UC Irvine Art Alliance Making Maintenance of Sites a Priority

By CATHY CURTIS

Jan. 19, 1999 12 AM PT

Stephen Barker, faculty assistant to the UC Irvine chancellor, leaned back in his chair during a recent interview to reveal a small can of orange paint tucked away in a corner, a memento from the team that installed Mark di Suvero’s steel sculpture “Aesop” in front of the administration building.

“If we have a little midnight graffiti, I can go down in the morning and touch it up,” Barker said.

He wasn’t kidding.

Aware of UCI’s history of neglect for outdoor sculpture in its care, Barker promised that maintenance of outdoor sites would be a high priority of the new Campus Art Alliance he heads.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, outdoor works by several artists--including Di Suvero, Canadian sculptor Mowry Baden and Tony deLap--were installed at UCI with much fanfare and then ignored, or worse.

Plagued by dry rot, repeatedly vandalized and even set on fire, “Nova Albion”--a Di Suvero sculpture made from railroad ties and other castoff materials he often used in the 1960s--finally was repossessed by the artist in the following decade. Di Suvero wrote to the dean threatening a lawsuit but didn’t follow through.

Baden did successfully sue UCI--for $2.5 million--in 1988, when workers clearing a ravine to make way for faculty housing dug up his 1979 sculpture “Wild Celery for Stephen Davis” and hauled it away. The crew had thought the piece--made up of four long red steel ramps overgrown (as the artist intended) with wild plants--was just a piece of junk.

In the early 1990s, deLap loaned UCI his stainless steel and fiberglass sculpture “Houdini.” The campus never bothered to clean it, deLap said.

“The only thing that touched it was the lawn mowers that ran into it,” he joked last week. “I wasn’t particularly mad, but I took it [back] because it wasn’t favorable to me to have it there. . . . It’s a major piece of mine from the late ‘60s, the only one of that scale.”

DeLap has agreed to be a member of the new Art Alliance. Still, he said, “It’s amazing Mark [di Suvero] would come back.”