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A team of five art experts walked along Addison Street from Milvia Street to Shattuck Avenue last Monday afternoon, scanning the streetscape to develop plans for embedding art in the sidewalks. 

They were in the first stages of determining where to place the works of eight Berkeley artists recently selected by the Berkeley Civic Arts Commission to design art for the Addison Streetscape Project. 

The underfoot art will be created in a range of materials and textures in panels of varying sizes that meet structural, aesthetic and disability standards. It will include sections of thick glass, blue ceramic tiles, and concrete laced with rusted steel and stone. 

The entire block, which constitutes the Downtown Arts District, will display art in the sidewalk. A serpentine concrete ribbon, contrasting in color from the sidewalks, will tie in all the elements. 

This visual and tactile art will accompany the expansion of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, whose new 600-plus seat house will help solidify the theater as the Arts District anchor. 

Another theater venue will join the neighborhood when the Aurora Theater Company moves to a new home in the Kress Building on the corner of Shattuck and Addison. Its entrance will be in the landmark Golden Sheaf Bakery building on Addison next to the Kress Building. 

The music dimension arrives via The Freight and Salvage Coffee House, which is buying the old Stadium Garage with financial assistance from the city. The Capoeira Arts Café already provides a Brazilian dance studio. 

“We want to make it an environment, not just a destination,” said Mary Ann Merker-Benton, civic arts coordinator. 

People can experience different art techniques, so the street becomes a living area, she said. The city is making a major statement on this street, she said, and turning the whole sidewalk into a work of art is part of the very ambitious project. 

“I think we’re creating an environment for people to be surprised,” said Susan Medak, managing director of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. 

A huge portion of the street’s footpad art will be literary. Robert Haas, an English professor at UC Berkeley and former poet laureate of the United States, is editing and selecting poems to be placed in squares near the sidewalk edges. 

He is selecting poems that bear some relationship to life in Berkeley and evoke a sense of place, said Michael Caplan, the city’s economic development coordinator for downtown. 

Caplan said the material for the 2-foot by 2-foot squares has not yet been determined, but the poetry excerpts may be cast in bronze or etched in stone, ceramic material or glass or a combination of several media. 

The current sidewalks on the block will be removed and the poetry squares and the 12 art panels will be embedded in new sidewalks after construction work on the street is completed, probably spring of next year. 

Last Monday afternoon, the Public Art Team along with Merker-Benton stood outside the Capoeira Arts Café, looking at the construction site of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. 

Landscape architect John Roberts said its façade would contain large panels of glass and the effect would be “very light.” 

Scott Donahue, an Emeryville public artist and a consultant for the Addison Streetscape project, said it might make sense to match glass (sidewalk art panels) with glass. 

The team had only recently seen the samples of the sidewalk art, and their job is to make the best aesthetic placement possible. 

Questions they needed to answer include determining how the art relates to the buildings next to it, the themes expressed in nearby poetry squares and the other art panels on the street. 

“I think we should honor the artists’ work as much as possible,” said Merker-Benton. “They put their heart and soul into it.” 

With a background in painting and mixed media, Merker-Benton has been the city’s civic arts coordinator for two years. 

She was hired to establish a Public Arts program using Measure S bond issue funding, and in that role her job is to keep politics and art separate. She said she came in when the groundwork for public art here already was established. At the city’s request she wrote a new ordinance requiring the city to contribute 1 1/2 percent of the cost of each new structure it builds to public art. 

The California Association of Local Arts Agencies has chosen Berkeley as a model project by including the entire call for artists as an example in the city’s tool kit sent to l00 cities throughout the state in cooperation with the California League of Cities. 

“Art is now recognized as playing a very important role in the revitalization of cities,” she said. 

People come to California for the geography and the culture, she said, describing the opposites of opera and Yosemite and the effect of tourism on local economies. 

Caplan said the conception for the Arts District emerged from many conversations among city planners who realized they already had the anchor component in the Berkeley Rep.