After a years-long process to complete the approval and installation of the newest public art wraps around utility boxes in town, on August 7, the Coronado Historical Association (CHA) hosted a dedication for the new Art Outside the Box installation. Seven Coronado High School and Coronado School of the Arts (CoSA) students collaborated with the Coronado Cultural Arts Commission and CHA to update the public art wraps around utility boxes in Coronado.
Coronado Cultural Arts Commissioner Dawn Richards began the presentation, expressing her thanks for the students’ hard work bringing a new series of public art pieces to the City and to all involved in that process.
In the spring of 2023, students Sophia Hodges, Griffin Wong, Mason Deane, and Jasmine Lo interned with CHA, where they were responsible for researching the utility box sites and combing through historic photos of Coronado. CoSA students Rebekka Siqueiros, Juniper Clark, and Jocain Howard also partnered with the CHA interns during that time to finalize the selection of images and turn them into the pieces of public art that can now be seen all around Coronado. The final designs were submitted and reviewed by the City and Caltrans.
“Art Outside the Box is a unique program that transforms our dull, yet very necessary utility boxes into vibrant works of public art, adding color, creativity, and beauty to our downtown area,” Richards noted. “Tonight, we are here to celebrate the incredible partnership behind this project and recognize the talented high school students who made this happen. The first group worked with the Coronado Historical Association and made use of their wonderful resources. They probably combed through hundreds of images to try and find the most appropriate ones for this project.”
CHA President Jenna McIntosh and Curator of Collections Vickie Stone were at the event and were responsible for assisting the students with the initial phase of this project. Stone is one of the direct CHA liaisons for the Coronado Unified School District’s internship program (a partnership that has been going on for over a decade now), where she provided the CHA interns involved with Art Outside the Box access to their archives and the many photos housed there.
“We’re so pleased to be able to offer [this internship] to Coronado High School students. Almost every semester, we have students who are interested in what they can do with us,” Stone said during the ceremony. “Generally, we do an oral history program as our internship project, and so this was a really fun, collaborative project that gave our students an opportunity to think a little bit differently. Not only did the students pick each image, but they had to research them and write an informative and engaging article for the public to read in the Coronado Magazine.”
“The second group was with CoSA’s graphic design program,” Richards noted. “What they did was [they] took the parameters of all of the boxes and made the artwork fit on each of the four side panels. To take it a step further, they also added pops of color to these historical photos.”
Councilmember Kelly Purvis, who previously served as the City’s Arts Administrator, was also invited to speak, and Purvis explained how the utility box art wraps have evolved over the past decade.
“This project started ten years ago in 2015,” Purvis said. “Carol Pastor, a wonderful member of the Historical Association, came forward and said, ‘We have a great idea – we’d like to paint boxes throughout town.’ That idea evolved, and we came up with the idea of wrapping them in film, taking artwork, and having students do it.”
The first iteration of Art Outside the Box involved Coronado students from fifth through ninth grades, who went through an extensive jury process and learned a lot about public art as they submitted their designs. “I have to say, it was a splash of color in our downtown, and it was just lovely to see those boxes,” she continued. “Was it one hundred percent loved? No, but that’s what public art does. It creates conversation.”
That initial project included utility boxes in the Village, and the next iteration of the project focused on the Strand and brought in the Silver Strand Beautification Committee. Members of the committee suggested putting photography on the boxes that would highlight the beauty of the Strand. “That’s exactly what we did,” Purvis said. “We incorporated the work of a few photographers, one of whom was Brian Lippe. He was a U.S. Navy SEAL who lived down in the Cays.”
Lippe passed away before those art wraps were completed, and in honor of his memory, a photo of him was also incorporated into Art Outside the Box. “What I love about it and [Lippe’s] work is that as you drive out of the Cays, there’s a box with him on it, taking a photograph. So that was a wonderful second project.”
For the latest variation to the Art Outside the Box, CHA brought the proposal to use historical photos and bring the high school students on board. “On Third Street, you can see the helicopter [wrap] as you’re going into the Base. On Fourth Street, you’ll see the preschool, which was actually on that block across the street (that was Miss Bunny’s preschool). Down the way, you’ll see the photos of the film festival. We actually had an earlier film festival,” Purvis listed. “The stories go on and on, and these students learned about our history, about what had been there, and picked out appropriate pictures.”
