Hearing Postponed on Art Icons for San Pablo Avenue

A public hearing on the proposed large metal icons for San Pablo Avenue streetlight poles — which would be the biggest public art project in El Cerrito history — has been postponed until next month, city officials said.

The proposed designs for the colorful icons — simple images of people and objects placed on 50 streetlight poles along the entire length of San Pablo inside the city limits — were rejected by the city's Arts and Culture Commission in April. But city officials that their action was not properly done and that commission action could come only after a formal presentation of the artists' full design proposal, accompanied by a public hearing.

The hearing had been tentatively planned for the commission's monthy meeting this month but ran into scheduling conflicts. Instead it will be held Thursday, July 14, in the City Council chambers, in lieu of the commission's regular meeting, which would have been on July 20, according to Suzanne Iarla, community outreach specialist in the city manager's office.

The commission voted 5-0 on April 20 to ask the two Berkeley artists commissioned to do the $100,000 project, Jonathan Russell and Saori Ide, to come back with different designs. Their proposed designs had been criticized as resembling "clip art" and not representative of El Cerrito. The commission asked them to return with abstract designs without color or in copper.

Russell told Patch last week that he and Ide are "more than willing to go in a new direction" and have "a very exciting idea of copper forms." 

"Public Art is sometimes a difficult process to work through," Russell said in an email, "especially as there are so many competing interests and perspectives. This interaction, although stressful at times, can yield wonderful results."

But first, Russell said, the artists's contract with the city requires a formal, detailed presentation of their original plan. Some commissioners questioned the detailed plan presentation and hearing as a waste of time and money, but Assistant City Manager Karen Pinkos told the commission that attorneys for the city and for the artists agreed that the contract requires such a step before the commission can properly accept or reject the proposed design.

Russell told Patch, "We are compelled, in order to fulfill our contract, to present our current proposal to the AC (Arts and Culture Commission) for their official thumbs down. At that time we are looking forward to scheduling a meeting where we can present the AC with a new project that is more in keeping with the parameters that they have recently proposed. We have what we think is a very exciting idea of copper forms on the street light poles in place of the painted icons that we previously proposed."