Festival Brings Art to Children

Some drew the ducks in Echo Park Lake. Others painted images of the neighborhood Pioneer Market.

These works, by students from Logan Street, Mayberry and Elysian Park elementary schools, which have no art teachers, hung in a makeshift gallery at El Centro del Pueblo on Lemoyne Avenue during the third annual Echo Park Arts Festival. The show was part of a program Saturday to bring art to students who have no formal art classes in school.

“We wanted to have an art show with the theme of Echo Park, celebrating [the students’] neighborhood and the park,” said Katrina Alexy, a festival organizer.

Outside, children painted on velvet, strung macaroni and beads to make necklaces and formed tissue paper and wire into butterfly kites. “I wanted to give them something nice and combine it with stuff they can find at home,” Alexy said.

“We don’t have art classes,” said Raisa Lopez, a fifth-grader at Logan Street, as she pasted sequins on a paper cutout of a bird. “We get to draw once a week. I wish we could do more. I like making something new.”

The festival offered free shuttle tours to galleries and studios where adult artists showed their work, bringing in an audience different from the usual gallery crowd.

“Last year this kid was looking at my work, he had tattoos and a shaved head, like a gang member. He was really scary-looking,” said Zohreh Partovi, who displayed her paintings and video collages at her Silver Lake home studio, one of the stops on the tour. “But he started asking me about mixing the colors, how I did it, why I did it. Sometimes he made more sense than some of the art dealers.”

Works by students at Marshall High School, which has four art teachers and 4,200 students, and Belmont High hung opposite the younger children’s work.

An oil-pastel sunset fell over the downtown shadows and Echo Park Lake next to paper cutouts of palm trees and park benches reminiscent of Henri Matisse.

“It’s great to encourage outlets for creative expression,” said Joy Anderson, a journal-maker and writer who grew up in El Sereno and now lives in Echo Park. “I’m sure there is a lot of stress kids here have to deal with.”

Festival organizers awarded gift certificates to the best artists in the show, and Alexy said everyone was given art supplies to take home.