VEGASinsight Archives

The sun lingered above the horizon as the inaugural First Friday of spring 2006 kicked off, dozens of people already gathering downtown by 6 p.m.

Cold weather might have cut into the numbers over the last three months, but Vegas Valley’s largest monthly arts festival saw a return to stronger numbers with the milder temperatures.

Casino Center Boulevard, once again, was shut off to through-traffic as far north as Charleston, a sign that the festival’s organizer, Whirlygig, Inc., expected a greater influx of patrons and vendors than in the earlier months of the year, where barricades were pushed up as far south as California Street.

As usual, the coordination of gallery exhibit openings was poor, with too many receptions taking place all at once on First Friday. Yes, this is the best time to get a maximum number of people to the galleries downtown. But there are four to five Fridays a month, a fact that gallery owners might want to take note of if they want to increase foot traffic into their venues on the other 29-30 days per month.

The over-scheduling was evident in places like DUST Gallery, where a new exhibit by Matty Byloos, called “Wordless Chorus,” saw few bodies early in the evening even though hundreds already gathered half a block away near the Casino Center Boulevard/Colorado Street corridor street vendors.

Over at the Commerce Street Studios – within walking distance of the First Friday epicenter but by no means close – experienced low foot traffic for its many independent galleries.

By contrast, the Arts Factory saw the usual overrepresentation of bodies, with a juried show at the soon-to-be-relocated Contemporary Arts Collective gallery, as well as new exhibits in the Trifecta and Wardle galleries.

Upstairs at capital h, popular mixed-media artist Brian Henry showed his second annual “Zombie Jesus” exhibit, a collection of distorted images and representations of the Messiah in honor of that Pagan-Christian holiday with the egg-laying bunnies. It was a stark – and interesting – departure from Henry’s usual works, which tend to lean toward iconic socio-political commentary. Of course, there is much to be read into these works, as well, including an acrylic, bas-relief version of the “Last Supper” entitled “First Supper,” with garish splotches of blood-red paint covering the gaping mouths of that famous supper table’s inhabitants.

Outside the Arts Factory, new murals adorned the west side of the aging building, freshly painted by graffiti artists, who finished their colorful works as patrons gathered and watched. The influence of urban hip-hop culture on the growing arts scene in general – and the Arts District in specific – was more evident on this First Friday than perhaps any other.

Urban muralists also created vivid spray-painted emblems on a wall across from the Arts Factory, while directly behind the building on its north side, MCs and DJs threw down beats and rhymes for the teeming masses. Directly inside was the Five Finger Miscount gallery, where the esoteric works of KD Matheson shared space with the hip-hop-influenced works of Iceberg Slick.

Add to this the breakdancers that regularly entertain passersby on Casino Center Boulevard and the permanent residence of former graffiti artist Dray across from the Funk House, and there is no doubt that hip-hop culture is playing a major role in the development of the downtown art scene in Vegas.

Flashback to just three years ago, however, and you realize how far we’ve come. It was only 2003 when Dray’s exhibit at the Winchester Community Center, “Wet Paint,” caused a stir among the “established” art patronage.

“It was a clear case of someone’s ignorance about what I was doing with graffiti, blown out of proportion,” Dray said in a 2003 interview. “The graffiti influenced work had an appeal on young and old. A retired doctor and an executive from the Mandalay Bay bought paintings from that show.”

That year, Dray banded together with Iceberg Slick and Vezun to form Five Finger Miscount, which produced subsequent shows at Dirk Vermin’s now-defunct Gallery Au Go-Go. The success of these shows eventually allowed the comic and graffiti creators to make the leap into the “mainstream” art scene, which was just starting to experience a rebirth thanks to the small, but growing, influence of First Friday.

As Las Vegas becomes more urbanized – speaking to density and lifestyle, not the influence of hip-hop culture – and the diversity of the downtown Arts District reflects those changes, what will the future socio-cultural makeup of downtown – and of the art scene – look like?

