Traffic Island as Artistic Landmark

The site, as artist Christopher Sproat describes it, is a “Mars-scape.” The long triangular traffic island in north Escondido “drops off into oblivion” and “already contains the world’s most enormous traffic signal.” As Sproat further notes, the land is barren and continues to erode.

What’s a city to do with such a useless eyesore?

Call in an artist to apply an aesthetic Band-Aid, to transform an ugly scrap left over from a city street realignment into a point of civic pride, to work art’s alchemical wonders on a victim of sloppy city planning.

The New York-based Sproat is one of three artists currently competing for the opportunity to enliven that plot of land through the largest commission in the history of Escondido’s five-year-old public art program. Escondido’s Public Art Commission invited Sproat, San Diego-based Italo Scanga and Mauro Staccioli from Milan, Italy, to make proposals for the 30,000-square-foot site at the intersection of El Norte and Centre City parkways. Drawings, models and statements about the three proposals are on view through the end of August in Escondido’s City Hall. Public comments are encouraged while the proposals are on view and also at the commission’s meeting to select the winner, scheduled for September or October.

Funds for the $200,000 commission ($170,000 for the artist, which covers construction, and $30,000 for administrative costs) will come from Escondido’s public art fund, which began accruing developers’ fees in 1987. At first, the city enforced a fee of 1/4 of 1% on all commercial, office and industrial development. In 1990, the ordinance was altered to require a fee of 30 cents per square foot after the first 1,800 square feet on all new construction in town, including residential. But the ordinance, according to Susan Pollack, Escondido’s public art consultant, “was written deliberately to deal with the development of industrial and commercial space, because that can make the most negative impact on a city.”

Most developers have chosen to apply their fee toward the purchase or commission of art on their own site, and nine sculptures, murals and fountains have resulted. Others have opted to contribute their fee to the city’s public art fund, which so far has commissioned three artworks on city property: Christine Oatman’s lyrical bronze “Eucalyptus Leaf Court” in Kit Carson Park, T.J. Dixon’s “Reflections on Downtown” located in the center of the city, and Jeff Lindeneau’s “Community,” a steel sculpture that marks the west entrance to the city. Lindeneau’s, at $64,000, was the most expensive city commission until now.

Escondido’s public art fund now holds roughly $250,000 not yet allocated. Other projects in the works include a collaborative commission for California sculpture with the nascent Center for the Arts North County and an art program for a local low-income housing development.

The current commission is by far the largest the city has attempted and is intended to produce a local landmark, a northern gateway to the city. Few pedestrians use the site, but over 15,000 cars pass it daily.

“It’s a monster of a site with all kinds of ugly things around it. Every problem that an urban site can have, it has,” Pollack said. “We needed something to pull it all together.”

Ten artists were suggested by an ad-hoc committee composed of Mary Beebe, director of the Stuart Collection of Outdoor Sculpture at UC San Diego, landscape architect Patrick O’Connor of the Austin Hansen Group, and University of San Diego art historian Sally Yard. After viewing slides of the artists’ works, members of the Escondido Public Art Commission selected three finalists, and awarded each $5,000 to develop a proposal. All three presented their plans to the commission in early July.

Scanga, Staccioli and Sproat have all proposed monumental sculptural forms for the site, rather than a more integrated environmental solution. The commission felt the site was not appropriate for a conceptual approach, Pollack said. What it got, instead, was a choice between a vibrant, celebratory figure, a minimalist exclamation point and a whimsical tableau.

Scanga’s standing steel “Escondido Figure” measures 32 feet in height, including the base. It holds aloft an arched form with sculpted fruits attached, a metaphor, according to the artist, for the agriculture that supports the city. Like Scanga’s smaller wood sculptures, as well as his works on paper, the figure would be painted with a Cubist mosaic of colored shapes outlined in black. Cypress and eucalyptus trees would punctuate the site, as would three large, colored-steel spheres, representing the globe or infinity, according to Scanga.

Staccioli’s “Sculpture Escondido 1992” would also be large enough to create the kind of drive-by impact the commission is looking for. His rust-colored steel form would rise to a height of nearly 50 feet from its grassy slope. Shaped like a gently curving, pointed dash, the sculpture would read like a giant accent mark upon the land, an emblem as recognizable as a bridge or other landmark, says Staccioli.

“The New Neighbor,” Sproat’s proposal, combines a welded-steel “mascot,” a building and a fence to create a playful suburban scenario, a twist on the traditional image of a house with a pet outside. Sproat’s 13-foot-high pet appears to be part dog, part deer. It stands on its hind legs, with its front paws poised against the post supporting the site’s huge traffic signal. The structure behind it would measure eight feet square but 34-feet high, proportions that Sproat designed to give it the effect of a “folly”--”an elaborately made building without much use.” A long fence of welded-steel leaves plays off the white picket fence form so typical in suburbia, Sproat says, and would help give the sense of an extended front yard to the retirement home adjacent to the site.

The Escondido Times Advocate made its own tongue-in-cheek suggestions for the site in an editorial last week. The city could save some money, the editorial said, by using a local monument that’s already been around for a while, a giant figure holding a car muffler on East Valley Parkway. In another editorial the previous week, the paper endorsed Scanga’s design, dubbing it “The Jolly Green-and-Lots-of-Other-Colors Giant Brings Gifts to the Hidden Valley.”

How much impact such an endorsement will have remains to be seen, but the Public Art Commission is committed to taking public input into account when it chooses the final design.

“We need to know how Escondido residents feel and we need to know now, before the pieces are up. Once the artist has been selected and the piece has been built and installed, it’s too late,” Pollack said, making reference to the controversy that has recently embroiled a public artwork in Carlsbad, despite advance efforts to inform the public of its design.

The models now on view at City Hall will also be taken to the shopping center and retirement home that border the site, to inform nearby residents and gather their responses. The three-member ad-hoc committee will first recommend a winner to the Public Art Commission, which will take into account public response and make its recommendation to the Escondido City Council, which will make the final vote.

An informed, participating public is especially important with a commission of this size, Pollack said, for residents are not only quick to criticize artworks they don’t understand, but also the city that funds them. This is money that’s been earmarked specifically for this purpose, she said.

“It’s exciting that when money is so tight, this fee set-up still allows us to put money back into the city without taking it out of general funds,” Pollack said.

“We’re not taking money from the homeless, I promise you. That’s what can kill a (public art) program, the perception that people are being irresponsible.”

Viewing hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the lobby at Escondido City Hall, 201 N. Broadway. For information, call the Community Services Department at 741-4693.