By PAM KRAGEN for THE SAN DIEGO UNION_TRIBUNE; JULY 20, 2021

SAN DIEGO — This morning, Vicki Estrada will virtually attend her first meeting of the California Arts Council. On July 7, the state Senate appointed the South Park resident to a four-year term on the 11-member panel, which oversees a newly expanded $128 million budget for the arts.

Estrada, 69, is a veteran landscape architect best known as the author of the 1989 Balboa Park Master Plan, and she has volunteered for many years on San Diego arts boards, commissions and committees. Estrada said her goal with the CAC will be to bring more state arts dollars to the region’s most underserved communities.

“There’s an interactive map on the CAC website with red dots that shows where its grants have gone in the past,” she said. “There’s a big core in the Southeast area of the county where I noticed a lack of dots. My goal is to not wait for applications to come in, but to go out into the community and start saying there’s money out there and we need you to apply.” Because of her background, Estrada has a big heart for amplifying the voices of the unheard…

…Estrada is the president and founder of 36-year-old Estrada Land Planning in downtown San Diego. Besides creating the Balboa Park Master Plan for future development, which she expanded with the Central Mesa Precise Plan in 1992, Estrada has designed the Plaza de Panama Fountain in Balboa Park, the Barrio Logan community sign, the Palm Avenue street end plaza in Imperial Beach and much more.

She also served for nine years on the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, seven years as chair of San Diego’s Public Art Commission, four years as chair of the San Diego International Airport public art commission and chair of the Media Arts Center, which produces the San Diego Latino Film Festival.

“Being an arts commissioner here changed my life,” Estrada said. “It allowed me to realize as a designer that I was a lot more rigid. Being an arts commissioner taught me there are so many different ways that people perceive and see things and feel things because their needs are so different.”

Estrada said many people don’t understand how landscape architecture and the arts are connected. But she said the best-planned public spaces are those that begin from an artistic viewpoint.

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