The Long Beach art walk has been working hard to create a monthly art oriented experience for audiences from all over inside of the Arts District in Long Beach. Not to be confused with Long Beach’s recent art walk, this festival collaborates with local businesses to support local artists and musicians. The Long Beach Art Walk happens every second Saturday of the month and has over 50 businesses, attraction, art shows, and murals to check out!
This month we made time to check out the Newly Activated East Village Arts Park off of Elm and Broadway. This small gem is activated by The Arts Council for Long Beach and will be a must visit attraction each month. The Arts Council for Long Beach quote “fosters creativity and culture, enliven communities and enable a thriving creative economy. Their vision is to help create a vibrant arts scene that makes Long Beach a premiere destination for residents, businesses, students and visitors.” And they do just that. For this month’s event, The Arts Council Collaborated with community partners; Tristan Crux, Davis Stewart, Jack Nugent, and Julian Montelongo. Tristan Cruz a.k.a CRUXWORLDWIDE set up a pin making workshop and vended his overly clever animation mashups. T.Crux provided the audience with materials to draw out and allow people to leave with their personally made souvenir. People bought SpongeBob and Rick and Morty mash up stickers, created friendship pins, and left with wants to buy a pin machine to always have the fun activity available for themselves and at future events.
Next there was Davis Stewart and Jack Nugent who were representing Radio 22 West, CSULB’s student ran radio station. They not only sound selected throughout the entire event but they were also there to talk about a new promotion. They are raffling off airplane tickets to anywhere in the world for the next two weeks. All you need to submit and entry is $22 bucks. We may or may not have bought 6 raffle tickets, Istanbul sounded like a lot of fun when thinking about 22-dollar airplane tickets for airfare you know?
Next we had Live Painter Julian Montelongo who has painted at events like first Fridays, Night Dive, and now the Art Walk. He painted a sunset as people walked by him on Elm and answered a few questions about his process and likes.Pow! Wow! School of Music drew the biggest crowd, Alumni of the music program had a circle sitting Indian style around them as they jammed together and showed off their skills. These teenaged musicians set a gloomy psychedelic atmosphere that had attendees of the Art walk asking who they were and how old they were.
