Common Ground of ‘Properties’ : Arts: Panelists at the new Huntington Beach center discuss how their public works encourage interaction with the people who view them.

When Karen Atkinson installed a piece of public art in Santa Monica City Hall recently, the worker staffing a nearby information booth became something of an expert on it.

Atkinson’s piece, “For the Time Being,” consists of what looks to be an ordinary parking meter. When viewers feed the meter a quarter, however, it plays a tape of commentary by artists and writers with HIV or AIDS or by their families and friends. The city hall staffer not only learned all about the project--how the money collected will support work by such artists, how viewers can call Atkinson to comment--but she is also memorizing the tapes, which periodically change.

“I go in there, and she’s mouthing the words,” Atkinson said.

Exposing art to people who don’t go out of their way to visit museums is the idea behind public art, the topic of a panel discussion Thursday night at the new Huntington Beach Art Center. Atkinson was one of five panelists with work in “Community Properties,” one of the center’s inaugural exhibitions, which is all about people, society and interaction.

Atkinson has installed about 20 meters in colleges, businesses, community centers and art venues, mostly in Los Angeles, and said she has received plenty of feedback.

Many “amazed” callers just wanted to know how she got her hands on so many real meters. (They were donated by Duncan Industries, which manufactures them, she said.) Other callers said they were deeply moved by stories on the tape. Atkinson seemed most fascinated by how relative strangers to the art world, such as the city hall staffer, have so readily embraced and championed the work.

The staffer has “become great at explaining the piece--and she’s not an art person,” Atkinson said. If somebody doesn’t “quite get it, (the staffer) goes through these long explanations.”

To create her installation “We Are Neighbors,” Mary Linn-Hughes met her public face to face. In fact, the Huntington Beach resident organized a block party. The work includes photographs, a wooden picket fence and commentary from the party.

“I live in a neighborhood where people don’t know each other,” said Hughes, who has been in the city for 17 years. “As I knocked on doors (inviting people), I realized I didn’t know many people. . . . One neighbor said, ‘You know, it’s so weird living here. You can hear your neighbors, but you can’t see them,’ ” thanks to so many fences.

But “lots of people came to the party, and we had fun.” Hughes says her effort “didn’t greatly transform the neighborhood for the long haul” but may have made “a dent in middle-class suburban isolation.” She hopes her piece will encourage more such parties throughout Orange County, and she invites anyone who stages such an event to add pictures of it to a photo album in the installation.

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Cheri Gaulke and Sue Maberry invited public participation in their work by asking gay and lesbian friends who are in monogamous relationships and have children to have family portraits taken at Sears. Their installation, “Families Next Door,” is meant to help broaden the public’s understanding of “family.”

For the most part, the artists’ friends reported “really positive” experiences at Sears, Gaulke said.

Richard A. Lou and Robert J. Sanchez’s installation may have elicited the most heated response among the panelists’ works.

In “White-Fying,” two fictional Chicano anthropologists discover the lost white race. The work includes a video and photographs in which “Los Anthropolocos” hunt and capture a frantic, naked white couple, trapping them beneath a net.

In this scenario, roles are reversed: Minorities are conducting scientific findings and defining white culture, and, Lou said, Chicanos are the “new dominant culture.” The work is meant to “provoke people into thinking about how our society has established itself and that maybe it wasn’t such a good way.”

Viewers have expressed “a great deal of anger” over the work, Lou said. But, he said, he thinks that’s good.

“Hopefully, they’ll go home and think about it and have a dialogue with someone else about it,” Lou said.

He said he has no choice but to make art with a message, one that has meaning outside of a gallery wall.

“I’m a brown man,” Lou said. “I live in a white society. What do I do? I focus my efforts in trying to break down myths instituted by the dominant culture. Otherwise, I’d go crazy.”

* “Community Properties” continues through June 11 at the Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St., Huntington Beach. Hours: noon-8 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursday; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sundays. Admission: $3. (714) 374-1650.