Pasadena Council to Vote on Art Conflict

In a move that may determine the future of the city’s public art projects, the Pasadena City Council will vote tonight on two competing recommendations for the first such project administered under the city’s new percent-for-art program.

The opposing recommendations pit the city’s arts division staff against its own arts commission, an advisory board of City Council appointees.

At issue is a $17,000 art commission for the Broadway Power Plant at the northern end of the Pasadena Freeway. Tied to power plant renovations and intended to serve as a “gateway” piece for those entering the city, the project has been planned since August, 1991, but would be the first built under the city’s new public art ordinance, enacted last February, mandating that 1% of city construction budgets be spent on the arts.

In a standard process that follows the ordinance’s guidelines, a panel--including artists John Outterbridge and Walter Askin, and Museum of Contemporary Art exhibitions coordinator Alma Ruiz--last October selected a design including sculptural and design elements by Highland Park artist Rod Baer. Baer has exhibited locally at the Meyers/Bloom Gallery and the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

But the arts commission--which established the guidelines and chose the panelists--immediately voted to overturn the panel’s recommendation, voting instead to award the commission to Pasadena artist Jirayr H. Zorthian, 81, for a proposal that would include sculptural and painted elements. Zorthian’s resume lists murals created in the 1930s and ‘40s, a 1953 show at the Pasadena Art Museum and a stint as chairman of the Pasadena Art Fair in 1954 and ’55.

The proposed reversal drew criticism from the city’s affirmative action director and a protest letter from the Pasadena Latin American Employees Assn., which objected to written materials by Zorthian suggesting that his more ambitious proposal could be “done within the budget if we use Mexican-American labor.” But the commission continued to support Zorthian, a factor that lead Lidia Fernandez Palmer, executive director of the Pasadena-based human rights group El Centro de Accion Social, to call for the resignation of the 11-member commission. Zorthian responded that he had been misunderstood when he suggested using a long-time assistant who is Mexican-American.

But in a poorly attended 11th-hour meeting called Friday evening, commissioners voted 4-2 to withdraw their support of Zorthian at today’s City Council meeting and instead to seek to have the entire project thrown out. They plan to ask the arts division to solicit new proposals from all area artists, according to the arts division’s Executive Director for the Arts Denise Nelson Nash.

Nash said Monday that her staff will continue to support Baer’s project, for which the city has already spent $10,000 on administrative costs and preliminary maquette fees, in addition to the $17,000 budgeted for the project.

“If you have a peer panel process, there is an expectation that that process be honored. It’s a process that works, that’s been used thousands of times,” Nash said. “And these commissioners were the ones that developed these guidelines. . . . Where the concerns lie now are on what effect their recommendations will have on future projects and what type of changes will need to be made in the selection process. We may have to start over with a new ordinance (if the Council disregards the peer panel process).”