My take on Artwalk (in response to Downtown News)

Everything is changing; Art Walk is no exception! For years it was a kind of grass-roots organization without a formal structure, but with thousands of people coming to the corner of Spring and 5th every second Tuesday Thursday of the month the Art Walk was ready to take a step forward. For quite some time the Artwalk was a joyfully decentralized effort led by gallery owners, with additionally wonderful (and successful) stakeholders stepping up to be supportive and a part of the action.

The only thing was, people had grown frustrated with the problems presented by the crowds and other kinds of problems, and some of those frustrations had gone unresolved for so long, that the BRAND NEW Artwalk Board was blamed for all the OLD problems.

Richard Schave, Kim Cooper and Chinta Cooper came forward to organize a Board of Directors, and it was the Board who led to incorporate the Art Walk as a 501-c-3 non-profit entity. The Downtown L.A. Artwalk as an entity was born on July 8 2009, with a group of community leaders dedicated to resolving the crowd logistics, supporting and promoting the galleries, promoting other local business, and helping to curate public art and performances for the second Tuesday of the month.

People don't know how hard Richard, Kim, and Chinta have been working to create, print and distribute maps, get a logo, get a great website going, and work with LAPD, and other groups to help make ARTWALK great. And, they are doing it all as volunteers for the time being.

Instead of working together, a small group of frustrated people have blamed the new Art Walk board for problems that have been on-going for at least a year and a half.

I say, let's move forward! End the bitterness! Get behind our community and work together so we can have a fun Art Walk that benefits our community. Two examples of great new things that are happening:

Richard got the owners of the Spring Arcade building to open up the arcade between Spring and Broadway for September's Art Walk. There was a band and some performance artists there. At first there were only a few people, but in about forty minutes, the arcade was full of people, and lots of people came from Broadway to Spring. That's the kind of creative, pro-active work that is being done now.

And, Nick Cha Kim's website galleryrow.org, up for three years has been updated in the past month or so and it looks great! It's a way for Gallery Row to break out from the once-a-month Art Walk label and get people thinking about visiting the galleries all month long. That just shows how once the Art Walk board came in to handle the once-monthly events, galleries can now focus on themselves.

Are there problems? Of course. But we can only solve them if people work together, instead of just complaining and being bitter.

And let's see how we can get the galleries who now close at 6pm to open up again for all of ART WALK!