ART SHARE LA GOT ARTISTS PAID TO PAINT THE TOWN

When the City of LA locked down indefinitely on a Friday the 13th in March 2020 for COVID-19 quarantine, many artists and business owners found themselves out of work.

Art Share LA utilized its extensive network and decades-long history for creative initiatives to connect them to one another, launching Let’s Paint the Town, a quarantine mural project and fundraiser hiring muralists of various career levels to beautify boarded up buildings. These temporal works across the city got artists paid as studies were released stating that as many as 42% of jobs will never come back. By June 2020, over 50 murals were painted by 20 artists stretching from DTLA to Studio City. The project was created and curated alongside muralist Jeremy Novy.

Through Let's Paint and other programs, Art Share LA continues its mission to make art – and artists – essential.

SCROLL DOWN OR CLICK ON A SECTION BELOW TO SEE HOW ART SHARE PAINTED THE TOWN

By April 26th, 40+ days into the quarantine and before the State of CA had figured out how to provide freelance Pandemic Unemployment Assistance to those in need, over 20 artists were back to work showing that they are essential to the health and safety of our communities. Businesses were boarded up and LAPD had expressed concern for community safety, but Art Share LA is proud to have created a movement to raise money and put artists back to work. By May, over 50 murals had been painted on boarded up windows, before the project shifted gears as social uprising across the nation cast a broader net across the city’s shuttered storefronts.

If this is our “new normal,” then we need to figure out how to create art and pay artists. Artists can’t keep producing and sharing for free. – Cheyanne Sauter, Executive Director, Art Share

Chances are you have joined a live-streamed morning workout, a home concert, or a virtual tour of a gallery. Art and creativity are seeping out of our society. Artists are keeping us sane through this quarantine — all for free! It’s time to pay artists to get back to work; 70% of Art Share residents were not be able to pay their May 2020 rent. Many of them are full-time artists depending on the gig-economy to support them and they do not know how they will repay their debts. Art Share is committed to paying artists for their work.

ART SHARE LA HAS SET OUT to prove that ARTISTS ARE ESSENTIAL.

SEE SOME OF THE ESSENTIAL ART THAT “LET’S PAINT” ENABLED BELOW.

Art Share LA is the only gallery, performance, and 100% affordable housing building in the Arts District that provides equitable access to artists and gives them a creative environment to live, work, develop, perform, and exhibit.

They are the sound-board of the cultural voices in the community, with free and low-cost programs that remove barriers to accessing art, giving hundreds of working artists each year hope in continuing to pursue their careers, and infusing the community with the vibrant energy that comes from artists creating and sharing their work. Art Share attracts 40,000 residents and tourists annually who visit our facility and fall for exhibitions, performances, and community events of all kinds. Art Share programs attract a local and diverse community of emerging artists, including many hundreds of visual and performing artists each year.

2020’s pandemic didn’t just put Art Share’s business and overall industry at risk, but also endangered the individual creators, staff, and community it supports.

When COVID-19 executive orders for quarantine put the entire creative industry on lockdown, small business sector of DTLA and surrounding neighborhoods – a sector of the economy that represents more than half of all business on a national average – instantly transformed into a virtual wasteland. Art Share reacted swiftly, creating a win-win scenario by pairing (hopefully) temporarily out-of-work artists with (hopefully) temporarily out-of-business shops, converting thousands of square feet of depressing, abandoned shops into uplifting works of art.

In all, artists painted murals at dozens of locations in multiple cities of LA County.

See the list of addresses below and spotlight videos by local news networks.

Since the first U.S. case of COVID-19 was reported on January 20, 2020, cancellations and closings have taken place at nearly every arts organizations across the country, and nearly two-thirds of the nation’s artists are now unemployed. Research by the Small Business Administration shows that “Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation” is the sector of the economy with highest percentage of “temporary closings” (53.3 percent of businesses surveyed).

Art was immediately dubbed “non-essential” and artists across the nation lost work and dove headfirst into unemployment and even poverty. Art Share LA sprung quickly into action to offer some reprieve to creative workers. Arts and Entertainment are not like other industries and the plans to re-open are much less hopeful.

The impact is evident – shown below through studies by Film LA and Americans for the Arts – that the “first to close, last to open” effect on the creative industry may prove to be permanently detrimental.

On the other hand, Art Share LA continued to employ artists, providing work to dozens of creators for performances, murals, community cleanup, and other programs throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Taking an approach to economic development and local ownership of a community’s aesthetics, Let’s Paint the Town and similar Art Share LA programs both fundraised and promoted togetherness around vacant storefronts to promote their symbolic reprieve moving forward through quarantine. This is a pattern the organization exhibits year after year, decade after decade.

Art Share LA gives artists work and opportunities, and has created motion out of the pandemic, absolving stagnation within it.

ANNUALLY, ART SHARE LA :

A scrappy team of volunteers, artists, assistants, publicists, photographers, editors and producers teamed up to turn Let’s Paint the Town into a reality. Art Share utilized their network and historic place in LA’s grassroots art scene to pair up muralist Jeremy Novy with the artists and facilitators that got the fundraiser off the ground. Hijinx spread the project far and wide, to cover more of Los Angeles and invite more contributors and talent. And once the project found its legs, Think Tank director Jacob Patterson was brought in to assist with creative production and archival work. Find more about each of these organizations, and the videographer that captured the project, below.

See all of the murals on Instagram here: @LETSPAINTTHETOWNLA

CONTACT US

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THINK TANK PLEASE CONTACT JACOB PATTERSON
THINKTANKGALLERY@GMAIL.COM – 916.670.3801

STAY CREATIVE WITH ART SHARE LA HTTP://ARTSHARELA.ORG/PAINTTHETOWN

RECAP VIDEO AND MUSIC BY @JAMSUS