Culture Report: Getting 2015 Off the Ground

What’s the status of the planning for the upcoming 2015 celebration in Balboa Park? Organizers last week said they’ve dropped their “Edge2015” branding and don’t know yet how much the yearlong celebration will cost. We rounded up some other unanswered questions about parking and funding.

The San Diego Daily Transcript included this sense from Mayor Bob Filner:

Filner estimates the event could cost $30 million to get it off the ground, $50 million to make it good or $100 million to be spectacular.

You’re reading the Culture Report, our weekly compilation of the region’s arts and culture news.

Happening Here:

• Thieves hit Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company’s production at the 10th Ave. Theatre last week, absconding with key computer equipment, the sound board, props and jewelry. The company delayed the next evening’s show by 40 minutes once the team discovered the losses. Company founder Seema Sueko highlighted the work of her production team and other figures in the tight-knit theater community, who were coming through with loaned equipment and time to rebuild the production. “As we say in theater, ‘the show must go on,’ and they made it possible,” Sueko wrote in her blog.

• If you’ve not seen the temporary murals that have been going up in La Jolla over the last couple of years, you can see some of them in this KPBS television piece.

• Reviewing for the San Diego Reader, W.S. de Piero finds a lot to admire in the photojournalism exhibit, “Pictures of the Year International,” on display at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park through September.

• Asian art is a big deal at the San Diego Museum of Art. The institution owns a prestigious collection bequeathed by an heir to the Crayola brand, Edwin Binney 3. The museum named a new associate curator  of Southern Asian and Islamic art. (U-T)

• The U-T’s sports staff selected their top 50 historical sports sites around San Diego, including the Lafayette Hotel, a former Chargers haunt.

Local Roots:

• Rejection and finding out that a budget has been cut is the reality for artists, said sound and multimedia artist Margaret Noble in a CityBeat story about the Port’s slashed art budget, which cuts implicate a project Noble was planning for the Chula Vista shoreline. Still, Noble said the Port should’ve communicated this to her, rather than wait for her to find out from a reporter.

“This doesn’t take away my belief in the work or myself,” Noble said. “I get it. I’m not going to be angry at people that can’t pay their bills.”

• “I’m just a middle-aged person from La Jolla,” said the first woman cast in a  neat-sounding project, “100% San Diego,” at the La Jolla Playhouse. And that was exactly the point. The Playhouse’s project to depict San Diego’s demographics with a person to represent each percentage point in the breakdown of age and ethnicity. That woman, Andrea Moser, works for the Economic Development Corporation and helped the Playhouse team find the demographic info, then found herself cast as the first performer in the production. (KPBS)

• Cosmo Wenman has been photographing great world sculptures from every possible angle, then synthesizing those images so that he can make replicas using 3-D printers. Wenman has two replicas of “Head of a Horse of Selene,” a 432 B.C. sculpture belonging to the British Museum, in his San Diego living room. (Atlantic Cities)

• For its new class of astronaut candidates, NASA selected a researcher who graduated from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla in 2009. (UC San Diego)

• Robert Irwin, a renowned artist who’s made San Diego County his home for a couple of decades, has an exhibition of his colored fluorescent light pieces on display at the Pace Gallery in London. (Art Daily)

• A “set designer with deep roots in San Diego,” Robert Brill has designed the onstage worlds for recent theatrical hits here — “Moby Dick” at San Diego Opera, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” at La Jolla Playhouse. (KPBS)

• Victoria Hamilton, former head of the city Commission for Arts and Culture, is joining the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation. The nonprofit hopes to make the Village at Market Creek Plaza in southeastern San Diego into a “lively, multi-cultural arts destination.”

• A beloved fixture in San Diego theater for decades, Antonio “T.J.” Johnson, is moving to New York City. (U-T)

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