Not even a week after the show was hung, a single art piece showing as part of the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission’s (SBCAC) collaborative exhibit with skateboarder/artist Pat Ngoho and his ongoing, international exhibit Love + Guts, was taken down by Bob Nelson, chief of staff for Santa Barbara County 4th District Supervisor Peter Adam.
The piece by Los Angeles-based skateboarder/artist Steve Olson, which featured prominent red lettering reading “BUY SEXUAL” over a grid of red and white $69.99 price tags, has since been hung back up by county Arts Commission staff, and the process of getting the piece removed through official channels is starting.
Adam and Nelson both agreed that the piece of art was inappropriate for the government building where county Board of Supervisors meetings take place and locals receive marriage licenses. Nelson acted on Adam’s orders when he took the piece down without permission, the two told the Sun.
“My boss was supportive,” Nelson said.
“I told you to do it,” Adam cut in, “and you did it, and you don’t feel a bit bad about doing it.”
“No, I do not,” Nelson said.
Adam chose not to remove the piece once it was hung again, he explained, so as not to begin an unnecessary conflict that would take up county supervisors’ meeting time.
Nelson did attend a County Art in Public Places (CAPP) committee meeting on Sept. 14 in Santa Barbara to offer comments to the committee, which delivered a 5-1 vote to move the piece to a less conspicuous part off the hall. The vote will act as a formal recommendation for the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission, which was scheduled to meet at noon on Sept. 17 at the Elverhoj Museum in Solvang.
The piece was put back up in order to follow the official procedure of the Arts Commission, explained commission Executive Director Ginny Brush.
“The process is important for this reason,” Brush said. “People have specific opinions about things, especially art, and the county created this location that has processes for reviewing art, and if there are complaints or objections, that will go through the Arts Commission and the arts commissioners who will review it and make an approval.”
District Attorney Joyce Dudley attended the CAPP meeting along with the office’s Director of the Victim-Witness Assistance Program Megan Rheinschild, who said she attended the meeting to get a better understanding of the vetting process employed by the commission when considering new work.
Rheinschild also serves as coordinator for the countywide Human Trafficking Taskforce, and said that the art piece delivers a troubling message about prostitution that runs counter to the task force’s aim of educating the county about sexual exploitation.
“I think it has a lot of really heavy, complicated messaging going on, and there is a time and place for that, but I’m not sure a county building where people are casually walking through, getting married, getting paperwork, is the kind of place you are going to get that kind of intelligent, meaningful dialogue,” she said. “You have people coming through the Betteravia building who are not walking in with the idea of walking into an art gallery to be provoked and thinking about complex issues.”
Adam’s and Dudley’s offices aren’t concerned with the rest of the art show, which includes mostly paintings and mixed media work by famous skateboarders/artists and locals, including a few pieces by John Hood, Allan Hancock College art instructor and curator for the show.
Hood spoke with the Sun just before the CAPP committee meeting, where he voted to move the piece to a less prominent location, explaining that the piece should have never been removed in the first place.
“We kind of knew it might happen,” he said. “It’s one of those things, where it happened so quickly, there was no discussion about it. We were hoping to just have a dialogue about that, but it became a formal request to take it down, and it became something we couldn’t comment on because it became a legal matter.”
While the recommendation by the CAPP committee to simply move the piece was set to be considered by the SBCAC meeting, at press time Adam and Nelson were hopeful that the commission would vote to remove or replace the work with another by Olson that’s more appropriate for the public space, as well as refine the procedure for vetting art that shows in the public hall.
Simply moving the piece still isn’t good enough, Adam and Nelson explained from the foyer of the administration building housing the art show and the piece.
“I’m just wanting to deal with this one thing on the wall,” Adam said. “And I would ask them to use some judgment about what community they’re in when they deploy art and not try and poke anybody in the eye. I feel pretty poked in the eye.”
This article appears in Sep 17-24, 2015.