Taking art to the streets of L.A. County

The new Los Angeles County Administration Building rises four stories above Vermont Avenue, between 83rd and 84th streets, its clean lines and green-glass front striking a contrast with the auto body shops and parking lots nearby.

But something else also sets the county social services hub apart from the squat concrete structures around it: tile murals inside and outside the building, glazed with digitally manipulated photographs of oak trees to soften the bustle of South Los Angeles.

Completed this December, the building is the first developed under the Civic Art Program, which allots 1% of new county buildings' construction and design costs for art.

Betty Frazer, waiting in line for homeless assistance in advance of her pending eviction, said the wall-sized mural in the lobby, which depicts a fence threading across rolling hills and alongside majestic oaks, gave her a "sense of beauty."

"It makes it look peaceful," said Frazer, 44, of South Los Angeles, "even though it may not be. You come here and it's a headache."

The program, launched in December 2004, brings L.A. County up to date with other local governments, said Julie Silliman, civic art director with the Public Arts Commission.

Civic art is "something that's becoming more and more expected and more of a common factor in all public buildings across the country," she said. "The county is rather late in a sense."

The oldest public art program in the Southland is Los Angeles' Community Redevelopment Agency, which traces its roots to the late 1960s, according to Susan Gray, the agency's cultural arts planner.

One of the oldest such programs in the nation has been transforming Seattle's public landscape since 1973. Today, the city has 400 permanently sited works and 2,800 portable works.

"I think it has become part of the urban fabric here," said Ruri Yampolsky, director of the Seattle program. "It allows people to be engaged in the civic dialogue in a certain way."

Silliman hopes the nascent county program will encourage the public to think about the community where the art is placed.

"Los Angeles is very big, and we go from one neighborhood to another," and public art "helps you know where you are, because it's custom," she said.

L.A. County's process for commissioning art for a new building begins by gathering a project coordination committee for each project, made up of county officials, architects, developers and community representatives who discuss what would be most appropriate for that particular site.