San Diego Public Art

A standard lament in the visual arts community is that San Diego is fated to be a perpetual Jersey-on-the-Pacific, with art remaining the odd duck out in a region known for its theatre and physical culture.

The artists tend to blame this on the weather, without considering that the problem may be their art. San Diego has beautiful light, and people are outdoors enjoying it. For art to be an integral part of the regional culture,it needs to follow the people outdoors.

To a remarkable extent this has already occurred: art's outside in San Diego, thanks to community action, private foundations, and city art programs.

But the region also has a history of civic controversies over public art: several high-profile proposals have crashed and burned, and in a few cases installed work was removed. Sometimes the fault seemed to lie as much with the artist as the unhappy public. Artists and audience alike need to learn: good art is hard, good public art harder.

And even the controversy itself needs to be put into perspective: about the proposed Statue of Liberty, the New York Times opined that "no true patriot can countenance any such expenditures for bronze females in the present state of our finances." Parisians hated the Eiffel Tower. Veterans hated the Vietnam Wall.

To date most media coverage of San Diego public art has been event-driven, focused on proposals, installations, and any ensuing controversies. What's been missing is a directory of public art: something that not only helps interested viewers find the community gems and learn more about them, but also shows just how much good public art there already is. This book reviews selected works from around the region, with the criterion for inclusion being that the work be worth the trip.XThe links in this book jump to Safari or the Maps

app – to return, switch back to the Books app.Click on the image above to view the artwork locationsin Google Maps (along with a list of artists and titles)

David C. Freeman Memorial

Artist: Paul Sibel

Walk the walk from Children's Pool to La Jolla Cove, and just before the Bridge Club you'll see a metal box encrusted with barnacles. The barnacles are letters, and the box is actually three things: an emergency phone for calling the lifeguards; a marker showing the location of Boomer Beach (a world-renowned bodysurf break); and a memorial to David C. Freeman, a master bodysurfer and Boomer local who died young in 1994.

The San Diego bodysurfing community wished to remember a friend, and the lifeguard phone at the time was rusting out, so someone put two and two together and this memorial was born. Look closely and you'll see David's name among the letters.

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Night Vision Series I

Artist: Roberto Salas

Between Presidents Way and Upas, Park Boulevard has fifty-one traffic signs. The general pattern (if you try counting) goes something like this: Parking, No Parking, Parking, No Parking, No Parking, No Parking, No Parking, Zoo Place, what, what?

The what's are art – traffic sign art – and they're doing what the best public art does: paying attention to the surroundings, finding a niche, and settling in.

The signs are notable for a couple of reasons. First, unlike most art (which assumes the long look) but definitely like most billboards, they're designed to be seen at driving speed. Second, they were the City of San Diego's first-ever public art purchase, back in 1989.

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Pacific Union

Artist: George Trakas

Paris and Manhattan are famous (among other things) for their pocket parks: tiny oases of urban public space too small to be called parks. It turns out La Jolla's got one – courtesy of the museum – at the corner of Coast and Cuvier Street. Look for a narrow pathway leading up from the sidewalk, follow it up, and you're there.

While the park offers the usual grass and benches, its most notable feature is four small shelters which resemble Zen huts, but with whitewater views. These are fantastic places to sit, meditate, and watch the whales and tourists.

If at some point you wonder where the art is, you're in it: the whole park's the artwork.

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Euclid Tower

Artists: Cynthia Bechtel, Mark Messenger, Christina Montuori

Drive east on University and you won't miss this. Where did it come from? First came the tower, part of a drive-through burger joint. Then some artists and paint turned the tower into a beloved community symbol. Then the tower started leaning and was torn down. Then the community worked with the city to rebuild it. And there it is: beautiful.

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El Cid

Artist: Anna Hyatt Huntington

This occupies such a central location in the Park that it's easy to assume it's Balboa. The man on the horse is actually El Cid, legendary warrior of medieval Spain. The horse is Babieca.

Huntington studied with sculptor Gutzon Borglum (of Mount Rushmore fame). She made five versions of this statue: the others are in New York, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, and Seville.

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Nikigator

Artist: Niki de Saint Phalle

A stone's throw from El Cid, Nikigator ranks with The Bean as one of the world's great kid magnets.

