Connect with artists at the Long Beach Arts & Culture Registry

‘CALLIGRAPHY’ by MICHAEL E. GORDON

For over a decade, Sander Wolff’s longbeachculture.org has been a modest but earnest source of city arts and culture connectivity. But last month he e-mailed its contributors and subscribers to say he’s retiring the site because the mantle has been taken up by others, “finally fulfilling our original aspirations.”

Wolff is referring to the just-launched Long Beach Arts & Culture Registry, one of Leadership Long Beach Class of 2009’s graduation projects, developed in coordination with the Arts Council for Long Beach and with input from Wolff himself.

The registry was produced by LLB team members Debbie Rodriguez, Rachel Potucek, Elena Curris, Derek Burnham, Rick Gonzalez, Michelle Manire and Sabrina Sanders after the class listened to a panel of representatives of the arts community. “They spoke about how hard it is to get out the word about what they do,” Potucek recalls. Thus came the simple idea: With the amount and variety of artistic talent within the city, why should local businesses and the like look elsewhere to fulfill their artistic needs?

Now they don’t have to. Already featuring nearly 100 emerging to established artists, the registry includes profiles of each individual or group and the services they can provide, whether photography or interior design, music or murals, words or woodworking.
Potucek says that in part the registry is meant to broaden people’s conceptions of what art is beyond “a picture hanging on a wall. [ . . . ] You can’t have the life you have without art, [from] the books you read to the clothes you wear.”

The project kicked into high gear in late April when Craig Watson (LLB Class of ‘05, as it happens) took over as executive director of the Arts Council. Potucek reports that within a week of assuming his position he was on the phone asking, “What can I do to help?”

To Watson, the value of the registry was self-evident. “It’s a great gift to the community,” he states—and not only within the realm of art and artist: “It’s a place where, in the most basic ways, buyers and sellers come together.”

This “practical” angle was present in the idea’s very origin. “We’re not artists,” says Potucek of her team. “We’re doing this [not only] because the arts create identity for our community, [but because] it’s also something that has a great return on investment. With a little bit of support, artists can take that and stretch it and turn it into something really special.”

LONG BEACH ARTS & CULTURE REGISTRY REGISTER FREE OF CHARGE AT ARTSLB.ORG/REGISTRY

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