Glow designed for art newbies
By CHRISTINA YOON Special to the Daily Press
SANTA MONICA PIER As the sun dips beneath the horizon on Saturday, the lights and sounds of over 100 original art pieces will fill the night sky at Glow, the city’s first-ever overnight art event.
From 7 p.m. Saturday to 7 a.m. Sunday, Glow will take over Santa Monica Beach, the pier and Palisades Park to provide free, interactive art and music experiences to wandering visitors.
From a live Ferris wheel orchestra to an illuminated “tumbleweed” made of recycled materials floating in the ocean, Glow is designed to provide unique, tactile surprises to tourists, art fanatics and local residents alike. The event embraces the essence of collaboration, with more than 15 nearby restaurants and bars offering longer business hours and food and drink specials, shuttles provided by the Big Blue Bus and DJs from local public radio station KCRW spinning music on the pier. Organizers hope that the success of Glow this Saturday will lead to a biannual return.
“It’s really an intersection between art and popular culture,” said Jessica Cusick, City Hall’s cultural affairs manager and one of Glow’s organizers.
While working together on a temporary art installation two years ago, Cusick and Marc Pally, Glow’s artistic director, began to discuss the possibility of creating a large-scale art event.
“We were going through a cultural plan-ning process and hearing that people really wanted to see a signature cultural event in Santa Monica,” Cusick said.“We were really fascinated with the concept of allowing artists to be the people to help us rediscover the city in a time and place when you Inspiration for Glow came from near and far. Cusick and Pally followed the lead of all-night art festivals around the world including Paris’s annual Nuit Blanche event, which began in 2002. Keeping with this international approach, Glow’s two major commissions come from London-based interactive artist Usman Haque and Shih Chieh Huang, who was born in Taiwan.
Glow was also designed to take the aesthetic lead of a more local source — the famous grunion runs that occur along the Southern California coasts during the summer months. Artists were encouraged to keep the elusive, glowing fish in mind when conceptualizing their pieces.
Glow organizers enlisted the help of grunion expert Karen Martin, professor of biology at Pepperdine University. Martin is also the founder of the Grunion Greeters, a statewide group that tracks grunion runs and educates people about the behaviors of the popular grunion and their effects on local ecology.
“I think it’s wonderful that people appreciate the magic and beauty of the grunion,” Martin said.“My goal will be that people will make the grunion comfortable.”
Volunteers from Grunion Greeters and Heal the Bay will be at the beach on Saturday night to answer questions and make sure that visitors don’t disturb the grunion should they choose to make a run.
“We’re a bit concerned about large crowds of people.” Martin said. “To see a good run, you need a quiet night with not a lot of people around.”
Although July is just past the peak of the grunion run season, lucky attendees may catch a glimpse anyway. Earlier this year, a run of about 1,000 grunion was spotted near the pier.
The wildlife is not the only local aspect of Glow. Many of the event’s featured artists are Santa Monica residents whose projects are testaments to their love of their hometown. Artist Frank Rozasy has lived in Santa Monica for 20 years, and has been commissioned to create an installation titled “Illumination Migration,”in which he places 950 glow sticks on the beach, creating a giant “light field” that viewers can walk through. Rozasy lives just three blocks from where his project will be displayed.
“I’m a long-distance swimmer and I swim one or two miles every day right by the piece,” Rozasy said. “It’s sort of perfect for me.”
Another local artist, Elena Mary Siff, will orchestrate a parade of glowing paper koi fish from Palisades Park to the pier, where the fish will interact with local celebrity and one-man band Arthur Nakane. Although there are environmental and artistic messages intertwined in “Solar Koi,” Siff has one main goal for the night.
“Just fun, fun, fun,” she said. “I hope it’s very magical.”
The pier in particular has been home to many artistic projects in the past, including Gregory Colbert’s “Ashes and Snow” exhibit in 2006 and weekly free concerts and films during the summer months. The artists and Glow’s organizers agree, however, that Saturday’s event will be the first of its kind in Santa Monica in terms of its interactivity and the variety of the media that the artists will utilize.
Juan Azulay, an architect and filmmaker who teaches the Media Scapes post-graduate program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, was initially surprised to hear of the event being held in the area.
“Usually in L.A. the art scene is on its own and tends to be separated from the normal life of the city,” he said.“But the pier is a way to make it accessible to people who don’t tend to do these things... It really has a crowd built into it, and that is essential.”
Pally agreed that Glow was designed to be appealing to even the most novice visitor.
“I think by having it out in public, people’s expectations are totally different,” he said.“I think that when people go in a museum the first thought is, ‘Will I understand it?’ Whereas if you see something in a public place, the first thought is ‘Do I enjoy this or not?’”
“Our intent with Glow was to change people’s perceptions of contemporary art,” Cusick said. “This is not the ‘stand back and don’t touch’ art in a museum. All of the artists have created something that’s participatory in some way — you can sit on it, walk through it. It’s not art for art’s sake.”
For more information including down-loadable maps, schedules, programs and iPod tours, visit www.smgov.net/smarts/glow/
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 19, 2008. Read the original PDF.