The same could be said of most playground equipment, but then most playground equipment doesn't offer a visuo-tactile feast of tile, stone, and mirror.

The only way to fully experience this artwork is to give it a climb – the pedestal's padded for safety.

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Nexus Eucalyptus

Artist: Roman de Salvo

Two things are clear about Caltrans:

• They are the true form-givers of our age, creating structures that millennia from now will be held in the same regard as the Parthenon, Colosseum, or Great Wall.

• In the past two decades they entered their Rococo period, melding forms of breathtaking scale and complexity with close attention to decorative surface.

Given an organization with such a self-consciously artistic approach to their public works, it can't be surprising that the art in the plaza of their San Diego office is a scale model of a freeway interchange, beautifully rendered in milled tree trunks.

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Chicano Park Murals

Artists: Salvador Torres and many others

The best public art in San Diego can be found in a neighborhood park next to the Coronado bridge.

The park is home to one of the world's largest outdoor public art galleries, with over 70 murals by the region's finest artists, and visitors from around the world – proof positive that San Diego has culture.

If you haven't visited the murals, plan a trip: have lunch at the Old Town Mexican Cafe, then head over to the park and take in the sights.

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The Head of David

Artist: Jeff Sale

Driving north on I-5, you couldn't miss it: a two-story mural of David – Michelangelo's David – painted on the side of a pink apartment, and dedicated by the artist to the city of San Diego.

This was back in '84. Now, almost 30 years later, David's still there. But a Marriott went in next door, then Caltrans widened the freeway and put in a brick wall. So now when you drive by, the head appears for just a split second.

Blink and you'll miss it.

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Farm Workers

Artist: Ricardo Breceda

In 1950 the Di Giorgio Fruit Corporation shipped 149,000 packages of grapes from Borrego Springs.

These sculptures – sited on one of the former vineyards – remember the people who picked them.

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El Camino Real Bells

Artist: Mrs. A.S.C. Forbes

The bells are all over town – this one's at the corner of Laurel and Pacific Highway.

They were originally created in 1906 as roadside markers commemorating El Camino Real, the trail built by Spanish missionaries to connect the California missions. Hundreds of bells were placed along roads from the border to Sonoma.

In San Diego, Pacific Highway is the designated El Camino Real, which is why so many of the bells can be found there today. But they are also popular decorative items (explaining their appearance in places like Fashion Valley and Vacation Isle) or in some cases refugees, such as the one on North Torrey Pines Road which apparently got transplanted after UCSD was built on top of the old Pacific Highway.

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The Mothership

Artist: Invader

Space Invaders is one of the earliest and most famous video games. First developed in the late 1970's as an arcade game, its most distinctive visual feature is the pixelated "aliens" that were a byproduct of the stone-age digital hardware of the time.

Invader is a French street artist with an international reputation for re-creating the Space Invader aliens in public places, using colored mosaic tiles to represent the pixels. The result is graffiti, but the genius of the approach is that by careful siting of the artwork, and by using tile instead of spray paint, Invader's art integrates so seamlessly into its urban surroundings that it appears as if it had always been there.

Over twenty of Invader's artworks landed in San Diego as part of an exhibition at MCASD. This one is on the Art Center building downtown. Note that the abstract shape to the left of the alien is not itself an alien, but rather a temporal singularity.

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Sun God

Artist: Niki de Saint Phalle

In form and scale monumental sculpture is meant to mean, deploying awe in the service of history, memory, and social or political significance.

The beauty of Sun God – a 14-foot statue on a 15-foot pedestal – lies in its absence of meaning. The title alludes to religion, yet the figure has no roots in any history, religion, or culture outside the artist's own intention, which may or may not be a celebration of the sun, or the eye.

Meaning abhors a vacuum, so when Sun God first landed on UCSD, the studentry set themselves to the task, creating the annual Sun God festival which is now the largest student event on campus. And the landmark's become a symbol, available on t-shirts and mugs from the campus bookstore.

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Cloud Project

Artist: Jim Wilsterman

Clouds condense over the Laguna, Sierra, and Rocky Mountains, sending water down rivers, canals, reservoirs and pipes to an East County water tank. The job of the tank is to press condensed cloud out your faucet.

At this scale a public artwork generates an infinity of perspectives near and far. The freeway views, the ones most people know, effectively reduce the size of the tower by siting it in the context of the freeway itself. The neighborhood views, on the other hand, don't.

