Art Festival to Be Held in Echo Park, Silver Lake

A group of Echo Park artists has banded together to put on an arts festival and studio tour in the style of the Venice Art Walk on the first Saturday of October.

“It’s to show there is an artists community here in Echo Park,” said Theresa Powers, a festival organizer and local mural artist. “The big gallery scene is at places like Bergomot Station [a former Red Car repair station on the Westside that was transformed into galleries] and other Santa Monica galleries. But a lot of those artists who show there live here.”

The Echo Park Artists Festival, slated for Oct. 5, will be based on Lemoyne Avenue, the street that borders the north end of the Echo Park Recreation Center off of Sunset Boulevard.

Buses will take festival goers to more than a dozen studios in Echo Park and Silver Lake, Powers said. Participants include Peter Shire, Karen Wolff and Dauna Whitehead.

“The buses will drop people off and they can spend like 15 minutes or longer talking with the artists in the studios,” Powers said.

Several galleries also will be participating by opening their doors to the public, including the Bata Gallery, which mainly features works by Cuban artists, and Lemoyne Kennels, which Powers described as an “alternative space” (formerly, a garage).

Several exhibitions of works by local artists and children will be shown at temporary gallery spaces built along Lemoyne Avenue.

In conjunction with the festival, 10 artists have been commissioned to decorate bus benches in the area, said Ivan Corpeno, a librarian and festival organizer.

A map of the bus benches, in addition to another map of all the murals in the Echo Park area, will be available, Corpeno said.

Several local bands, including a high school mariachi band and a Latin funk group, will perform throughout the day.

Information: (213) 460-2805.