The DTLB Art Walk—now formally dubbed the DTLB Art + Design Walk—has long been loved by the Downtown community. And while it has both evolved and sometimes outright disappeared over the years, the Downtown Long Beach Alliance has been spearheading its return throughout 2024 with quarterly events.
And the walk once against returns to 2024 on Oct. 12.
DTLB Art Walk to showcase both art and design community
Celebrating October’s moniker of Arts Month, the DTLB Art + Design Walk has been a quarterly event exploring the downtown art scene. It has been under many forms since before then, including one under the Arts Council in 2019 and multiple within the East Village Arts District across the 2010s. But this third iteration from the Downtown Long Beach Alliance has been its most stable and solid.
The first one back in April was a showcase of one of our most important neighborhoods, inviting people to take a gander at the former Acres of Books (which they will be able to do again this year) or a record sleeve art show at Record Box. In other words: It was the epitome of both community and cool.
“Our goal is to showcase the rich, evolving creative landscape of Downtown Long Beach,” said Justine Nevarez, the Alliance’s Community Outreach & Events Manager. “We hope the DTLB Art + Design Walk will inspire, uplift, and support the many talented individuals and businesses that make our Downtown so vibrant. It’s an opportunity for artists, designers, and the community to come together and celebrate creativity.”
This month’s iteration? It includes more than 30 venues across DTLB: From the incredible guitar work of Robert Brownwell at ISM Beer to exploring Outer Limits and their attempt to create a tattoo museum in Long Beach, this incredible array of mini-events within the grander overall event is both impressive and heartwarming.
The need for DTLB to have a design district is a real thing.
The DTLB Art Walk is part of a larger conversation surrounding what DTLB is and represents from an artistic and design angle. And that larger conversation has led Studio One Eleven to lead a charge in creating the DTLB Design District.
Which makes sense. Last year, the L.A. Design Festival opted to make Downtown Long Beach one its three hubs. As a result, this was a huge discernment for the festival’s layout: From coverage by Architectural Digest to KTLA to the Los Angeles Times, the festival—an annual event that, at least historically, tends to keep its presence to Los Angeles proper—is a big event. And it explores architecture, textile-making, street art, interior and landscape design…
And its choice to include Long Beach for the first time spoke volumes.
They hosted a block party. They brought in artists to design posters to be hung on a construction wall along The Promenade in front of what is now The Inkwell residential building. Tours of Studio One Eleven, the Billie Jean King Library, Lincoln Park, and Long Beach Museum of Art’s Downtown extension. Expert panel discussions surrounding local art exhibitions, design, architecture as a cultural signifier…