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Torrey Pines Bridge

Artist: Safdie Rabines Architects

To drivers it's near invisible, marked only by a brief burst of railing on the road. But to beachwalkers the bridge is a thing of grace and beauty.

The designers honored the old bridge by leaving a piece behind.

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Fossils Exposed

Artist: Doron Rosenthal

San Diego's largest sculpture stretches for a mile along University Avenue, between 1st and Park.

Materially it consists of 150 small granite markers, set inconspicuously into the sidewalk pavement.

Experientially it consists of the discoveries, memories, associations, and expectations that come from walking University and getting to know them.

Each marker contains the carved image of a fossil plant or animal.

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Pacific Beach Sign

Artist: unknown

For a community sign this is doing a lot:

• The river rock base references nearby Rose Creek.

• The sheet metal and flat color allude to Pop illustration while asserting the fully sculptural form of a breaking wave.

• The font is classic Dr. Seuss (who lived on nearby Mount Soledad).

The pair of reddish forms hovering over the "P" serve two functions. They reinforce the visual reading of a breaking wave, while slyly asserting community values through some insider surf knowledge: these are the swim-finned feet of a bodysurfer, fully engaged in the maneuver known as "going over the falls".

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Magic Carpet Ride

Artist: Matthew Antichevich

The Cardiff Botanical Society is dedicated to beautifying their community, so they came up with the idea of putting a statue in the center of town.

The botanical folks thought that a young boy learning to surf would be a good theme, so they went ahead and commissioned the statue, without bothering to check with the local surf community.

The surf community was not happy. What they saw was a statue of an out-of-control surfer with bad form and – worst of all – unmanly bent wrists.

At first the surfers complained bitterly, until somebody got the idea of insulting the statue by dressing it up. This proved wildly popular: every time the city took down a costume, a new one would go up in its place.

Thus was born the Cardiff Kook, a phenomenon that has put Cardiff on the map both regionally and nationally.

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Sea Passage

Artist: James Hubbell

This fountain/sculpture is outside the community center in Coronado.

Hubbell, a regional treasure, can make anything: paintings, sculpture, jewelry, mosaic, stained glass, houses, chapels, and most recently, parks.

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Shelltown Mural

Artists: Mario Torero, Todd Stands, Fernando Vossa

Graffiti in your neighborhood? No problem:

1. Find artists so good even the taggers respect them.

2. Work with the city to divert funding normally used for graffiti abatement.

3. Get local residents in on the project.

4. Paint some murals.

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City Chevrolet Mural

Artists: Robin Olimb, Kevin Immel, David Glanz

An icon for freeway drivers, the whale recently turned twenty-one. Decades of bay sun have given it the look of an Old Master painting.

As whale murals go, this one's notable for how it merges two perspectives – marine and submarine – into a single image: Wyland-meets-Cubism, but done so deftly the eye barely thinks twice.

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Fish Mural

Artist: Chuck Byron

A mile south of the City Chevrolet whale – and less visible from the freeway – this mural depicts a marlin chasing dorado through an abstract sea.

The artist was a true original: Byron was an Army paratrooper, fishing boat captain, sport fisherman, and professional wildlife artist. He painted what he knew.

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Recipe for Friendship

Artist: Nina Karavasiles

Visit the Saturday farmers market in Little Italy, and you'll spot a tiny outdoor cafe in Amici Park – four tables, set with checkerboard cloth and the entree of your choice: blackened fish tacos; stuffed artichoke; fava bean spread; or pasta with marinara.

While the tablecloths – rendered in glass tile mosaic – are flat-out exquisite, the food is less so: cast bronze people can look beautiful, but cast bronze food is unappetizing. The artist pulls a beautiful save by including cast bronze recipes with each dish: reading the recipe brings the food to life.

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For MCASD

Artist: Jenny Holzer

English script reads left to right; Arabic and Hebrew right to left; traditional Chinese top to bottom; and ancient Greek boustrophedonically (alternating between right to left and left to right).

Holzer's sign – on the facade of MCASD downtown – reads bottom to top, fast, and right into the clouds.

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Mount Soledad Cross

Artist: Donald Campbell

With its foreshortened crossarm and emphasis on light and structure, the cross is a beautiful piece of Mid-Century modern design.

