Stop at the light on Imperial Highway and Shopping Mall Way, the one by Brea Union Plaza, and look left before it turns green. Three bronze figures stand near the parking lot entrance, each with its own small title: "Just a Taste," "There, Now You Can Grow," "Water Power." Most people driving to Sprouts or Ross have never noticed them as anything more than landscaping.
All three are by J. Seward Johnson Jr. In Brea, they sit next to a parking lot, uncredited by any plaque most drivers would notice, one small cluster within roughly 195 sculptures the city has accumulated since 1975 under a program most residents have never heard of by name: Art in Public Places.
Here's the part that actually changes how you see the city. This isn't a downtown arts district or a sculpture park you'd plan a trip around. It's the opposite. Brea's collection is threaded through office parks, apartment complexes, and strip malls precisely because the city never built it that way on purpose. It built the requirement instead, and let developers do the rest.
The ordinance that turned parking lots into a gallery
In 1975, the Brea City Council passed a resolution that, on paper, sounds like a zoning technicality. Any private developer building a residential, commercial, or industrial project of five units or more, with a total valuation above roughly $1.5 million, had to commission and permanently install an outdoor sculpture as part of the project. The art had to be accessible to the public. The developer paid for it. The property owner, not the city, has been responsible for maintaining it ever since.
That funding model is the reason the collection doesn't look like a typical civic art program. Most cities that invest in public art cluster it downtown, near city hall, along a designed promenade built for the purpose. Brea's program grew the opposite way. It expanded wherever private construction happened to occur, which means a sculpture might show up outside a self-storage facility as easily as outside a theater. The city formalized the requirement further in 2001, writing it into the zoning code, and the current policy manual governing how sculptures are reviewed, sited, and maintained was last updated in November 2021.
Fifty years in, the city counts more than 195 sculptures across roughly 12 square miles, one of the largest civic art collections in the state by that measure. Spread that count across Brea's footprint and you get a rough sense of how often you're near one without knowing it: this isn't a handful of showpieces at a cultural center, it's dozens of works scattered through the same commercial corridors residents use for groceries, gas, and errands.
Five pieces you've probably already driven past
You don't need a map to start noticing them, though the city does maintain an interactive one. A few that sit on well-traveled corners:
| Piece | Artist | Where to find it |
|---|---|---|
| Sky Spheres | Ivan McLean | North side of Lambert Road, between Puente and Pioneer |
| Just a Taste, There Now You Can Grow, Water Power | J. Seward Johnson Jr. | Brea Union Plaza, northwest corner of Imperial Highway and Shopping Mall Way |
| Sunburst | Sergio O'Cadiz | Northeast corner of Brea Boulevard and Canyon Country |
| Siamese Metal #6 | Richard Deacon | East side of State College Boulevard, between Birch and Avocado |
| Cove Sculpture | Wall and Goldfinger | Southwest corner of Birch Street and Valencia Avenue |
McLean's piece on Lambert is a cluster of steel spheres, each one assembled from hundreds of individual welded steel elements, the kind of work that looks different depending on the angle of the afternoon sun. Deacon's piece sits on State College Boulevard next to an office building most people pass without a second look on a commute.
The number that reframes the whole city
It's easy to hear "195 sculptures" and picture a scavenger hunt. The more useful way to think about it is density. A city with one or two headline sculptures downtown asks you to go visit them. A city with nearly 200 sculptures spread across 12 square miles has, without really trying, made public art part of the built environment rather than a destination layered on top of it. You're not visiting the collection. You're already inside it, most days, without noticing.
That's also why so few residents can name more than one or two pieces. There's no single unveiling, no single ribbon cutting, no single afternoon where the city says "here it is." The collection arrived one commercial permit at a time, over five decades, which means most of it has simply become scenery.
The exhibition trying to change that, running through September
That's what makes this particular late summer worth paying attention to. The Brea Gallery, inside the Civic and Cultural Center at 1 Civic Center Circle, is currently showing "Mapping the Landscape: A 50 Year Dialogue with Art and the Community," on view through September 19, 2026. It marks the program's 50th anniversary, and it does something the sculptures themselves can't: it gathers work from artists across the collection into one room, indoors, with context, rather than leaving each piece isolated at its own intersection.
That matters more than it might sound. Because the sculptures sit on private property and are maintained by individual property owners, there's no natural place where the whole program comes together and tells its own story. A show like this is the closest thing Brea has to seeing the full fifty years at once, and it closes in a few weeks. If you've read this far because one of the pieces above sounds familiar, this is the month to actually go.
Earlier this month, Brea Fest, the city's annual food and music festival at the Civic and Cultural Center, drew crowds under the same roof that houses the gallery. Proceeds from the event go toward the city's art programs, including the gallery and the Curtis Theatre, which is a small but telling detail: the same civic infrastructure that funds a Friday night food festival is also what keeps a fifty-year sculpture program running. It's not a separate cultural budget line. It's the same one.
Why the model still works, decades later
New development in Brea still triggers the same requirement it did in 1975. Every qualifying project adds to the collection, which means the count of 195 isn't a fixed historical number. It grows quietly with each new commercial or multi-unit residential build that clears the valuation threshold, which is part of why longtime residents will tell you the collection feels bigger every few years without anyone announcing an addition.
It also means property owners inherit an obligation most people never think about when they buy into a commercial center or a condo development with a sculpture already sited on the grounds. Maintenance, insurance, and repair fall to whoever owns the property, not the city, which is a detail worth knowing if you've ever wondered why some pieces look freshly cleaned and others look like they've weathered fifty summers, because in some cases, they have.
For a city its size, that's an unusual amount of infrastructure built around something with no admission fee and no dedicated building. It's why Brea's reputation as North Orange County's "City of Art" isn't a slogan invented for a tourism brochure. It's a zoning requirement that quietly outlasted five decades of turnover in city councils, developers, and residents, and it's still adding pieces today.
Next time you're waiting at Imperial and Shopping Mall Way, look left. The three figures with the garden titles will still be there, unbothered by the traffic.
If you're curious what else has changed in the neighborhoods around Brea, or you're weighing a move into one of the communities near these corridors, Jin Hong Team has spent years tracking the details that make North Orange County's cities distinct from one another. Reach out when you're ready to talk about what's actually happening on the ground here, not just the median price.
