Art Events Sweep Northeast L.A.

A line of people dressed in black marched up Figueroa Street in Highland Park on Saturday morning holding brightly colored brooms. The group methodically swept the sidewalk, moving dust, empty soda cans and cigarette butts into the street.

Shop owners peered curiously from their storefronts. Pedestrians paused to watch, looking puzzled.

“It’s sort of ownership,” said Allison Heimstead, 33, who organized a performance she called “Broom Procession” with friends and students from the California Institute for the Arts in Valencia. “If you clean the space, you sort of own the space. We’re reclaiming the street.”

Laying claim to public space is the driving theme behind October Surprise, a grass-roots community arts festival held at various locations in northeast Los Angeles, including Mount Washington, Cypress Park and Eagle Rock.

The festival, which started Friday and ends Monday, features lectures, performances and other events all meant to bring what organizers call creative interventions to an area that many see as a new battleground over gentrification and land use. The organizers believe that public art is a good mediator for a community in flux.

“The idea is: Public life in L.A. could be a lot richer than it is,” said Mark Herbst, a member of the committee that organized the festival with support from the Highland Park-based Arroyo Arts Collective. The goal is to have an “art show that might have a real effect.”

In a Highland Park supermarket, artist Jen Hofer set up her installation “escritorio publico,” during which she used a rickety typewriter to compose letters for a small fee -- similar to the tradition of public typists in many parts of Latin America.

Before dawn Friday, the Pocho Research Society, a group of anonymous guerrilla artists, illegally posted plaques recognizing neighborhood historic sites far outside the mainstream, such as an abandoned building that once was an unofficial meeting place for Highland Park anarchists.

Northeast Los Angeles, wedged between downtown and Pasadena, has a history of fostering a creative and culturally mixed-up atmosphere. But as the real estate market continues to force home buyers east, many say they fear the area could lose its bohemian character.

October Surprise, artists said, aims to provide a bridge between the area’s working-class communities and its emerging generation of new artists.

As the “Broom Procession” worked its way along Figueroa from Marmion Way to Avenue 50, artists and residents struck up conversations and greeted one another as neighbors.

“It’s a visual way of saying we care about this community,” said participant Heidi Carlson, a graduate student in theater at CalArts, as a few storeowners, perhaps inspired by the performance, brought out their own cleaning supplies to sweep dust from their patches of sidewalk.

Francisco Perez, a 39-year-old tire shop worker who has lived in Highland Park for 20 years, watched the procession with his small daughter from the shade of a doorway.

“You get used to the atmosphere here, the vibe,” Perez said. “And the cleaner the street is, all the better.”

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Art events for the October Surprise festival are listed at www.theoctobersurprise.org.