The lady in the back of the art gallery wasn't trying to be snarky. An hour into a presentation on the Valley's small/growing/about-to-get-bigger public art scene and she still wasn't convinced that municipal leaders knew art from a hole in the wall. For her, art and culture formed a metropolitan double helix, intertwined into the life of a city—and Vegas, well, it has all the culture of a cadaver. If Scottsdale, Seattle, Portland and other presumably less hip cities can commission artists to design everything from sidewalks to fences to bathrooms, then what's taking us so long to get with it?
"How can the city and county continue to ignore art and culture?"
Her comments were like a slow pitch over home plate for Brian Alvarez, vice president of the Contemporary Arts Collective, a small art gallery shoehorned into the southeast corner of the former Holsum bakery and the scene of last Thursday's pep talk. Part of the reason Vegas can't go toe-to-toe with the New Yorks and San Franciscos on the art-culture tip, he said, is because we've done a poor job of cataloguing our history. When town matriarch Helen Stewart died, Alvarez said, her extensive collection of Paiute Indian baskets vanished. "We've got to preserve what we have."
It'd also help if we quit bitching and opened our eyes, he said with vinegar in his voice: "The Strip is the largest private investment in public art in human history, some $50 billion. There is culture here, it's just a different kind of culture, one that we don't need to apologize for."
If we'd bone up a bit on our local art knowledge, said Patrick Gaffey, cultural program supervisor for the county's Parks and Community Services department, we might be surprised by what we have here. Only a few hands shot up when he asked the crowd of 30 if anyone knew where in the Valley famed Texas sculptor Luis Jimenez has a piece. "Vaquero," a fiberglass rendition of a Mexican cowboy riding a bucking horse, sits at the entrance to McCarran International Airport. Jimenez died last month at age 66.
More flummoxed faces when he asked where Lloyd Hamrol's piece is located. That piece would be the "Serpent Mound" child's play area in front of the Green Valley Library. "People have to realize what we have," Gaffey said.
Municipal leaders, he said, are starting to understand the importance of integrating public art into public spaces. The city and county have pulled cultural-affairs programs from recreation and leisure services and made them their divisions—"Cultural Affairs is really best-equipped to build community," he said.
In recent months, water-reclamation officials approached him about designing a park between a reclamation plant and a posh neighborhood, and McCarran officials enlisted his expertise art-ing up a new, half-mile-long terminal at McCarran. It's a $5 million project, and if all the money is spent on art—there've been squabbles over how much will go to advertising—Gaffey said it would be one of the biggest public-art projects in the nation. He reserved his highest praise for Mayor Oscar Goodman for championing last year's Percent for the Arts ordinance, which allocates one percent of the construction costs for new civic buildings to supporting public arts. Last year, $600,000 of the $5.9 million cultural-programming budget went to public art projects like preserving neon signs and an aerial arts gallery on Las Vegas Boulevard. City spokeswoman Diana Paul said Percent for the Arts has generated $600,000 this year.
Tallying up the city's embrace of the arts—the Art in Public Places, First Friday, temporary public art such as wrapping Citizens Area Transit buses in Centennial motifs—Gaffey sounded both hopeful and envious.
"Whatever you think of him," Gaffey said, "Mayor Goodman did a good thing with the one-percent allocation. I hope other municipalities begin to follow the city's lead."
While Gaffey, Alvarez and others who are promoters of the arts work on lifting the Valley's cultural IQ, they said citizens need to press government for more support of public art—the slacks, ties and blouses seemed to signal that this wasn't an artsy-fartsy anti-establishment crowd, but one that would follow through with public pressure on politicians—and artists need to stay abreast of upcoming public projects and experiment with new materials like the high-density foam used to create TI's new logo. As for Gaffey and the arts crew, they'll have to do a better job disseminating information in the future. Thursday's confab offered little of the promised guidance on where new funds for public art will come from—aside from the city's Percent for the Arts program—and how to access them. (The Nevada Arts Council, dmla.clan.lib.nv.us/docs/arts/, offers a wealth of information on grants and fellowships.)
As Gaffey flitted through gasp-inducing slides of unique public art projects—bridges designed to look like grasshoppers and rattlesnakes, a light fixture in a library designed in the shape of a face, hieroglyphic designs etched into the side of a casino parking garage in Reno—folks chatted about the things that could be art-ed up in Vegas. The freeway (already in the works—the giant tortoises and desert mosaics near the Spaghetti Bowl). McCarran. ("Airports are so drab anyway.") The possibilities are endless.
"We're really pushing for functional art," Gaffey said. "You're going to build a building, so you're going to need doors, but you want impressive doors. Why not commission an artist to design the doors? You will get something great and artistic, and you'll probably be able to do them cheaper. The same goes with the entire building. Everything can be made into art. Concrete, walls, windows, sidewalks, bathrooms, fixtures."