Find Art Here

For  San Diego Design Week 2021 , The City of San Diego (City) has curated a series of self-guided tours of the City’s Civic Art Collection. These tours are a complement to the City’s  interactive collection map , and offer focused selections along San Diego’s coast, through its parks, and in its libraries. There are sculptures, paintings, and functional and integrated artworks in a diverse range of media and materials. Color, line, shape, balance, rhythm, and contrast are just a few of the building blocks utilized by artists to create the works in the collection. Scroll down to enjoy from the comfort of your home or take to the streets with the interactive map as your guide to view these visual experiences.

Follow the links to the interactive tour features, or explore the embedded maps here if using a desktop or laptop browser. Artworks and locations are presented in recommended order. Each entry on the side bar includes links to Google maps for precise directions. Follow the tour in order and discover San Diego anew, or visit recommended works at your leisure. 

Be sure to virtually check out the nearly  100 artworks recently acquired by the City  to support the local arts ecosystem and the creative practices of the 89 local artists who created them.

San Diego’s parks and plazas are among the best opportunities to integrate public art into the built environment, especially large-scale permanent sculptures. Parks and plazas also represent the City’s Civic Art Collection from its very first acquisitions in the beginning of the 20th century, to recently completed contemporary site-specific commissions. This City-wide tour covers a broad range from intimate installations produced collaboratively with the surrounding community (A Place to Call Home) to early monumental works (Horton Plaza Fountain), to microcosms of the surrounding landscape (Fountain Mountain and Canyon Passage).  

Trace San Diego’s waterfront from the bay in Point Loma up through the beaches and La Jolla. Along the coast you will find a diverse array of permanent installations integrated into an equally diverse array of public facilities, from pump stations, to skate parks to lifeguard towers. Consider the intersection of culture and infrastructure as you explore San Diego’s iconic coastline. 

In addition to outdoor permanent commissions, the City’s Civic Art Collection is home to numerous paintings, drawings, portable sculptures, and site-specific commissions integrated into interior architecture. In addition to being invaluable assets to the communities they serve, libraries offer the best opportunities to see these works. This tour’s entries each feature a main, site-specific work that can be found at each selected library branch, however that’s not the only thing you can see there, by far. Take your time to explore each library branch to see the broad range of portable works in the Civic Art Collection. The Central Library Downtown is a tour in itself. Be sure to visit each floor! This tour is by no means exhaustive. Visit the main  interactive map  to see what other libraries around the city have in store. Before you go, check each  library branch’s  hours.