City Seeks New Face for Arts Plaza

If it was an expensive handbag or a fancy ball gown, they could have just returned it long ago.

But because the $150,000 copper curtain hanging on the side of the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza did not come with a money-back guarantee, the city is trying--once again--to improve one of its most prominent and most maligned landmarks.

At a public hearing in November, Port Hueneme artist Paul Morris is scheduled to unveil four options designed to make the curtain more appealing. The city has set aside $10,000 from a public arts fund to spend on brightening up the dull, brown metal curtain.

Morris, who makes his living designing sets and amusement parks for the entertainment industry, said the sculpture is in dire need of a fix.

“They’ve even shut the lights off at night so nobody sees it,” Morris said. “It’s such an embarrassment.”

Ideally, what he wants to do is create a contemporary painting on the curtain, staining the metal in different shades--black, red, blue and green. He has four ideas in mind, but his favorite is to create a somewhat abstract image of the sun setting in the West, with the hills in the foreground and two lines representing the intersection of the Ventura and Moorpark freeways.

It’s important that the design be simple enough for motorists buzzing along at 65 mph to be able to see and understand, Morris said. But he is realistic enough to know that it isn’t going to be easy to please everyone.

“Whatever you put up there, you are going to have people that aren’t going to like it,” Morris said. “I don’t care what you put on it. You could paint an eyeball on it and some people are going to love it and some are going to hate it.”

Morris said he would seek corporate sponsorship to make improvements to the curtain. The city’s $10,000, he said, would barely cover construction of a scaffolding around the curtain. He would not get paid for his troubles. But he said he would gain plenty from fixing up this city’s least favorite sculpture.

“It’s a legacy,” he said. “Everybody who drives down the freeway is going to see something I created and gave to the community. I will have left something. That is worth something.”

Last year, a committee, of which Morris is a member, was created to figure out what to do about the curtain. Carol Williams, an analyst in the city manager’s office, said the 15-member committee includes concerned arts commissioners and local business leaders, artists and architects. Another option the committee is still considering is to leave the sculpture alone, a move some members would heartily applaud.

“I hate to see art dealt with by committee,” said local architect Francisco Behr, who participated in several of the committee’s meetings. “The whole point of art is that it is not supposed to be liked or disliked by everybody. You are not going to fix it with a committee. It’s not going to be a work of art, it’s going to be a work of committee.”

“Eventually, everybody is going to look back on this debate as being something of a comedy,” Behr added.

Ever since the narrow strips of copper first appeared on the side of the city’s blocky new civic center, the curtain has been fodder for both biting humor and taxpayers’ resentment.

Meant to reflect the elegance of the swaying stage curtain within, the giant copper curtain almost immediately missed that goal when city officials deemed it too dangerous and ordered it battened down to protect motorists on the adjacent Ventura Freeway over fear of flying copper strips.

Williams said the curtain committee has dismissed a lot of ideas simply because its budget is too small to make a radical change.

“There were some really glorious ideas, things like taking the whole thing down and starting over, maybe having another piece mounted on top of the curtain,” Williams said. “But the drastic things had to be ruled out because there weren’t enough funds.”

The committee plans to solicit public comments at a 7 p.m. meeting Nov. 14 in the board room at the Civic Arts Plaza. The public’s comments would then be included in a report to the council, which has the final say on what happens to the curtain.

Morris isn’t holding his breath for the go-ahead to start painting.

“It’s such a political thing that no one wants to make a decision,” he said. “This has already gone on for a year. Everybody is afraid because it is such an eyesore.”