Where Art Leads . . .

The city of Ventura’s plan to incorporate a major artwork into the reconstruction of the Grant Park reservoir is a bold example of exactly the kind of thinking that makes art in public places programs worth having.

Carefully selected and executed, such an artwork could help turn a spectacular but underused park into a more popular destination for families and visitors alike.

Although most public arts projects “follow”--being installed where there are already plenty of passersby to enjoy them--in this case the Public Arts Commission has chosen to lead.

“Whenever we have visitors from out of town we always take them up to Grant Park to show them the incredible view of the city,” commission member Glen Morris explained at a recent hearing on upcoming projects. “This would be a way to encourage more people to go up there.”

The long-range vision, added chair Scott Boydstun, is “to enhance Grant Park with an ongoing series of projects, until the park has reached its potential.”

The site is one of five for which the city’s Public Art Commission is now selecting artists and ideas. The other sites--E.P. Foster Library, the branch library at Casa de Anza, a transit center at the Buenaventura Mall and the California Street offramp of The Ventura Freeway--are all in heavily traveled locations.

Ventura recognized the importance of public art in 1991, when it passed an ordinance reserving 2% of the budget for each future construction project to be spent on art. Oxnard, Thousand Oaks, Moorpark and Ojai are other Ventura County cities with similar programs.

Of the money thus far accumulated, $405,000 was budgeted for projects in 1996-97 and $529,125 for 1997-98; $175,000 of that will go for artwork at the Grant Park reservoir site.

By law, this money can only be used for art. It cannot be used to merely landscape the site--even artfully. But if used with the sort of inspired creativity that produced the multimedia Central Garden at the Getty Center, Antonio Gaudi’s Serpentine Gardens in Barcelona, Spain, or the three-dimensional playground of fountains, pathways and lookout points of the Cerro Santa Lucia park in Santiago, Chile, it could help turn this underused and underappreciated hilltop into a source of civic pleasure and pride.

The obvious thing for a public arts program to do is to plant statues in parks and hang paintings in City Hall. We expect more imagination than that from artists, and this exciting challenge is a good start.

We hope local artists will step forward to take this good idea and fly with it.