The City of Santa Cruz is pleased to announce the launch of our new City Arts website: SantaCruzCityArts.com

Through extensive use of photography and video, the site introduces residents and visitors to the vibrant public arts culture of Santa Cruz. Features include an interactive tour of the City’s public art, and calls to artists to participate in public arts projects. Plus, the site helps artists, and the public, understand how these art pieces are commissioned and selected, while making it easy for artists to respond to calls for proposals.

The City of Santa Cruz has a long history of supporting the arts. It currently requires that one percent of the budget for City-funded construction projects be spent on public artwork. Managed by the City’s Arts Program Manager, under direction of the Santa Cruz City Arts Commission, the Percent for Art program has commissioned dozens of site-specific projects in variety of media—painting, new technologies, lighting, mosaic, glass, textiles, sculpture, signal box art, and works that are integrated into infrastructure and architecture.

The Santa Cruz City Arts Commission guides the public arts programs for the City. Established in 1977 to enhance the aesthetic, cultural and economic quality of life in the City, the Commission encourages, supports and promotes the diversity of arts and artists in the community. Their leadership was pivotal to the construction of The Tannery Arts Center.

The City Arts site is a companion to CruzCal.com, also sponsored by Santa Cruz City Arts and the Santa Cruz Economic Development Office. CruzCal is the Santa Cruz community’s free, convenient, and open calendar resource for all arts and cultural events. It allows arts event organizers to post information in one, central place. The City Arts site pulls information on upcoming events from CruzCal and features it on our Home page. Audiences, media, curated websites, and bloggers can easily import event information from CruzCal and share it on their own calendars.