300,000 has been budgeted for the commission. The art advisory committee, working with CCDC board members and staff as well as leaders in the African-American community, will soon invite five artists or teams to develop proposals for the site. Though the names of the finalists have not yet been released, members of the committee say they are all African-American.

The African-American community members working with the art advisory committee “have brought a very rich and human component to the whole process,” said Hugh Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and member of the art committee. Other members of the art committee agreed that the alienation felt by the Latino community during the Adams/Blum incident has left its imprint on their decision-making process.

“This time, the process has felt very right,” Davies said.