NoHo Now : Valley Neighborhood Shows Off Its Growth at Annual Festival of Performing, Visual Arts

Local artists of every variety opened up their burgeoning arts community to the rest of the San Fernando Valley Saturday for the third annual NoHo Performing and Visual Arts Festival.

And most of the visitors said the fair, which runs along Lankershim Boulevard just north of Magnolia, brought them to an area they don’t frequent often or never knew existed. Comparisons to the famed New York City arts area south of Houston Street, known as SoHo, were unending.

“You don’t usually think of going to the ‘Lankershim District.’ You think of it just as a street that gets you from one place to another,” said David Rosenberg of Toluca Lake, who was exploring the festival with his family.

“Now I know there are a lot of cool shops and things to see. We’ll come back.”

And that’s good news for the owners of the playhouses, cafes, restaurants and shops that have cropped up along Lankershim over the past few years.

In addition to the usual street fair fare of food, crafts, T-shirts, jewelry and watercolor paintings of oceans and parks, this festival has performances.

A tent at the northern end of the blocked-off boulevard boasted a full schedule of short plays and scenes from plays put on by Valley theater companies.

Taking over the eastern lot that runs along the street was another tent of musical acts and dance troupes, including traditional Japanese dancers, line dancers, jazz dancers and Armenian dancers.

Pamela Hall, of the Valley Theater League, was busy selling discount tickets and passbooks to shows in the league’s 33 theaters.

“You get new audience members who say, ‘I didn’t know that theater was there,” Hall said. “People always think you have to go Downtown to the Dorothy Chandler for theater and they find there’s a wealth of theater right here.”

The art, too, was different than the usual festival quality--

especially since most of the artists live in the neighborhood.

Sue Davis moved to North Hollywood from Texas a month ago.

Her large, vibrant, acrylic-on-

canvas paintings help her fit right into the neighborhood and the festival.

She set up several large paintings along a metal fence and used an orange city-issue sawhorse, set up over a broken fire hydrant, to display one of her smaller sketches.

Books filled with her other paintings and furniture designs sat next to her.

Davis only lives a few blocks away but because of the large size of her pieces, she couldn’t get them all here, she said.

She walked to a 7-Eleven store and flagged down a man with a truck who agreed to help her transport her work to the festival, she said.

“I can afford the space I need to live and work here,” Davis said, standing in front of her 6-foot-8-inch painting, “Diva,” which she said is meant to be a modern Mona Lisa in the “psychedelic renaissance” style.

“[The festival] is good for name recognition,” she added, saying her pieces sell from $150 to $5,000. “I don’t expect to sell a lot today.”

But passersby were as eager to examine Davis’ pieces and portfolios as they were to look at fabric flowers and five-foot wooden octopuses and ducks whose legs whirl with the wind.

Vendors sold spin-art Frisbees, brilliantly colored, fused-glass vases, caricatures, pottery sculpted with women’s faces and stall after stall of hats--sequined hats, baby hats, felt hats, flower hats, Western hats and even wire mesh-looking hats.

Whether watching the dances and plays or strolling through the booths, most visitors said they were enjoying their Saturday outside with their neighbors.

Nobody seemed to mind that the festival, which ends Sunday night, did not draw huge crowds its first day.

Some sniffed that the crafts were not what they had hoped for, but acknowledged that like the neighborhood, perhaps the festival was still growing.

“I think it’s great,” said Diana Walker of Studio City, who came with her daughter and husband. “We were in SoHo in New York last week and this is a mini SoHo.”

Added her husband, Kent Walker: “Once the subway comes, this is going to be the hottest spot in the Valley.”

Estelle Busch has lived in North Hollywood since 1953, she said, and watched it go from thriving to downtrodden and now, on its way to thriving again.

“There are cafes and bookstores and arts supply stores and there are about 13 theaters in the Lankershim area,” Busch said.

“It’s going to be a rival to SoHo.”