Every summer, kids in swimsuits climb into the bronze fountain at Brea Union Plaza and jump through the water spraying from two boys frozen mid-splash. The piece is called Water Power, sculpted by J. Seward Johnson Jr., and it sits a few steps from a companion piece by the same artist, Just a Taste, in the same shopping center off Imperial Highway. Most people walking past assume the city put it there, the same way a city plants trees or paves a crosswalk. It didn't. Almost none of the sculptures scattered across Brea came from a city budget, and understanding who actually paid for them changes what you notice the next time you drive past one.
The Assumption Everyone Gets Backwards
Brea's Art in Public Places Program started in 1975, and the mechanism behind it has nothing to do with city arts funding. Any private development with a total project valuation of $1.5 million or more is required to dedicate roughly 1 percent of that value to outdoor sculpture, commissioned and installed by the developer, on the developer's own property. The city sets the rule and keeps the map. It does not write the checks, and it does not own the art.
That distinction matters because it flips the usual assumption about public art. In most cities, a sculpture on a street corner signals a parks department line item or a grant. In Brea, it signals that a shopping center, apartment complex, or office park cleared a $1.5 million threshold and had to spend part of that money on a working artist. The sculpture in front of a Birch Street office building and the sculpture outside a Kraemer Boulevard apartment complex were bought by two different property owners, for two different reasons, with two different levels of enthusiasm about the process.
Fifty Years of a Rule Nobody Notices
That one requirement, repeated across five decades of development, is why Brea now holds one of the largest civic sculpture collections in California, with more than 185 individually commissioned pieces spread across the city's roughly twelve square miles. The roster of artists reads like a survey course: Magdalena Abakanowicz, Nikki de Saint Phalle, J. Seward Johnson Jr., Laddie John Dill, and longtime local contributor Marlo Bartels, whose tile and mosaic work shows up on benches, walls, and the semicircular outdoor amphitheater called Production of Oil, on Santa Fe Road between Kraemer Boulevard and Valencia Avenue. The program passed its 50-year mark in 2025, and the city still adds pieces every time a large enough project breaks ground.
None of that scale came from a master plan for a sculpture park. It came from ordinary commercial permitting, one developer at a time, over half a century.
Six Pieces That Show What "Developer-Funded, Owner-Maintained" Actually Looks Like
- Water Power and Just a Taste, J. Seward Johnson Jr., Brea Union Plaza off Imperial Highway. Two of the most-used pieces in the collection precisely because the property owner treats them as an amenity kids can climb on, not a fragile art object.
- Orange Grove Fountain, Meg Cranston, along the Birch Street Promenade downtown. A landmark piece in the highest-visibility commercial stretch in the city, kept in visibly better condition than pieces on quieter industrial parcels.
- Bluebird, Katie Casida, at East Pointe Village Townhomes near Birch and Redwood. Faded paint over the years earned it an unofficial nickname among longtime residents: Brown Bird.
- Mustangs, Ray Persinger, at the end of Saturn Street. Three life-size bronze horses that went noticeably grimy for a stretch before a property-side cleanup brought the piece back to something closer to its original finish.
- La Lune, Nikki de Saint Phalle, originally installed in a fountain inside Brea Mall in 1990. When the mall went through renovation, the piece spent months in storage while the property owner worked out what came next for it, a decision entirely outside city control.
- Production of Oil, Marlo Bartels, Santa Fe Road between Kraemer and Valencia. An amphitheater-scale installation on a private office parcel, proof that the 1 percent rule occasionally produces something closer to civic infrastructure than a lobby decoration.
Line those six up and a pattern shows up that has nothing to do with the artist's reputation or the sculpture's age. It has to do with which property owner is currently responsible for the parcel underneath it.
Who Actually Watches Over It
Because the city doesn't maintain these pieces, the job of noticing when one needs attention has largely fallen to volunteers. Voice of OC profiled two longtime residents, Terry Sullivan and Dena Sommer, who spend weekends driving the collection, flagging faded paint or missing pieces to city staff and tracking which companies currently own which parcels, since ownership changes hands more often than most people realize.
"You can see how there's been a progression in thinking from the developers," Sommer told Voice of OC in 2019.
Her point was that early participants treated the 1 percent requirement as an obligation, while more recent developers compete to install something memorable. That shift is visible if you know where to look. It also means the condition of any given sculpture today is less a statement about the city's priorities and more a live readout of who owns the building behind it.
What's New This Fall
The sculptures are permanent, but the programming around Brea's art identity changes every season, and this fall brings a piece of local trivia most residents don't know. The Brea Gallery, across the plaza from the Curtis Theatre at the Civic and Cultural Center, opens Yo Gabba Gabba: The Super Art Friends Show on October 18, running through December 12. The show ties back to the fact that the children's television franchise began its journey in Brea 20 years ago, and the exhibition pulls from the gallery's network of pop, surreal, and low-brow artists for a run of never-before-seen work built around that anniversary.
That show follows a summer exhibition, presented with Thinkspace Projects, that asked local and national artists to imagine what the country looks like on a milestone birthday a century from now. Both exhibitions are funded and staffed differently than the sculpture collection outside. The gallery, the Curtis Theatre, and the city's summer Concerts in the Park series draw support in part from ticket and admission revenue, including proceeds from Brea Fest, the city's annual food and arts festival. The sculptures on the sidewalk answer to a private developer. The gallery down the street answers to a different funding stream entirely, which is its own small lesson in how one city can run two separate art economies at the same time.
Seeing It for Yourself
The city maintains an interactive map of the full collection, searchable by location, artist name, or sculpture title, which is the easiest way to plan a short driving loop if you want to put names to the pieces you already pass on a normal week. Start downtown at the Birch Street Promenade for Orange Grove Fountain, head to the Civic Center for Hermandad by Carlos Terres at Birch and Randolph, and finish a few minutes away at Brea Union Plaza for Water Power, all well within a single afternoon.
Knowing that a private developer, not the city, paid for the piece outside your neighbor's office building does not change what it looks like. It changes what you're actually looking at when you slow down to notice it.
If you are thinking further ahead than an afternoon walk, and wondering what the property behind one of these parcels, or your own home, is actually worth right now, Daniel P. Garcia combines 23 years in the San Gabriel Valley and North Orange County market with a licensed contractor's eye for what actually raises value. Request a Free Home Valuation & Renovation Plan when you're ready to find out.
