The Stuart Collection at UCSD

N 32° 52.916 W 117° 14.048

Wandering through the Eucalyptus groves on the beautiful UC San Diego campus, you suddenly come across what the students call the ‘giraffe catcher’:  two purple, V-shaped fences suspended 20 feet in the air.  At night, the seven vices and virtues blink in neon light.  Near the southwest corner of campus, also in a Eucalyptus grove is a large, red shoe apparently left by a passing giant.  And speaking of giants, on the other end of campus sits an huge Teddy Bear made of boulders and a mosaic snake path climbing the hill to the Geisel Library.  Welcome to the Stuart Collection, UCSD’s wonderful collection of outdoor art.  There are 17 pieces of art in the collection spread throughout the campus, each totally unique.  The Stuart Collection was conceived as an outdoor art collection to enrich the cultural and intellectual life of the UCSD campus. What makes it different from other sculpture gardens is that the entire UCSD campus can be considered as sites for commissioned sculpture.  In 1983, the first piece, Niki de Saint Phalle’s Sun God, was commissioned.  One by one, other pieces were added throughout the campus. 

Seven years ago, I was heavily involved with geocaching, a recreational activity that involves finding hidden caches using a GPS device and coordinates found on a website, geocaching.com.  At that time, it was possible to create a ‘virtual cache’ - a cache with no physical cache container to find but some virtual goal instead.  For example, virtual caches often require the finders to locate themselves at the posted coordinates and take a picture or answer a question about the location.  In 2004, I created a virtual cache around The Stuart Collection. I toured the campus, found every piece, and wrote a question regarding each piece of the art.  To do the cache, the geocacher answers fifteen questions (that's all there were back then), discovers a secret phrase, and emails me that phrase to get credit for the cache.  Since it’s inception, about 100 people have logged a ‘find’ on my Stuart Collection geocache.  But I hadn’t been back since that first tour.

Christmas Eve 2010. It was sunny and cool after a straight week of rain.  My wife, her daughters, a boyfriend and I gathered in a parking lot on the southwest corner of campus.  I explained geocaching, both traditional and virtual, and then assigned three jobs: the navigator, the puzzle solver, and the tour guide.   I put the coordinates for the first piece into the GPS’r and off the navigator went to the Southwest.  Just 200 feet away, we found Elizabeth Murray’s Red Shoe (1996).  The puzzle solver discovered that it was made of cedar which gave us a ‘C’ for the answer sheet.  The tour guide read some notes from The Stuart Collection website, and we were off again, wending up a hidden path behind the theatre.  Ten minutes later, we were perusing William Wegman’s  La Jolla Vista View (1988), a long bronze map of the view to the east, trying to complete the phrase ‘Food _____’.  After the counting blocks of La Jolla Project (1984), I took some funny pictures our group under and on top of the piece.  Next, we counted the starfish on Kiki Smith’s Standing (1998).  Our navigator was at a loss when she zero’d out next to a drinking fountain. Yep, that’s it all right: Michael Asher’s Untitled (1991).  At each stop, the puzzle solver answered the questions one by one while the tour guide put the pieces in their larger context.  Working north, we saw the neon signs that make up Vices and Virtues (1988), the huge Bear (2005), and our favorite, the Snake Path (1992).  The Library and the Price Center were closed so we couldn’t see READ/WRITE/THINK/DREAM (2001) and Another (2008) but our Tour Guide filled us in.  We listened to the recorded speeches and music that emanates from TREES (1986). At that point, one of our group guessed the secret phrase which prompted the others to redouble their efforts.  We contemplated the rusty TV’s and Buddhas of Something Pacific (1986) and were left nonplussed by UNDA (1987). We poured over the inscriptions on the Green Table (1992), sharing our discoveries with one another.  The puzzle was solved, we were getting tired - ready to think about Christmas Eve dinner - so we headed south past the Sun God (1983) and Two Running Violet V Forms (1983).We took a quick peek at Terrace (1991) which is built into the Cellular and Molecular Medicine Facility before heading for the cars. The whole trek took about three hours.

The consensus was that this was a really great way to spend an afternoon.  The unique art combined with the geocaching and puzzle solving experience was quite enjoyable.  If you are in the San Diego area and have a hand-held GPS device, give it a try – even if you are not a regular geocacher.  

Question of the Day: The Stuart Collection gets its name from James Stuart DeSilva, the art philanthropist who inspired the collection.  What business was DeSilva in?