By JOHN HARLOW | Editor-in-Chief
Calling all artists: The Pacific Palisades Community Council has set the date for the community’s first official Art Fair, which has been scheduled rather rapidly for Sunday, Sept. 10.
All Palisadian-based visual artists working in any medium—from video and graffiti to more traditional water and oil—will be invited to step out of their studios and show off their talents.
Pacific Palisades has a proud past of sheltering and promoting artists, including many German refugees in the 1940s and writer-turned-painter Henry Miller in the 1960s.
Supermarket magnate Huntington Hartford hired Lloyd Wright to design a 150-acre artists’ retreat in Rustic Canyon, which attracted superstars such as Edward Hopper.
But after paying the bills for 15 years and falling out of tune with “beatniks and juveniles,” such as Pablo Picasso Hartford, he closed the colony in 1965.
The Palisades lost its artistic “mojo” after that, said one local artist last week, with rising house prices driving them east in search of more inspirational landscapes in Boyle Heights.
The PPCC originally planned for an Art Walk, possibly with shuttle buses between open studios, but that has proven too logistically and legally tricky.
The site, probably in the Village, maybe at a school, will be selected over the next few weeks and artists invited to take part.
There are already many potential stars who belong to the Pacific Palisades Arts Society or hone their craft at the Katie O’Neil Fine Art Studio that may surprise and delight, or even, as more interesting artists are wont to do, offend neighbors and patrons in 101 days’ time.
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