The densest glut of small-scale music venues, art galleries and antique shops are already downtown, as are government services, attorneys and mass transportation facilities. The groundwork for an urban core has been laid, but will realistically priced residences and convenient services such as grocery and drug stores fill in their final pieces of the puzzle to make this picture come together?

It seems that, despite the best efforts of private citizens and public administrators, only time can truly tell.

I wrote the first news story about Gallery Au Go-Go, Dirk Vermin’s three-year experiment as a semi-permanent gallery curator. He took the half of his Maryland Parkway tattoo parlor, Pussykat Tattoos, which was being leased by a photographer as her studio, and turned it into an honest-to-Sid Vicious art gallery.

It was a labour of love for the local punk rock legend and tattoo artist, something borne of a genuine desire to provide an artistic outlet for other artists that felt estranged from the increasingly insular Arts District scene happening downtown. He expected to make no real profit from the gallery, asking only a minimal commission from his featured artists to help cover things like free beer and bologna sandwiches.

“If we do OK, I’ll be happy,” Vermin told me before the gallery opened in May 2002, “it will have been a successful venture.”

Familiar names in the local art scene today – Mark T. Zeilman, Iceberg Slick, Dray, Carrie McCutcheon – all had early showings at Vermin’s gallery, often when other venues would refuse to show an artist. Dray was one of those, who ran into friction with an early showing at the Winchester Community Center. The first show of his arts collective, Five Finger Miscount, at Gallery Au Go-Go also featured the work of urban muralist and underground comic creator Vezun, who told me he had difficulty getting his work into stores because of the negative image many people hold of graffiti artists.

“People don’t want to touch that kind of stuff,” he said.

I owe as much to Gallery Au Go-Go as the artists whose careers were jump-started by Vermin’s flexibility and resolve to go against the grain. I was writing mostly about local music and nightlife for the CityLife before the gallery opened. But I’d known Vermin for years, both from the music scene (where he appears irregularly with his self-named punk band) and from sitting on the receiving end of his tattoo gun. That, and I’m pretty sure he was at my wedding. So I had an inside track on the forthcoming gallery, which gave me an opportunity to write my first “art” column for the weekly paper.

From there, Gallery Au Go-Go and underground art became somewhat of my “beat.” From May 2002 until Dec. 2003, I reported on a subject about which I knew little to start, but I learned a lot quickly. While the CityLife’s official art writer covered mainstream venues, new artists, new galleries and mainly new shows at Gallery Au Go-Go were my domain, sometimes to his chagrin.

In the last year or so, buzz has died down surrounding Vermin’s gallery. My guess is that the more defined focus on downtown as the official Arts District for the city has somewhat sucked the air out from beneath Gallery Au Go-Go’s wings. The artists that used to find refuge in the welcoming cinder-block walls of the tattoo parlor-cum-art gallery are now living in and operating their own studios downtown, or filling up space in places like the Art Bar. Once-legendary fire-code-breaking opening receptions at Gallery Au Go-Go became more quiet affairs, the same 25 people or so showing up at every opening.

Vermin did the noble thing – he left on a high note, before the gallery could become completely inconsequential. And judging by the amount of press the gallery’s closing received – major features in the Review-Journal, Sun, CityLife and Weekly – the influence of Gallery Au Go-Go on the local community remained strong to its end.

I attended the closing bash, appropriately named “Gallery Au Go-Go Must Be Destroyed!” Vermin seemed to be genuinely happy, almost relieved. He told me that he plans to claim the gallery space for himself, expanding his office by about 10 feet and creating a completely revamped tattooing studio, complete with custom stone tile and stainless steel fixtures.

“No more of this pink and black stuff,” Vermin said, pointing to his garishly adorned tattooing space.

You can read the papers for details about Vermin’s upcoming book about the 1980s punk scene in Vegas (which we’ve been talking about for three years), or about his plans to curate shows at other galleries downtown. I won’t reiterate. But I will say a last goodbye to the place that gave a proper shove-off to the local arts scene, to many an artist’s career, and to this journalist’s portfolio. Or, in true Vermin form:

“Fuck you, too.”