Ars populi
Public art is set for a renaissance — even if it has to be trucked in
By Jake Armstrong 08/26/2010
Nearly three years have passed since SideStreet Projects’ fleet of school buses and antique travel trailers rolled into Pasadena with a unique mission: to bring art directly to the people.
When the wheels stopped and the dust finally settled, the nonprofit arts organization’s mobile armada had nestled into a vacant lot on North Fair Oaks Avenue, just north of Orange Grove Boulevard and directly in the flight path of aromas from the neighboring Church’s Chicken.
Now, after serving a steadily increasing number of public school students as arts funding falls, SideStreet Projects finds itself in the midst of resurgence, one with the potential to bring art and arts education directly to even more neighborhoods as temporary, mobile art prepares to — ironically — become a fixture in the Crown City.
“Everything is in line for this mobile renaissance,” said Jon Lapointe, chair of the nonprofit arts organization’s board and director of the Armory Center for the Arts.
Soon, the city’s Cultural Affairs Department will debut temporary public art programs that will place artwork on street medians and in vacant storefronts around town. And the public will get its say on the future of public art in the city as the city begins taking comments to draft the Public Art Master Plan, a blueprint to guide such endeavors in the future. “It’s a very exciting time for public art in Pasadena,” said Rochelle Branch, cultural affairs manager for the city of Pasadena.
Buggin’ out
Only about 20 percent of arts nonprofits own their own building, and the rest that either rent or lease generally head to the cheapest part of town to keep spending money on their mission, Lapointe said. But the burst of activity in some of those areas often gives rise to gentrification, making arts organizations victims of their own success, he said.
“Arts organizations come in, and then we get pushed out when rents go up,” he said.
But with the fleet of restored vintage camping trailers and a 21-year-old yellow school bus, SideStreet is totally mobile, able to pack up and head off to schools in about an hour — a lot like the TV show MASH, Lapointe quipped. And when the organization’s lease expires on the lot, slated for the Heritage Square senior citizens’ housing development, the trailers can easily move to another location without losing operational time to moving, Lapointe said.
So far, Northwest Pasadena is fertile ground for mobile arts, given the youth and density of the population, Lapointe said. “Anywhere we go in this community we have an audience,” he said.
The yellow bus on the lot is home to the SideStreet woodworking program, which debuted in 1997 and has since been added to the PUSD’s third-grade arts activities, said Emily Hopkins, SideStreet’s executive director. When the school year begins anew this fall, the program will reach more than 800 of the 1,500 third-graders at the PUSD’s 12 elementary schools. About 12,000 students in the county have participated so far, Hopkins said.
On the bus, kids sit at one of 10 pint-sized woodworking stations and measure, cut, carve and sand an object that will make their life tasks easier, in whatever fashion their imaginative minds interpret. “They all want to make a wooden video game,” Hopkins quipped.
Woodworking teaches students both manual arts and mathematics through the measurements and angles they must use to cut, hammer and drill to get to complete their item, Hopkins said.
Students also get a primer on Pasadena’s famed architectural styles with a visit to the Gamble House, where they get inspiration for a project of their own, according to Jennifer Olson, PUSD’s visual arts consultant. “It's a great example of learning through the arts. Students gain important skills in geometry and measurement, and discover part of their local history while having a real-world, meaningful arts experience,” Olson said.
The hands-on and fun integration allows children to learn the technical skills that form the basis of craft and design. “Particularly in a city like Pasadena, where the arts and crafts movement is so strongly represented, this type of instruction program seems to be a perfect fit,” Branch said.
By the end of the program, many of the third-graders gain enough skills and confidence in their abilities that they can design and build a project of their own. “We push kids, we challenge kids in this program,” Lapointe said. “Success in the bus carries on elsewhere.”
The Armadillo, a former FEMA trailer dispatched to the Hurricane Katrina disaster area and later converted into a self-sustaining mobile community garden by students at MIT, is another curiosity on the lot. Festooned with a series of 2-liter bottles rigged into a gravity-powered drip-watering system, the Armadillo helps students learn how art and sustainability are connected in a 90-minute lesson, which also teaches them to make their own vertical planter. The sessions help show how art can extend beyond aesthetics. “It’s about the intersection of art and problem-solving,” Lapointe said.
Directly across the street from the dusty lot that is home to the mobile menagerie, a different type of renaissance is taking place and attracting no small share of odd looks from rubbernecking drivers passing by. It’s the Urban Transplanter, a solar-powered, automated 75-foot conveyor belt and irrigation system that delivers seedlings of kale, squash, lettuce and other seasonal vegetables to the sidewalk three times a day.
Created by Arizona artist and fourth-generation farmer Matthew Moore, the installation is an interpretation of the food distribution system, and the ready-to-grow vegetables it emits to the public each day present those willing to plant them with a chance to better understand how food gets to the table.
“It seems that modern economic systems continually separate consumers from the natural cycles of the Earth,” Moore said when the installation opened in September 2009. “I hope to inspire people to reconnect with the land by growing their own food as a means of pursuing a more sustainable future.”
No one knows how many planted plots now exist in the neighborhood. But a guerilla lettuce garden was spotted growing in a planter in the Vons parking lot just south of the installation.
Lapointe said he hopes students who visit the Urban Transplanter look beyond the nexus of commerce and agriculture it represents to see art as a potential livelihood.
“Being an artist is a viable career choice. An artist can do something like this,” Lapointe said.
Additionally, both the Urban Transplanter and the SideStreet Projects trailers are on vacant lots that could otherwise become beacons for a variety of nuisances. “We feel it’s a win-win-win for the city, the Armory and the community,” Branch said.
Finishing touches
Pasadena’s public art program, launched in 1988, currently comprises 120 art installations. That number will soon grow as the city places artwork on city property in each council district, and as developers in the Northwest begin to add art to their projects, under a recent ordinance requiring a public art component for new development.
Lapointe said projects like the urban Transplanter show temporary art is a viable and appreciated commodity. “I think we’ve kind of shown Pasadena that temporary public art takes the risk out of art projects,” he said, adding that such displays could make it so “there’s constantly little pockets of strange” around town.
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