The cross is actually three crosses:

• The concrete Latin cross (subject of epic debate).

• The air cross within-a-cross formed by visually integrating the spaces in the concrete.

• The nearly Greek cross formed by treating the bottom two spaces as part of the base.

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Neon Majorette

Artists: Austin Linn Gray, Joe Schmidt

46 feet of animated neon, the majorette performs nightly in Lemon Grove, where she serves as logo and beacon for the Marketplace at the Grove shopping center.

The majorette was originally built (in 1947) for the Campus Drive-In Theater, once the largest drive-in on the West Coast, now history. Her gig with the shopping center is the work of SOHO, a nonprofit dedicated to saving the good things in San Diego.

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Cosmic Train

Artist: Mario Torero

The corner of Normal, Park, and El Cajon Boulevard is marked (just barely) by a small, oddly wedge-shaped office building.

The front of the building offers CPA services, 30-minute free parking, and a neon sign captioned FRANK THE TRAINMAN.

The back has this.

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University Heights Ostriches

Artist: Kevin Whaley

University Heights has neither a university nor a football team, but it does have a great community mascot.

Drive through the Heights, you'll see ostriches everywhere: on street signs, houses, monuments.

Go Ostriches!

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North Park Parking Garage

Artists: AVRP Studios, Blair Thornley

How do you design a 5-story, 150,000 square-foot parking garage in an arts-friendly community noted for its human scale?

One way is to make the garage itself a work of art.

Another approach is designer pizza: take a standard garage and plaster it with every distracting design element you can think of: decorative tile, awnings, banners, trellises, color, and finally, art.

The result's not bad for designer pizza: the theme of framed paintings on a wall – while retro in the extreme – does a fair job of fooling the eye into down-scaling the beast to gallery size.

And Thornley's supremely stylish imagery (retro in its own way, having been added long after the designers chose and hung the frames) performs further eye-foolery by normally existing at the scale of a magazine.

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Okeanos

Artist: William Tucker

When shown at a sculpture park in upstate New York, this was hailed a masterpiece by national critics.

But when unveiled at its new permanent home in front of La Jolla's Scripps Green Hospital, it drew gasps from the hospital staff, who saw their work flash before their eyes.

Both in fact were right, demonstrating a fundamental rule of art: context is everything.

In this case, context won – thirteen years after the sculpture was unveiled, it got moved to its current location, in front of a hospital parking lot.

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The Indian

Artist: Arthur Putnam

The Indian can be found in Presidio Park, just below the Mission Valley Mission.

The Indian's left hand rests on the head of the mountain lion he's reclining on.

The artist was a Frisco art star – Jack London used to hang in his studio, and he showed with Duchamp in the Armory Show.

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WaterMarks

Artists: Lynn Susholtz, Aida Mancillas

Mission Trails Park is 5800 acres of hills, rocks, canyons, trails, birds, mountain, river, and dam, all within the city limits.

WaterMarks, at the park's Deerfield entrance, compresses the entire park into a 200-foot entry wall: equal parts dam, river, mountain, leaf, map, animal footprint, history book.

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Granite Hills Eagle

Artist: unknown

A giant bronze eagle named Ernie guards the entrance of Granite Hills High School.

Ernie was first created in 1960, by San Diego artist and craftsman Lyle Tracy.

In 2009, students from a rival high school pulled down the statue.

After considering repairs, Granite Hills decided to replace the original fiberglass eagle with a new one done in bronze.

“It's always Ernie, in all its forms,” said Granite Hills High principal Georgette Torres.

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Standing

Artist: Kiki Smith

The woman stands on a eucalyptus trunk, near the heart of the School of Medicine.

She is cast bronze, as are the tiny starfish that form a constellation on her torso.

The trunk is cast concrete – its roots stand in a river rock pool.

Water drips from the woman's hands, down to the pool, and up again.

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La Jolla Vista View

Artist: William Wegman

Walk behind the Potiker Theatre at La Jolla Playhouse, and you'll find this: a scenic viewpoint, seemingly air-lifted in from the Grand Canyon, and aimed towards a patch of San Diego named for its money and freeways: the Golden Triangle.

La Jolla Vista View offers both a telescope (free) and a long bronze plate on which is etched a drawing of the urban landscape made by Wegman back in 1987, when the viewpoint was created. The drawing includes many touches of the signature wry humor that made him famous.