I had the chance to chat with Sophia Hodges, one of the CHA interns who had worked on the project, who graduated from CHS earlier this year, at the event. Part of Hodges’ involvement included researching the history, specifically around Avenida del Sol and Avenida de Las Arenas. “I really like history, so I had wanted to do an internship that semester with the Coronado Historical Association,” she mentioned of what had motivated her to be a part of this project.
One of Hodges’ favorite takeaways from the experience was learning how to use CHA’s image catalogue and getting to go through so many historic photos. “That was really interesting, and learning new things and seeing these photos I’d never seen before was pretty cool,” she described. “At Tent City, there was a dance hall, and that one was my favorite because I hadn’t known that it had been there, and it was a really beautiful building. It had a similar Victorian and Queen Anne style as the Del, and I wish it was still there.
“[CHA] also taught us how to write a research article and how to incorporate that with the images,” Hodges added. “That was really interesting to try and piece it together. It was definitely a process, but it was worth it, and now I want to try and get more involved with local history, local art, anything like that.”
During the presentation, Purvis also discussed how much effort went into restoring, enlarging, and getting the images from the historical photographs to work with the dimensions of a utility box, a challenge that the CoSA students took on. “These photographs were very granular, and they had to blow them up, and they decided to add pops of color to them. And that pop of color made these pictures just wonderful. This project is an unbelievable collaboration between CoSA, CHA, the Arts Commission, our City, and Caltrans,” Purvis mentioned. “They’ve turned these boxes into canvases and made a statement with our history, and they make me smile when I drive by. Public art is for us, it’s a gift.”
I also had the opportunity to discuss that part of the experience with Rebekka Siqueiros, one of the CoSA students who designed the wraps for the utility boxes on the corners of Avenida del Sol and Orange Avenue, Avenida de Las Arenas and Silver Strand, and Pomona and Orange Avenue. Siqueiros, who is now getting ready to start her sophomore year of college, mentioned how the graphic designers on the project decided to randomly divvy up the utility boxes among themselves and then worked from the narrowed-down selection of photos the CHA interns presented them with.
“We had a couple of meetings with the Arts Commission, where we narrowed it down further to a few photos per box. Then we went through the restoration process, adding color and formatting them,” Siqueiros explained. As Purvis had noted, that process brought with it a series of challenges, given that they were working with older photographs and unusual canvas sizes and shapes.
“Some of the photos were scanned pictures of a photo from years ago and weren’t the right aspect ratio to fit the frame,” Siqueiros agreed. “We thought about what we could do, and Photoshop has this cool thing where you can extend [elements]. I did that a couple of times, but I wasn’t changing the integrity of the photo. It was just the sky or the beach [that were extended] to fit the frame. There was also a lot of reworking on the color because we had to figure out if we wanted to do full color or have it be a pop of color on one aspect.”
She recalled having a lot of freedom with those creative aspects for the designs, including selecting what colors to use. “I personally did a couple of versions of each one. We had another meeting where we could spitball ideas and ask what color we liked best, or if we wanted a different part of the photo to be highlighted, and we came together as a group to decide that. It was a lot of workshopping.”
Siqueiros added that it’s been a surreal feeling to see that work physically brought to life with the completed installation of the wraps this year. “Now it’s real, and people are looking at it every day. It makes me feel really grateful for all of the opportunities to do this,” she said. “There were a lot of photos that I really liked that didn’t make it through the process, but they were so interesting. I’ve gone to school here all of my life, but I don’t live on the island, so it was cool to see this stuff that I never would have known had been here if it wasn’t for this project.”
As part of the celebration of these newest iteration Art Outside the Box public art pieces, the full-sized, three-dimensional models of the art wraps for the utility boxes alongside historical photographs are on display at the Coronado Public Library through September 8.
A full list of the ten Art Outside the Box locations with information about which students worked on which boxes is available on the City’s website at https://www.coronado.ca.us/1093/Art-Outside-the-Box-Take-2-Orange-Avenue. To read the students’ article about the history around each of those locations and the corresponding historic photos, please visit https://issuu.com/coronadomagazine/docs/coronado_magazine_-_august_2025.
VOL. 115, NO. 34 – Aug. 20, 2025