Shelly Willis, Sacramento's new public art administrator, grew up poor and on welfare – and fairly deprived of art, other than her great uncle Bentley's watercolors hanging in the family home.

Her art education began at 14 when her godmother took her to the Huntington Art Gallery in Los Angeles, and Thomas Gainsborough's "Blue Boy" took her breath away. She didn't enter another art space until four years later, as a college freshman.

"I think a big reason why I gravitated toward the field of public art is because it puts work in the path of your everyday life," says Willis.

Five months ago, she took the helm of the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission's Art in Public Places, a program that, for 30 years, has put sculptures, paintings, fountains, mosaics and murals by local and nationally regarded artists out for all to see.

The 600-piece collection is as diverse as Linda Gelfman's whimsical mural at the Southside Art Center, and Archie Held's "Dread and Wonder," a pair of sculptures that form a gate at the Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center, a suburban jail. And then there's the Watt Avenue median strip on which Alan Osborne last year "planted" a 25-foot-tall palm tree along a sculpture fence sporting salmon, crows and goats.

Art in Public Places is funded by city and county ordinances that require developers to set aside 2 percent of their construction budgets for artwork. Sacramento was among the first U.S. cities to establish such a program.

Dennis Oppenheim, the New York City-based artist who created the "Flying Garden" bird sculptures at Sacramento International Airport, told The Bee in 2005, "You have more art (in Sacramento) than almost any city I have seen."

The commission's very first public installation was Gerald Walburg's "Indo Arch," a looming sculpture placed on the K Street Mall near Macy's in 1977. It was derided early on, called an oversized "nutcracker" by citizen critics. Over time it's become an accepted, if not beloved, Sacramento landmark.

"Art is typically to deliver the questions, not the answers," says Willis, "and to me when a work initiates or inspires curiosity and questions, and this need to explore, and is sort of mysterious, that is its success. The artists are asking the questions in their work. They're trying to unravel the complexities of what it is to be alive and to be here.

"I would need a couple of glasses of wine to sit down and talk about the definition of art," she says with a laugh. "It's a complex question."

Lately she's had on her mind the lyrics from Leonard Cohen's song "Anthem": Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in.

"I've been thinking about that in terms of this job, because there is nothing perfect. It can't be perfect – that's why it's perfect, because there is a crack or there is a imperfection. There's mystery. There is a desire to explore. A successful work of art does that. It makes you wonder, and it's different for everyone. It depends on where you're at in your life."

Willis, 46, is a blue-eyed blonde with perfect teeth who grew up in Orange, in Southern California. As a kid, she watched her great uncle paint for hours, until he finally shooed her away.

She studied painting as a teenager and again as a student at California State University, Chico. She was the first in her family to attend college.

"I pretty clearly from the beginning realized that I didn't have the heart for making art," she says this early morning at SMAC headquarters on Del Paso Boulevard. "I was struck by the environment, and I wanted to be around those people. I wanted to support what they were doing. That's where my passion was. It wasn't at all in the making of the work."

She was just out of college, with a degree in art history and business administration, when she answered an ad for an intern position in the California Arts Council's Art in Public Buildings program, in Sacramento. The job paid nothing, so she waited tables at a Tony Roma's to make her rent.

Call The Bee's Dixie Reid, (916) 321-1134.