Will Visual Dallas’s One Percent Solution Boost Public Art?

The bronze horses in front of Williams Square at Las Colinas. People frolicking in the fountains at Allied Bank Tower on a hot summer day. A field of Indian paintbrushes at the Dallas Arboretum & Botanical Gardens. Which of these qualify as “public art”? According to Mickey Gustin. a feisty arts advocate brought here from Seattle in July 1986 by the City Park and Recreation Board to muster support for a city-wide public arts program, all three come under the general rubric of public art.

It is Mickey Gustin’s mission to wow Dallas with what it lacks: a lively visual identity. Does that mean Gustin believes that Dallas is, shall we say. uglier than a mule’s behind? She would put it more diplomatically: “Let’s just say that there are things the city can do to create rich and varied aesthetic gifts to residents and visitors alike.1’

Hers is not an easy task. Since spring of 1986, consultant Gustin has set about building grass-roots support for her program, which was mandated by the city of Dallas in its Cultural Policy Resolution of 1985. Sometime this month. Gustin and a twenty-nine-member citizens’ committee hope to plead their case before the Dallas City Council. What they will unveil is a one hundred-page master plan, which includes specific suggestions for funding, maintaining, and administering a public arts program. At the core of the plan is a “Percent for Art” proposal that would require 1.5 percent of future capital budgets to go toward the integration of designs by local artists into city-sponsored improvement and building projects.

The group has had so much trouble communicating what public art is, that it often relies on what it’s not. “Most people think that public art is putting a sculpture in front of a building. But that’s just one form of public art.’” Gustin says.

Dallas has yet to do much more than pay lip service to the idea. But that has not daunted Gustin and her team of artists, who spent several months last spring surveying various areas of town and dreaming up innovative ways to improve them. A follow-up conference in July, titled “Visual Dallas.” brought together some 200 artists, designers, journalists, and arts supporters to see slides of the results and to begin a dialogue on how best to proceed.