Artistic Irony
About $245,000 worth of public art projects managed to squeak into the new fiscal year because they were already in progress, including more baubles for the Little Sugar Creek Greenway: $126,000 for interactive sculptures that “have reflective spheres with poems in Braille to be experienced by the site impaired. Viewers can move levers over Braille to create musical sounds,” according the county’s description of the project.
Mecklenburg commissioners were slated at their July 6 meeting to approve the Arts and Science Council’s Public Art Work Plan for the new fiscal year, at a price tag of about $880,000. That went by the wayside because the county’s capital investment plan funding for public art is on hold.
Commissioners were also supposed to authorize County Manager Harry Jones to negotiate and execute the annual agreement with the ASC for the administration of the county’s public art program. That, however, also hit a snag.
Commissioner Vilma Leake, a Democrat, questioned whether it was a conflict of interest to have the county manager negotiate a contract with the ASC’s governing board, when Jones is a member of that board. Turns out, it is.
“He’s basically negotiating with himself,” said county attorney Marvin Bethune, who further opined that, while such an arrangement would be a conflict of interest, it wouldn’t necessarily be illegal.
The board decided to error on the side of caution and approved a motion that delegates Bethune, along with Commissioners Chairman Jennifer Roberts, to negotiate the county’s public art plan agreement with the ASC.
That agreement might see some changes in the future. Roberts, a Democrat, said she would like to see a larger percentage of grants funded through the county’s public art program awarded to local artists. The majority of artists who have previously received such funding have been foreign, Roberts said, with only about 30 percent hailing from North Carolina.
Roberts said she wants some assurances that arts commission is trying to fund more local artists “that are representative of the community in terms of having African-American, Latino, having a cultural mix of what this community looks like.”
“We’re not trying to find the cheapest art, we’re trying to find good art,” Roberts said, noting that 1 percent of the budget for most capital projects must be spent on public art.
That, though, might also be changing. Commissioner Neil Cooksey, a Republican, requested that the board explore revamping the 1-percent rule, to exempt certain capital projects where public art might not be warranted – a jail, for example.
“I think there probably is a category of projects that we ought to exempt from the public art ordinance,” Cooksey said.
A majority of commissioners seemed inclined to at least discuss changing the ordinance, agreeing to address the issue during the board’s upcoming planning retreat.
Until then, make sure you don’t stub a toe on any multi-ton artistic boulders dotting the county’s greenways.
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