San Diego Steps It Up

San Diego Steps It Up: Watch for these future arts projects

San Diego Arts Entertainment District (SDAED) is a neighborhood revitalization project for the North Broadway corridor (Front St. to 10th Avenue and Ash S. to E St.) of Downtown San Diego promoting our vibrant arts industry. The district will create activities through art festivals, concerts, holiday events, cultural events, outdoor films, and most importantly though an innovative signage program. . SDAED will support the countywide artistic community through public displays of all types of art and through marketing support that will help drive awareness to showings within the arts community.  Private funds from a revenue share of district commercial signage will be reinvested into the district for the betterment of the local community. This was a process that worked very well in the Denver Theater District and is especially suited to downtown San Diego with its very stringent rules on commercial signage.

But this is not a done deal until its proposal with the City Council Land Use Committee in November and with City Council in January 2013 is approved. We can expect the start of this scheme if all goes well by April of 2013.

The district will be managed by Finwater Municipal Marketing through David Ehrich. The company is a partnership between Finwater Advisors LLC and Marston+Marston, Inc. Several national media companies will provide various forms of signage including LED screens, banners, and flags that will generate district revenue. A local board of directors, comprised of representatives from the City as well as arts groups and private business owners, will govern the district. This Board will review and make recommendations to the City Planning authorities related to all district signage to ensure that the signage meets appropriate public interests and standards. We believe that they will encourage innovative and creative photos and videos and that will help make the signs not an eyesore, but a wonderful added element of art that is constantly changing and spreading the word about arts in our region. Public displays of art will be a hallmark of the SDAED. These displays will provide valuable exposure to arts groups within and outside of the district boundaries.

National Science Foundation awards a $2.6m grant to the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership to lead a national innovation incubator project integrating arts-based-learning and STEM (What we in SD call STEAM). We heard more about the innovation Incubator grant program at the  Reuben H. Fleet Science Center Community Forum when San Diego Innovation Alliance members were invited to join a special informational meeting with Harvey Seifter, Art of Science Learning founder and the project’s director and principal investigator.

This project will take place over three years. The first phase is a planning year when a curriculum will be designed to help the teams and those  teams will be formed through a network of advisors and mentors, faculty and corporate sponsors. Each city will choose a civic challenge and the teams will self form and generate their own themes. The second year will put the 300 team members divided amongst three cities to work. Each city will have 5 teams working on school programming and five teams working on projects with products or services.  At least 20% of those teams will be students. The results will be documented and an exhibition is planned to show case all of the teams in all three cities starting at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center.

There will also be an independent research project with a control group and one which has undergone about 12 hours of the curriculum instruction. They will then be asked to generate solutions for the same projects that the teams have worked on. This will generate statistics, hopefully, confirming that students that study the arts outperform those who don’t and scientist who participate in the arts are higher achiever than those who don’t. That study will involve both high school students and early career STEM professionals.

They also want to foster engagement through a series of public programs. Of course they will have an evaluation assessment. The main push with this project is to enhance cross discipline practices, strengthen creativity in the sciences and generate innovation. This will hopefully fill the gap in communication skills and facilitate greater teamwork skills. Both of these along with enhanced creativity have been identified as needs to jump start our innovative economic progress.

We also hear rumors of a performing arts annual Fringe Event which will have visual arts component. AND don’t forget the San Diego View Art Now (SDVAN) app coming to you later this year. Produced and sponsored by San Diego Visual Arts Network, this app will pin point events near you on a Google map and be searchable by date or region of SD including Baja Norte.