Artists Say Exhibition Will Paint a Brighter Picture of Downtown : Culture: Show’s organizers want to encourage art patrons to visit loft studio community. Public perceptions of crime are exaggerated, they say.

They are a diverse and fiercely independent lot, those 400 artists whose acrylic portraits, photo murals, welded steel sculpture and oddball collages go on display today at a converted Los Angeles produce warehouse.

They live for their work--intensely personal creations that are more likely to reflect the artist’s raw emotions than some interior decorator’s finicky taste. And they live with their work--in 3,000 residential loft studios carved out of former factories and sweatshops in the city’s sprawling industrial area.

But these days each is trying to paint the same picture: one of a thriving Downtown art colony that is bouncing back from the riots, the recession and the rumors of unchecked street crime.

Artists say those three Rs have taken their toll over the past year.

The economy, of course, has affected everyone. But artists worry that collectors with money to spend are afraid to come to the loft district because they think it has been devastated by last year’s civil unrest and by Downtown’s current army of homeless.

So the artists have formed their own booster group and are staging a three-weekend exhibition that they hope will lure patrons back to the southeast edge of Downtown.

“We’re alive,” said Barbara Mendes, a painter who has helped organize the new Downtown Arts Development Assn. and set up the “Downtown Lives!” exhibit. “With Los Angeles’ mixture of cultures, I feel we’re the cultural center of the world now.”

The unusual show fills a 25,000-square-foot warehouse at 740 Alameda St. and will feature performance art ranging from poetry readings to experimental music. It will be open Saturdays from noon to 11 p.m. and Sundays from noon to 6 p.m. through Dec. 19. Admission is $2.

“There have been a lot of misconceptions. People saw the rioters at Parker Center on TV and thought they were down here. People are afraid to come here,” said Steve Seemayer, a 39-year-old loft artist who has a spotlighted, 8-foot skull painting on display.

“People have overreacted in a negative way and we’re saying we’re sick of it. People should not at all be afraid to come down here. The neighborhood has actually improved over the last few years--it was far more dangerous when I first came here in 1973.”

The artists have sympathy for the street people who sometimes camp outside their loft doors. Many of the works on display have homelessness as a theme.

One of the largest is a living-room-size tent outfitted with a sound system, paintings, a mock automated teller machine and dozens of candles wrapped by barbed wire. Third Street loft artist Tod Lychkoff says his “installation” is a cry for help for street people.

“Something needs to be done for them,” said Lychkoff, 37. He said most of the homeless are “passive, docile” types who are nonetheless frightening to outsiders.

Douglas DiJulio, whose development company donated space for the show and rents lofts to many Downtown artists, said news reports have fostered misapprehension about the Downtown area.

“After the riots, the ongoing story has been, ‘Gee, the bloom is off L.A.’ It’s been fashionable to bash L.A. and that’s hurt the art community,” DiJulio said.

The idea of a crime wave is also overblown, according to artist and loft-owner Jon Peterson, 48, whose oil painting on beeswax is on display at the exhibit. “It’s a perception that’s not reality,” he said.

Los Angeles police agree.

“There’s very little crime over there in the loft area,” said Lt. Louis Trovato, commander of Central Division detectives and head of the division’s crime analysis detail. “There is theft from autos, perhaps, but no crime per se. There was never a prostitution problem over there. And there have been no violent crimes I can remember off the top of my head.”

Like most other places in the city, reported crimes in the Central Division are down this year. Statistics released this week show burglaries down 26% from the same period last year, auto thefts down 22% and robberies down 10%.

Artists said the exhibition may breathe new life into the Downtown art scene in more ways than one. Some said they were meeting other painters and sculptors who work in the sprawling loft district for the first time.

“This is going to give a sense of community to Downtown L.A.,” said Milano Kazanjian, 50, who painted a seven-foot oil portrait of a woman in the exhibit at his Washington Boulevard loft. “Eight years ago it was a wild scene down here. Then it kind of died.”

Other pieces in the artists’ exhibition defy classification.

Seventh Street loft artist Doug Cousins, 39, has created a display of 256 blank computer floppy disks. He plans to give them to exhibit visitors and ask them to fill the disks with programming that he can incorporate into an exhibit in next year’s art show--if there is one.

Dave Mueller, 29, who works in a 14th Street loft, has created a room-sized “lounge” that he and partner Becky Allen have filled with 1950s-style furniture.

Artist Rod Baer, 42, who lives and works on Main Street, has created a homey-looking setting in the middle of a 2,000-gallon wading pool. An easy chair, a bookshelf and a coffee table holding a working TV set sit in 1 1/2 feet of water as an overflowing aquarium bubbles nearby.

Baer took off his boots and rolled up his trousers to retrieve several books that floated out of the bookcase. “That’s my television set. I’m television-less for three weeks,” Baer said.

“But artists are tough. We’re used to taking our lumps.”