Ventura Council to Vote on 3 Public Art Projects

In an effort to take art to the city’s streets, fields and highways, the City Council is considering three projects that could cover bland cement structures with creative strokes.

The City Council will vote Monday on whether to funnel out of this year’s budget $92,000 to the five-story, 500-space downtown parking structure; $28,750 to the yet-to-be-built California 126 pedestrian overpass; and $170,000 to the Ventura River Trail.

“Along the lines of ancient Rome and Greece, the idea is to have art all around you. It doesn’t have to be in a special building where you go to look at art,” said Jennifer Easton, Ventura’s cultural affairs supervisor. “This is about breaking down those walls.”

The city’s innovative public program, to feed art concepts into functional city projects, began in 1991. Under the program, known as Art in Public Places, the City Council authorized allotting 2% of city capital improvement budget for commissioning artists’ energies.

To date the city has funded two such projects: the bronze figurative sculpture “Chumash Fluteplayer,” designed by Eric Richards, which stands in Arroyo Verde Park; and “The Five Senses,” piece designed by Mark Lere, at California Plaza next to the Promenade. Some money also went to pay for an artist to participate in preliminary design plans for the Ventura River Trail.

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But the projects up for consideration Monday night would be the largest so far. The city has accumulated $829,000 from capital improvements since collections began. The new proposals would, if approved, use $290,750 of that.

The biggest chunk of money would go to the Ventura River Trail. The project aims to transform the journey from the Ojai bike trail to the sea into a whirl through a museum without walls--a miniature tour through the city history. City engineers and landscape architects have worked since 1993 with Jud Fine, a Los Angeles-based artist with a home in Carpinteria, to come up with a trail master plan.

The plan identifies the array of land uses along the trail--including industrial, agricultural and residential. The history there stretches from the era of the Chumash Indians to the heyday of the oil industry.

The trail path will play those up.

“One of his ideas was to take metal rail from the railroad tracks and use it as part of the fencing,” said Albert Carbon, the project engineer for the bike trail, who worked with artist Fine. “Another was to take pieces of ingredients he finds on trails, use those as stands, or a backdrop for mile markers.”

One mile marker might be a piece of an oil derrick, another a piece of discarded agricultural equipment.

The artistic flourishes to the downtown parking structure might be more superficial, because it must be built quickly, and the design has already been approved. But redevelopment officials say there are many opportunities for art projects using the parking structure’s exterior sheer walls: banners on the outside of the building and entrances and exits to the building.

As one of the entrances to the city, the California 126 pedestrian overpass was chosen because it is highly visible.

The overpass will link Camino Real Park and what is slated to be a large residential development on the opposite side of the highway. Easton said one idea would be for an artist to run workshops with neighborhood children.

The children would design colorful tiles which would be inlaid into the cement of the structure.

But whether it’s children’s tiles or the remnants of Ventura’s history, the projects are expected to plant the seeds of public art.

“This is holistic and organic,” Easton said. “The idea is to get people involved early on in the process--to make people’s environment a little more worth looking at.”