Wander through a modern art museum and...

Wander through a modern art museum and invariably you will hear it, someone saying, “What’s so great about this stuff? I could have done that.”

“I get tired of that attitude,” said modern artist David DiMichele, who, along with his partner, has built an abstract artwork that takes up several rooms and requires an elevator ride to see it all. The ambitious collection of more than 75 panels of various sizes was created for Sunday’s wide-ranging sixth annual Art Exhibition in Long Beach.

“I feel as though those people are missing out on a wonderful thing,” DiMichele said. “By opening up your mind to the possibilities, you’ll find something you didn’t see before, something that will enrich you.”

For risk takers and art lovers, the festival will be “an all-day adventure,” as the organizers bill it. It will start with self-guided tours of local artists’ studios from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. At noon, 20 exhibits will open at downtown galleries, museums, restaurants, churches and neighborhood centers, with subjects ranging from weaving by Khmer women to Jay McCafferty’s solar burns on paper.

On the Promenade downtown, artists will sell wares at an outdoor market. And throughout the day, there will be music, dancing, poetry readings and artists’ talks. The musical performers will include the groups Quetzalcoatl, a string trio playing indigenous Mexican music; Yatiri, playing traditional Andean music on native instruments; Rhythm Culture on steel drums and the International City Barbershop Quartet.

For the first time, artists will transform the landmark Walker Building, at the corner of Pine Avenue and 4th Street in downtown Long Beach, into a piece of art itself. Local artists such as DiMichele and his partner, John Russett, have created towering works that incorporate the unfinished interior of the building, a former department store being transformed into retail outlets and artist lofts.

DiMichele and Russett created “Death and Burial in the Three Kingdoms Period” to juxtapose images from great civilizations of the past with images from the modern era, connected by an elevator ride. “The up and down movement of the elevators is like the up and down movement of civilizations, coming and going,” DiMichele said. “It’s intriguing to think that growth and decline is constantly going on.”

Admission is free to all events except the artists’ studio tour (tickets are $4 in advance, $5 on the day of the event, children under 12 are free). Exhibits continue throughout the month of October. For information and a complete schedule of events, call 499-7777. Or arrive on Sunday at the FHP Hippodrome Gallery, 628 Alamitos Ave., for a map and program.

And don’t forget, COMA, the California Outside Music Assn., stages its provocative fourth annual Day of Music festival on Saturday at various Long Beach locales.

Artists from the outside edges of jazz, electronic, computer-generated and cabaret music, along with those experimenting in industrial rock and Tibetan humming, will present sounds unavailable on CDs or tapes in a festival that happens only once a year in the Los Angeles-Orange County area. The lineup:

* At System M Cafe and Gallery, 213-A Pine Ave.: M. Stew, Ken Filiano Quartet, Michael Vlatkovich Quintet, Kaoru, SubMedia, Manufacturing of Humidifiers, Emily Hay Trio, Nels Cline Trio, Carl Denson, Papa’s Midnight Hop, Cruel Frederick, Bazooka.

* At Williams/Lamb Gallery, 102 W. 3rd St.: Ken Ando, the Fnords, Trio Search and Seizure, Non Credo, Carl Stone.

* At Mum’s Ristorante, 144 Pine Ave.: G.E. Stinson Quartet, Bill Plake Quintet, Richard Grossman.

* At Birdland West, 105 W. Broadway: Vinny Golia, Horace Tapscott.

* At the Walker Building, Pine Avenue and 4th Street: Richard Derrick, Goucho Marks, David Poyourow, Virtus Kerny, Bonnie Barnett.

Admission is $5. For information and a schedule of events, call 254-3203.