Pencil in our next meeting for April 30th, 2PM, back at the Downey Theatre green room.
We have special guest, Jay Lopez, formerly of the Downtown LA Art Walk, and currently of Art Weekend LA, Off Broadway LA, and has is own outfit called Contemporary Cultural Consultants. He helps cities find their footing with arts events and marrying the city’s interests of economic revitalization of downtown areas with the arts. Thanks to Rene Garzona for hooking up a contact with Jay.
Also, we want to formalize our “mission statement” if you will, and decide on what the main function of the Downey Arts Coalition will be. We talked last month through various options of being an collaboration and advocacy group vs getting into the business of producing events ourselves. Our assignment is to email a sentence or two of what you think the Downey Arts Coalition should become, and what types of tasks we take on as a group.
For those who missed the meeting, we talked for awhile about what the challenges and current business of the Downey Symphony as a test-case to discuss how our group could potentially help their group. Then we discussed putting together an Art Walk event, which branched into two questions: What does the legal producing/insurance/non-profit/tax exempt requirements play out of producing an event, and does the DAC even want to be a producing organization? Also, we debated about the push-pull of staying true to the goals of creating community around art, vs. getting corporate sponsors and helping them advertise themselves through our event. Councilman Fernando Vasquez also shared his perspective from working with the city. We also heard from new theatre manager Amber Vogel about what VenueTech has been doing at the theatre.
Looking forward to seeing you at the next meeting, we’ll enter through the office door, which is in the back across from the Library building.
Downtown Downey, 3rd Street:
