---

The city’s public arts committee is back in action with a new meeting schedule after an unofficial one-year hiatus.

The seven-member committee oversees the approval process for public art — mostly murals — in the city, ensuring that the city’s public arts ordinance is followed.

“Asbury park is an art and cultural destination and you can’t be an art and cultural destination of any repute without a major presence in public art,” said member Mike Sodano. “Public art is a tourist attraction. What better place to have a living, breathing artistic tourist attraction than Asbury Park?”

Other members of the committee are city manager Terence Reidy, Trip Brooks, Marilyn Schlossbach, Malcolm Navias and new appointees Andy Pawlin and Don Stine.

Sodano, who co-owns The ShowRoom independent movie theater, oversaw the re-configuration of the committee. It was created about a year and a half ago and functioned for six months, he said. Then, meetings were not scheduled for the past year due to an apparent lack of applications.

But the reason for the lack of artist applications may have been the lack of scheduled meetings, Sodano said.

The public arts ordinance requires interested artists to send letters to people who live within 200 feet of the prospective mural site. Those letters must include the date and time of the next public arts committee meetings for nearby residents to see the artist’s presentation and comment if they wish. With no meetings scheduled, this was not possible.

“You can’t get a mural done unless you have a meeting and you can’t schedule applications until you know when the meeting is,” Sodano said. “It was kind of a cart before the horse situation.”

This new iteration of the public arts committee will have a meeting scheduled every month, Sodano said. If there are no mural applications in a given month, the meeting will be canceled.

“Everybody will know that that’s when you have to shoot to get your application in,” he said.

Also, the public arts committee will now enlist the help of the Arts Coalition of Asbury Park [ArtsCAP]. ArtsCAP member Dennis Carroll will act as a liaison between the artists and the committee, guiding artists through the application process.

“The artists can do their work designing murals, and ArtsCAP can get the [application] process done for them and with them,” Sodano said.

The new committee also hopes to create an inventory of blank walls that could become murals around the city, Sodano said. In the future, the committee may also try to create a public art map with cultural and artistic destinations.

The mural on the back of the Interfaith Neighbors building, at Fourth Avenue and Memorial Drive, [pictured above] was approved by the public arts committee last year. The committee also approved a mural slated to be painted at A&J Sneakers, on the corner of Main Street and Summerfield avenues.

---