The art installation “Light of Passage” hovers under a skylight in the County of San Diego's Southeastern Live Well Center. Hand-cut pieces of four different types of glass are attached to stainless steel wires, representing the nearby Chollas Creek. On a sunny day, the glass creates shadow play on the walls and floor below — splashes of blue, purple and yellow.
“(The community) expressed their desire to see a lot of colors and something that gives hope and optimism,” said artist Kaori Fukuyama. “I wanted to use materials that really shine and reflect off of our beautiful sunlight.”
It’s one of many pieces of public art at the new county building at the southeast corner of Market Street and Euclid Avenue. Organizers of the Live Well Center’s public art program said the pieces were selected based on community member feedback — an attempt to create a building for the community.
The Tubman Chavez Center was originally located where the Southeastern Live Well Center, or SELWC, stands now. In October 2021, construction of the 65,000-square-foot center began with the goal of putting several resource buildings together. It now houses programs that the county’s Southeastern Family Resource Center location, the Central Region Public Health Center and Tubman Chavez Center previously provided.
Live Well San Diego is a program within the county’s Health and Human Services Department that aims to provide social and health services to San Diegans. Live Well Centers are designed to be “one-stop shops,” aiming to prevent many visits to different buildings for access to different services.
The SELWC building includes resources like behavioral health, vaccines and probation services, in addition to spaces like meeting rooms. Some programs are income-based or dependent on what insurance you have, but the conference spaces are free for anyone to book.
When it came to installing art in the building, Barbara Jimenez, community operations officer at the county, said input from residents was gathered through online surveys, advertisements in local community newspapers, social media posts and community meetings.
“What we heard directly from the community — that this is a diverse community and that having the opportunity really to reflect the diversity through art was really important,” Jimenez said.
The project also had advisory groups that talked about what aspects of the building would be important.
“So one example is that it not look like a sterile government building, but it be very vibrant,” Jimenez said. “That the community have the opportunity to weigh in on everything from the art, the color of the facility, how the facility was set up.”
Community comments were passed along to a Public Art Committee, which was comprised of a project architect, project manager and nine community residents — two youth representatives and people with community organizations.
One hundred artists submitted proposals in spring 2022. Ultimately, the committee selected 14 artists to create commissioned works. They range from installations, statues, paintings, a meditation garden and more.
The artists are Manuelita Brown, Jean Cornwell Wheat, Kaori Fukuyama, Chloe Becky, Wendy Maruyama, JHelen Ramirez, Andrea Rushing, Jose “Bean” Venegas, Francisco Eme, Doris Bittar, Victor Ochoa, Daniel (Maxx Moses) Hopkins, Michelle Guerrero, and XoQue Art in Motion.
The county also purchased art from other artists who had applied to the program.
Budgets for new county buildings require at least 0.5% of spending on public art. That allowance is based on the estimated construction cost of a project. The budget for SELWC art was $290,000, which was based on the estimated construction cost of $58 million. The total project ended up costing $75.9 million after all was said and done.
Budgets for art pieces varied. For example, Manuelita Brown’s bronze statue welcoming visitors at the center's door was $60,000. Meanwhile, Fukuyama’s installation was $20,000. “Light of Passage” was meant to be bigger, but there wasn’t enough funding to carry out the full size of Fukuyama’s original vision.
Art consultant Leah Goodwin was brought in to help with the art. She’s previously worked on other public art projects, such as an underwater mural in the waiting room of Rady Children’s Hospital.
Goodwin took into account public feedback, including a request to honor the history of the Tubman Chavez Center. Goodwin curated the Tubman Chavez Cultural Display to meet that commitment.
The display is a wall filled with artifacts and pictures of programs and people that worked and visited the center. There are also images of community leaders like Councilmember Monica Montgomery Steppe and historical moments like Jesse Jackson visiting the center in 1997.
“This was a beloved building,” Goodwin said. “We learned so much about how many stories people had and how excited and warm people felt about it being Tubman Chavez, that it was a real symbol of a gathering place for Black and brown people just by its name.”
She also wanted the art in SELWC to help create a healing environment.
“There's evidence-based design principles that I used for my decades of putting art in hospitals and creating healing environments that are at play here,” Goodwin said. “Even though it's a public health center, people still may not be having their best day. As a public art consultant, we look at ways to find touch points to create beauty.”
Goodwin said adding art changes the energy of the building. The walls of the stairwell under Fukuyama’s “Light of Passage” were going to simply be perforated glass until artist Francisco Eme’s brightly colored piece was installed.
Eme’s installation “Crisol,” which means “melting pot” in Spanish, has panels of ceramics and both vintage and new textiles placed on the right side of the stairwell. The ceramics, created by artist Evan Lopez, represent the local ecosystem while the textiles represent various cultures in San Diego.
Eme picked textiles after remembering the warmth he felt looking at textile pieces at his grandmother’s home in Mexico.
“When I was thinking about this piece, I thought that we are very much connected to the textile work in history, in our cultures, and it says a lot about us, and it says a lot about our past and our present,” Eme said. “Even though it's a millinery technique, tradition, it's still very much present in different ways.”
Like Fukuyama, Eme said he took into consideration community feedback solicited for the public art at SELWC.
“I remember people being interested in representing different cultures,” Eme said. “This work is very nonpersonal, meaning that I did very little treatment to the textiles. I'm pretty much respecting the original design. And on the other hand, this intends to preserve it. Another fact that interested the people is (that) I wanted to work with native soil, the ceramic part.”
The textiles were mostly vintage pieces Eme found, but he commissioned artist María de la Luz Villa to create one of them. De la Luz Villa made a textile with cave painting-like designs that reflects her Cochimi and Kumeyaay background.
When visitors see “Crisol,” Eme hopes they will think about the hard work that independent artists do to create handmade textiles. Meanwhile, Fukuyama hopes that people feel optimistic when they see “Light of Passage.”
“I hope that they find beauty from the light,” Fukuyama said. “I hope that people find (a) sense of hope and optimism through the colors. And I'm hoping that if some people visit here more than once, then they see the changes throughout the day, throughout the season, and notice little things that change around us.”
There will be an open house and resource fair at SELWC on Oct. 14. Members of the public are invited to tour the facility and see all the art.
Residents are able to provide continued feedback on the Live Well program via email here.
