ART / LEAH OLLMAN : S. D. Museum Languishes as Escondido Moves Ahead

The San Diego Museum of Art’s “Cultural Currents” show drew to a close last weekend, leaving the museum’s special exhibition galleries empty but permeated with a new sense of potential. The show will be a hard act to follow for a museum more akin to showing cartoons and cowboys than intimate and challenging art. Education Curator Mary Stofflet’s gathering of 13 ethnically diverse contemporary artists brought an energy and life to the museum that locals had every reason to believe was long since suppressed.

Granted, the museum’s schedule has not been wholly barren of stimulation in recent years. Shows of African art, German painting and American women artists have livened up the museum, but like most of its best offerings, these shows originated from beyond the museum walls.

The “Cultural Currents” show was reassuring. It demonstrated that, contrary to appearances, the people in SDMA’s curatorial offices are still breathing, their minds are still ticking and even spitting out ideas.

The museum’s lineup for the next two years is surprisingly diverse, with shows focusing on public art, Latin American presence in the U.S., the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and more; but again, nearly all originate from other museums. The Baldwin M. Baldwin Collection of Toulouse-Lautrec graphics, which was hailed as a great coup for the museum when it was donated this year, will kick off the season next month. The collection has already been shown at the museum, in full or in part, three times over the last dozen years.

With an annual budget of more than $3.5 million (of which curatorial and educational expenditures rank the lowest of all), the museum should be expected to do more than simply open its doors to other museums’ ideas while subsidizing its own curators’ long, humidity-controlled naps. The California Arts Council came down hard this year on the museum’s lack of initiative and its passing interest in quality. Let’s hope the museum takes the comments to heart.

Just over a century ago, the Escondido Land & Town Co. began sponsoring “booster excursions” to entice investors to buy land in their “hidden valley.”

If all goes according to plan, the city may want to resume those junkets in a few years to show off its turf to out-of-towners.

“We want to make Escondido a real attraction,” said Randy Melinger of the Escondido Planning Department. “We want it to be a place where you can spend a day browsing antique shops and visiting galleries. Public art will be a part of that new definition.”

This month, the city of Escondido is expected to allocate more than $100,000 for three artworks on public sites: a gateway to downtown, a figurative emblem of the city and a work for a public park. And this, said Melinger, is just the beginning.

The city has $470,000 in its coffers for public art, accumulated since the passage of an ordinance over a year ago that imposes a 0.25% fee on all new commercial, industrial and office projects. Developers have the option of spending the money on art for their own sites or turning over the fees, and the choices, to the city.

A public art partnership panel, composed of city staffers and representatives of the Chamber of Commerce and the Felicita Foundation (an umbrella organization for a variety of arts programs), has been meeting regularly to guide the program into its first phase. David Beck Brown, an artist, instructor and director of the Grossmont College Gallery, has been hired as a consultant. Both he and Melinger are well aware of the Pandora’s box that springs open at the mention of public art.

“We’re trying to learn from other people’s mistakes,” Brown said. “With the Port Commission, the final difficulty was that the commissioners were not educated in what was fine art in 1988,” he said of the controversial recent rejection of two public art proposals by the San Diego Port Commission. “They came in with an historical view. The arts advisory committee came in with a contemporary point of view. We’re going to be showing the City Council pictures of art across the country to show them the appropriateness of it. It’s an educational process.”

Melinger also emphasized the importance of encouraging public participation. “We’re going to have a public art forum to explain our programs, and we will display the proposals. We’re not going to spring anything on anyone. We won’t have a (public) vote on it, but we’ll get comments, and the response will be a factor in our decisions.

The public art program is expected to enhance Escondido’s sense of civic pride, which was given a healthy boost by the completion of its new City Hall complex this year. Enthusiasm is building as well for the civic center, planned for a site across the park from City Hall. Internationally renowned architect Charles Moore was recently selected for the project, which is estimated for completion in 1992.

Art will have a prominent place in this development. Along with two theaters and a community center, the civic center will house a 5,000-square-foot exhibition space to be operated by the Felicita Foundation.

“We want a serious viewing space,” said Reesey Shaw, the foundation’s curator, “so we can take traveling shows or close off the space for smaller shows.”

Shaw also serves on a committee to commission a major work of art for the new city hall. An international roster of artists is being considered for the award of $100,000 to $150,000.

A movement to make Escondido a haven for the arts emerged after the devastating cuts of Proposition 13, Shaw said, and the city’s commitment to the arts continues to grow.