First Fridays Art Walk competes with CenterStage

I have been enjoying the First Fridays Art Walk for years. Its kooky, crazy and sometimes there might be something available for sale that I can actually afford. With the opening of the new CenterStage arts center this past September, city hall is looking to suck up some of those window shoppers. Its first order of business is to crack down on the galleries that made Richmond famous in the first place.

On Oct. 2 the Richmond police sent a bunch of the boys in blue to stop the famed Gallery5 fire dancers. If you haven’t heard of Gallery5, it is the oldest standing firehouse in Richmond. It was converted into an art gallery in 2005 to save it from being demolished by … the city of Richmond. In just four short years Gallery5 has become iconic for its shows, exhibits and people twirling flaming torches outside to sweet, funky, beats.

The fire dancers (known as the G5 Fire) have been operating on Marshall Street outside Gallery5 for years, closing off the road with orange traffic cones and having an informal police presence. G5 Fire was shut down because it didn’t have a permit, though the number of people in the street each First Friday would require that road to be closed anyway.

Police officers re-opened the street, and told the fire dancers to pack it up. What was their excuse for doing this now instead of years ago? According to Richmond Police Department PR Director Gene Lepley, the lane on Marshall Street had to be opened for emergency traffic to the medical center. I suppose that people didn’t have medical emergencies until art got popular.

Along with the burning of the fire dancers, the city is now attempting to enforce strict building codes on galleries that open on First Friday because their attendance exceeds the capacity of people allowed in the building, by law. These requirements were slapped on the galleries by the city Fire Marshall in early September. Though the city has done virtually nothing to revitalize the blocks of downtown where these galleries took over, it now feels it is necessary to grift their success. Meanwhile CenterStage, a for-profit enterprise that cost millions of dollars to build, has opened with the assistance of taxpayer money. Screwy, ain’t it?

The truth is the city doesn’t like grass roots initiatives because they don’t bring in revenue for the city, no matter how popular they are. After the city pumped all of its energy into CenterStage, First Fridays and their supporting galleries are now a threat.

I mean, if a ticket to CenterStage costs $50, and a student is choosing between that or a Gallery5 show for $10 that supports a local artist, there’s a very good chance a student is going to go to a Gallery5 show and the makers of Pabst Blue Ribbon are going to get $40.

The best thing the city can do is to cooperate with the gallery phenomenon. Support it; give it money to improve the galleries; get in on the local artist scene instead of competing with it. Corporate doesn’t go over well when a local scene gets trashed in the process.

If city hall doesn’t get its act together soon and start supporting the locals, the city will begin to sink once more into the disrepair that has been its trademark for decades. It will be a sad day if the first spark River City has lit in years, gets snuffed out.