The esthetic driver behind the original work was the ironic distance between the natural landscape evoked by the viewpoint structure, and the gung ho urban development visible in the Golden Triangle during the 1980's.

Two decades later, the trees planted throughout the community have obscured much of the development, shifting the view back towards the kind of natural landscape that such viewpoints are built for in the first place. The only way to see all the malls, condos, and offices out there is to look them up on the drawing.

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A San Diego African American Legacy

Artists: Jihmye Collins, Nina Karavasiles

An East Village courtyard wall's a history book, illustrated with paintings and a catcher's mitt cast in bronze.

Who knew about the Pacific Parachute Company? A World War II factory owned by Howard "Skippy" Smith, an African-American pilot and businessman.

Or the Creole Palace – Count Basie and Billie Holiday played here.

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Untitled, 1991

Artist: Michael Asher

UCSD was built on the site of a former Marine Corps base named Camp Matthews. From 1917 to 1964, one million soldiers learned to fire their rifles here.

When the university took over, it re-used the military buildings for academic purposes: the barracks became art studios.

But 50 years of campus hyper-development have left few traces of the original camp, with one remarkable exception: the small plaza south of the Price Center – curb, grass, trees, walkway, flagpole – remains virtually unchanged from how it appeared in Camp Matthews. (Look for the date "1-7-43" scratched in the cement of the flagpole base.)

Only two obvious changes can be found on the plaza, equidistant from the central flagpole:

• A granite monument installed in 1964, commemorating Camp Matthews and its transfer to the university.

• A granite replica of a 1950s-style office drinking fountain, installed in 1991 and co-commemorating many things: university/military ties; traditional park design; life and death; and the occasional need for a drink of water.

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Queen Califia's Magical Circle

Artist: Niki de Saint Phalle

One of the seven wonders of the world: the Queen on her eagle, eight totem poles, five two-headed snakes and a maze, all rendered in a sublime candy store of tile, stone, glass, cactus, and the occasional seashell.

The work is so strong it easily overcomes the security fence and minor vandalism that are the price of putting a major international artwork with Native American imagery in a small town park named for a famous Indian fighter.

Other signs of the artist's innate mischief: unlike Stonehenge, certain elements in the Circle seem designed with the goal of orienting viewers not towards the stars or planets but rather to the work itself: or more precisely, towards certain laugh-out-loud perspectival easter eggs. Seek, and you will find.

Closed Mondays and rainy days – in the summer, hot.

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The World's Biggest Lemon

Artist: unknown

Originally constructed as a parade float (it won third prize), the lemon was born in 1928.

Behind the statue is a small grove of lemons.

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Giant

Artist: Shepard Fairey

André René Roussimoff (1946–1993) was a professional wrestler and actor who performed under the name André the Giant.

Roussimoff's fame, identity, and lifelong suffering were a result of gigantism, a medical condition caused by the overproduction of growth hormone.

He is perhaps best known for playing the role of Fezzik in the film The Princess Bride.

His portrait can be found downtown, a block from MCASD.

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The Circle (on 7 Lemon)

Artists: Chor Boogie, Writerz Blok

It's not every day you come across street art tagged with a stainless steel object label:

Mural commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and Westfield Horton Plaza in conjunction with the exhibition Viva la Revolución: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape. Made possible by a generous gift from the Legler Benbough Endowment Fund.

Beautifully sited on the Horton Plaza parking garage, Lemon level.

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Blue Granite Shift

Artist: Mathieu Gregoire

Visit the California Center for the Arts in Escondido, and you'll pass by these rocks on the way to the theater.

The image is completely unrepresentative of the work, which is in fact a 200-foot narrative on the life of a stone: beginning with the uncarved block, ending on the lawn beyond the courtyard.

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Dragon Mural

Artist: Mirto Golino

San Diego once had a Chinatown.

A few signs remain: the Chinese Historical Museum and Chinese Center at 3rd and J, and two blocks north, a dragon.

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2005 OB Community Mural

Artist: Rich James

Every year Ocean Beach adds a new mural to their community.

The murals' distinctive mosaic-like quality derives from the manner of their creation: the painting rights for each one-foot square are sold to citizens during the OB Street Fair, with the proceeds going to the annual Fourth of July fireworks show.

