Fresh Art in Clover Park Kicks Off SM Arts Commission’s 20th Year

Artists’ reception will be held Saturday

   The City of Santa Monica Arts Commission will unveil Fresh Art 2002, an installation of three major new works of temporary public art by local artists in Clover Park this weekend.
   The kickoff event of a month-long celebration of the Commission’s twentieth anniversary, Fresh Art 2002 will run from October 5 to December 1. A reception for the artists is scheduled on Saturday, October 5, from 3 to 5 p.m. in the park at 2600 Ocean Park Boulevard.
   Now in its second year, Fresh Art is designed to give local artists experience in competing for and executing public art projects. Historically, most of the public art commissions in Santa Monica have been big-budget, large-scale projects, and have gone to established artists.
   Fresh Art not only gives less experienced artists a chance to explore first-hand the special challenges — both creative and practical — of creating public art, but it increases the talent pool of local qualified artists.
   Given the success of the first Fresh Art last year and the enthusiastic response by artists this year, the Cultural Affairs Division plans to make Fresh Art an annual program.
   Each of the three new artworks was conceived especially for the Clover Park site.
   Artists who live and/or work in Santa Monica were invited to submit proposals for Fresh Art 2001 to the City’s Cultural Affairs Division. Over six hundred Requests for Proposals were sent out, and there were 22 submissions – up 25 percent from last year. A jury of arts professionals reviewed the proposals and interviewed finalists prior to making its recommendations to the Commission. The jurors were: Lloyd Hamrol, artist. Eve Rappoport, Cultural Affairs Manager, City of Glendale, and Tyler Stalling, independent curator and artist.
   The three artists who were chosen are Ali Acerol, Bernadette Fox and Elena Mary Siff.
   Acerol’s “1001 Clovers” is a four-foot-wide, clover-shaped table made entirely of red bricks. Acerol frequently works with bricks, fashioning chairs, ottomans, tables, globes, cornucopias and other domestic objects. Born in Turkey and educated in Paris and at the California Institute of the Arts, he has had one-person exhibitions at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica, the LUX Art Institute in Rancho Santa Fe and at Los Angeles Harbor College, among other venues.
   Fox applied her training in art and architecture to her piece “Earth Plane,” a six-and-one-half-foot square platform of steel placed above an patch of bare earth. The sod cut from the ground below the structure has been placed on top of the tilted platform, creating the effect of floating turf. Fox received architectural training from the Southern California Institute of Architecture and sculpture training at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has created numerous installations in the United States and Germany.
   Elena Mary Siff was inspired to create “Birdsong” by Rene Magritte’s painting “The Therapeutist” and by the Nike of Samothrace, an ancient Greek sculpture now in the Louvre. Siff’s sculpture consists of a concrete replica of the Nike capped by a birdcage filled with bird seed, to entice local birds to visit. A poem by French poet Jacques Prevert has been placed at the foot of the sculpture.
   “Birdsong” has been placed adjacent to a pre-school in the park, which Siff had in mind when making her work. The surrealistic juxtaposition of classical sculpture with a found object is offered as an homage to Magritte. Siff has exhibited her work in many California cities.
   Founded in 1982, the Arts Commission is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this month, with a series of special events, including a seminar on artist housing, presented with California Lawyers for the Arts and San Francisco’s ArtHouse, on October 19 at the Ken Edwards Center, “Twenty 02 At Miles,” a free matinee and evening performance by Santa Monica’s leading nonprofit arts organizations at the historic Miles Playhouse on October 26, and the publication of “Twenty 02: Twenty Years of the Santa Monica Arts Commission,” commemorating the agency’s first two decades. The publication features essays and interviews by community and cultural leaders and photographs by three prominent Santa Monica photographers: Anne Fishbein, Anthony Friedkin and John Humble. In addition, the Commission is distributing a postcard throughout the region outlining the many arts events taking place in Santa Monica during October, National Arts Month.
   For additional information contact the Santa Monica Cultural Affairs Division at (310) 458-8350 or visit arts.santa-monica.org.