If you drive east to the end of SR 125, you will probably see the mushroom-shaped water tower with its silvery clouds. This site-specific sculpture was commissioned in the mid-1990s and reflects the challenges of doing public art.
Revisiting the controversy
Public art can cause controversy. Especially when it’s 150 feet tall and overlooks a suburban neighborhood.
In a late 1990s TV news report, residents proclaimed: "It’s inherently ugly. It’s really an unforgivable monstrosity. It’s a rust bucket in no uncertain terms. A monstrous blight on our community."
This was after Helix and Padre Dam Municipal Water Districts had built the water tower in question and done considerable community outreach to win over a majority of residents to the public art cloud project.
But back in the 1990s, public art was not as common in San Diego as it is now. Plus organizations and artists were not as well prepared for dealing with controversy, even if it was coming from a minority of people.
News stations at that time were quick to highlight the negative comments but failed to provide any context for the story. In fact one station insisted on calling it "an art project by Grossmont college art students," which was untrue, and demeaning it as if it were some decorative trim casually added to the water tower.
Almost three decades later, that still frustrates Jim Wilsterman, the artist hired to design the sculpture for the water tower.
"I think that that was meant to be dismissive," Wilsterman said. "I did put my students out front because they're the ones that were doing the hard work and labor. But to not even talk about what the project was and what it meant and why it was being built just sort of seems like it was a fluff piece to put on the news. They were not seeing a lot of monuments and public art out there. And when they did, they tended to think of them as decorative, not having meaning or context. I think that was the issue and it was sad."
The process of designing the project, meeting with residents, and then constructing the sculpture took years of hard work, so there was nothing casual or thoughtless about the process or the end result.
Context and meaning
During that controversy in the late 1990s, Wilsterman said no one from the local TV news stations ever bothered to speak to him or to even consider why someone would put clouds on a water tower. Wilsterman gratefully noted that at the time only The Reader provided context for the controversy.
The context Wilsterman was eager to discuss was water. Water has always been an important issue to him and he wanted to remind people where our water comes from, whether it’s clouds bringing rain or a water tower servicing a community.
"People here, they see green, they see lawns, they see trees, they think this is the way things are," Wilsterman said. "A decade or two later, here we are with a water shortage. That's what this was about, to try to make people think about where our water comes from. Because you hide a water tank, they don't think about it."
Helix Water District agreed then and now.
"We knew this tank was going to be seen for miles and miles around, and so we wanted to make it a feature and not a distraction from the environment," said Timothy Ross, Helix Water District's current director of engineering. "One of the reasons we decided to engage an artist on this project and make a public art piece is because this really is a unique tank for our system. As an engineer, I personally really think it's very creative, and I think this tank is unique. It was meant to be unique."
Unique in that it is two tanks in one using hydraulics to serve the different needs of two water districts, and it was designed to never need exterior maintenance.
"What it's doing is it's oxidizing the exterior, and this tank will never need to be recoated or maintained over the next two centuries that it will actually be in service," Ross added. "So it's a very practical application. But we also thought there's an opportunity to make it a feature and break up all that big, brown metal with something that stands out."
Designing and creating the sculpture
Wilsterman recalled his early reaction to the water tower, "It looks like a big mushroom esthetically. There wasn't a whole lot you can do with the outside, but around the rim was where I decided to put clouds. The people that live here can actually see these clouds climbing over the mountains here, and that provides the water that went into the lake and into the old flume. So they're literally probably the only people in San Diego that can actually see where their water comes from at that time, and now partially where it comes from."
Wilsterman suggested a trio of designs, not all with clouds, that were pitched to the community. Residents overwhelmingly chose the clouds that would eventually be constructed out of stainless steel.
"To do the finish we took the stainless steel and we brushed it to get the optical illusion that there's three dimension in billows," Wilsterman explained. "Then overlaid that with perforated stainless steel, which creates kind of a shadow effect. It was a challenge to figure out all these technologies that I wasn't necessarily familiar with."
The intent is that the closer you get, the more three-dimensional and beautifully detailed they become.
Wilsterman enlisted the help of his students, many of whom were from the community, to build the clouds.
"It took about two years, because those things are huge," Wilsterman said. "They don't look like it, but some of them are 14 foot tall and 35 feet wide. That's the size of a small house. But the most important part to me was working with my students, because my students really love the idea of public art."
The project was a challenge on multiple levels.
"I had to build my own crane. I had to build spreader bars to lift things up. I had to build jigs," Wilsterman said. "I pulled my father out of retirement, who worked at General Dynamics, and he came and showed me how to do layout work because he built huge aircraft and missiles. I had to take out a million dollar insurance policy just to step foot on this property."
Public art
Wilsterman has long been a proponent of public art. He has helped other artists fabricate their projects, worked decades creating multiple public art projects of his own, and he taught his students at Grossmont College about how to create public art as part of their careers.
That is one of the reasons that he had his students back in the 1990s help create the clouds for the water tower. He wanted them to experience being part of a public art project and seeing it through to completion.
But Wilsterman learned from both the water tower and a previous public art controversy in Carlsbad about needing to engage the community in the process.
"Handling public art has to be done very carefully," Wilsterman said. "What I learned is you can do stuff that's controversial if you handle it correctly. So you've got to be honest, you got to be out there, and you got to face whatever's there. The water district was absolutely stellar in their way of handling this. Mainly, it's engagement, telling people about themselves. So you're not talking down to them. What you're doing is just explaining something about the context and history of what you're doing. So you have to be able to speak to them in visual language and then be able to back it up with the way you explain it. Getting them involved is the best way to overcome opposition."
You can find other examples of his smaller scale public art at the children's playground for the Earl and Birdie Taylor Branch Library; in collaboration with artist Machi Uchida for City of Carlsbad's 10,000-Year Trail; and Grossmont College Child Development Center Garden.
Vindication
Wilsterman weathered a lot of criticism for the project but feels vindicated by the kids who grew up in the neighborhood and ended up at Grossmont College where he taught.
"When they found out that I was the artist that did that, they were like, that was the coolest thing that ever happened to my neighborhood when I was growing up, because it stimulated my imagination. I wanted to know why it was there. It reminded me of the clouds over the mountains, which was the story we were trying to tell, and sometimes we go up there just to look at them," Wilsterman recalled.
The next time you're in the area and see that brown, mushroom-shaped water tower, think about both what a marvel of engineering it is and what the art is trying to convey about who we are and where we live.