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Coming Together

Artist: Niki de Saint Phalle

Party at the Convention Center, sleep at the Hilton – as always, the artist's work seems keenly attuned to its site.

The night-and-day face reappears on one of the totems in Queen Califia's Magical Circle.

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Bear

Artist: Tim Hawkinson

The UCSD Engineering School has a bear in the courtyard.

The bear, 23 feet tall and 360000 pounds, was designed using software from the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and features advanced earthquake-proof engineering.

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Pacific Beach Elementary School Mural

Artist: Isaias Crow

The best murals play off the architecture of their support.

Sometimes it's a ceiling or a window. Only rarely is it a tree.

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West Coast Cairn

Artist: Andy Goldsworthy

A stone egg resides in front of MCASD.

It is one of three built by the artist in the United States: the others are in Des Moines, Iowa, and Purchase, New York.

While best known as a sculptor, Goldsworthy is also considered the founder of modern rock balancing.

If you haven't already, watch Rivers and Tides – perhaps the best and most beautiful art film ever made.

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Two Running Violet V Forms

Artist: Robert Irwin

The story of art: a set of objects designed to reward viewing with pleasure, and from which viewers learn to look at the world as they look at art, and so enrich their lives by seeing more in life.

By this definition Irwin doesn't make art – instead, he takes the more direct approach of building instruments to help viewers see the world more clearly.

The device shown here traverses the canopy of a eucalyptus grove on the UCSD campus. One could state that it consists of plastic-coated chain-link fencing on 25-foot high stainless steel poles, but that would be missing the point. It's expressly designed to to do two things:

• Draw the eye up into a space not normally paid attention to by wingless bipeds

• Respond like a chameleon to the ever-changing light in the trees

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Pleasure Point

Artist: Nancy Rubins

This sculpture is on the ocean side of MCASD.

It's constructed from kayaks, canoes, sailboards, surfboards, pedal boats, and a rowboat named Purr fect.

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Girl from Ipanema

Artist: Kim MacConnel

In public art, an artwork and its site can have distinct personalities. How these personalities interact determines how the art works.

This mural, located in an alley behind Girard in La Jolla, is far too extroverted for the community it resides in.

But by locating it in a back alley, the introversion of the site balances the extroversion of the art, which asserts itself only momentarily to passers-by on Kline Street, or in tantalizing bits above the rooftops on Girard.

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Santa Fe Depot

Artist: Richard Serra

This sculpture is behind MCASD, in an area where passengers once waited with their luggage.

The six steel blocks are far less expressive than the torqued ellipses the artist is known for, relying instead on a network of relations with each other – the blocks are identical – and with the lights and bricks and arches.

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Cruzando El Rio Bravo

Artist: Luis Jiménez

This sculpture is across the street from Santa Fe Depot.

In 1922 the artist's father crossed the Rio Grande and started a sign making business in El Paso.

His son earned a degree from the University of Texas, and went on to become an accomplished artist: work in numerous museums and private collections, teaching positions at the University of Arizona and University of Houston, and a Distinguished Alumnus award from the University of Texas.

The artist's daughter, a multimedia artist and fashion designer, was a contestant on Project Runway.

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Brave Men of La Jolla

Artist: Ed Ruscha

This mural is on the ocean side of MCASD.

The artist has made several variations on the theme of a sailing ship captioned with a line from an old Bob Hope movie.

In the movie, when Hope is attacked by Indians his response is to exclaim the line, and then run.

The red wedge echoing the ship's bowsprit is an untitled sculpture by Mauro Staccioli.

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Swami's Tiki

Artist: Tim Richards

Swami's Surf Park is one of the most beautiful spots in the county: grass, ocean, and a grove of 80-year-old Torrey pines.

One of the pines was infested with bark beetles and had to be cut down. But instead of a stump, the tree became a tiki.

The beetle holes are still visible on one side.

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Talking Tree

Artist: Terry Allen

Walk by the Student Health Center at UCSD, and you may hear voices.

If no one's around, it's not you – it's the talking tree.

Follow the voice into the grove next to the health center, and you'll find a trunk encased in sheets of lead.

The tree's not always talking – if you visit, you may not hear a thing.

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Snake Path

Artist: Alexis Smith

A 560-foot tile snake climbs a hill on the UCSD campus.

Its tail is near the Engineering building, its head by Geisel Library.

One coil contains a perfect miniature Eden.

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Stargazer

Artist: Alexander Liberman

This enormous sculpture is hidden away in a business park in Sorrento Valley.

Why? The developer of the San Diego Tech Center wanted to put his new building on the map, so he commissioned a sculpture that was so big it could be seen from the 805.

Not anymore though – the view's now blocked by Qualcomm buildings.

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Reclining Figure: Arch Leg

Artist: Henry Moore

This statue is in the sculpture garden in Balboa Park.

Moore is the public artist of the twentieth century, with work in 38 countries on 6 continents (and 66 cities in the U.S. alone).

His reclining figures are related to Chicano art: both reference the Toltec-Mayan sculptural form known as Chac Mool.

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Morning

Artist: Donal Hord

This statue is in the park next to Seaport Village – it's placed to catch the morning light.

Hord was San Diego's greatest sculptor, and in his time received national recognition.

His work can be found around the city.

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Night Presence II

Artist: Louise Nevelson

Major artist, strong work, odd site: Nevelson tableside, in the sculpture court café.

The steel forms echo the salvaged wood of her famous assemblages.

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Tumbleweed

Artist: Mark di Suvero

If it's public art and I-beams, it's a di Suvero.

A study in contrasts at the Balboa Park sculpture garden.

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Chicano Legacy 40 Años

Artist: Mario Torero

This 17 by 54 foot glass tile mural is on the east side of Peterson Hall on the UCSD campus.

It depicts 40 years of social progress, both on-campus and off.

The figure on the left is the Corn Mother, a traditional icon in Chicano art.

On the right is Cesar Chavez, who recently had a U.S. Navy ship named for him.

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Vices and Virtues

Artist: Bruce Nauman

The Charles Lee Powell Structural Systems Laboratory differs in two ways from the other engineering buildings at UCSD:

• On the inside it houses a six-story-tall earthquake simulator.

• On the outside it flashes the vices and virtues around the top of the building, in seven-foot-tall neon letters.

Each virtue is superimposed on a vice, and the two blink at different rates. So, for example, one corner of the building will light up with FAITH, followed a few moments later by LUST, and finally both light up together, which in a kind of moral calculus of typography, looks like FAUST.

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Pump Station 4

Artists: Teddy Cruz, Marcos Ramirez

Drive through a quiet corner of Shelter Island (San Diego's boat district) and you'll pass a small cinder block building, painted deep blue and covered on two sides with a steel lattice.

The lattice includes words, which when read in the right order yield a sentence: "Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same."

The sentence is from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "History". The essay continues thus:

She casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The adamant streams into soft but precise form before it, and, whilst I look at it, its outline and texture are changed again.

The building is a sewer pump station.

o

Brain/Cloud (with Seascape and Palm Tree)

Artist: John Baldessari

The ocean view at La Jolla Cove is better than any artwork.

This mural wisely acknowledges this by simply displacing the view. The displacement is the art.

From the cove the displacement is extreme (placing the ocean in the sky). But from the restaurant the mural's close enough to the real view to serve as an extension of it.

o

Unconditional Surrender

Artist: J. Seward Johnson

San Diego's a Navy town.

This sculpture was inspired by the famed photograph V-J Day in Times Square, which celebrates the end of World War II while prefiguring the post-war baby boom.

It's popular with the general public, most likely because large-scale statuary is such a rarity in contemporary public art. But it's distinctly unpopular with art professionals, who dismiss the work as kitsch.

The burden in this case falls on the professionals, as they struggle with the idea that public art is not simply a branch of art, but something slightly different. It's the difference – and the struggle – that make public art so interesting.

o

All text and photos in this book are by Richard Gleaves.

Copyrights for artwork typically remain with the artist – images of the artwork are used here under the fair use policy of United States copyright law.

The contents of this book were first published serially on utsandiego.com.

The artworks in this book exist in public, and are thus subject to the action of wood beetles, graffitists, solar radiation, cross-town high schools, and random acts of real estate. While all reasonable efforts will be made to keep the book up-to-date, no promises can be made that a given work will appear in the world as it does in the book, or at all.

The cover image is Niki de Saint Phalle's Sun God.

ISBN 978-0-615-64127-0