by James A. Bacon
Art in Richmond is busting out of the museums, universities and galleries and into the streets. The latest efflorescence occurred Saturday when a dozen nationally known street artists gathered to create an outdoor gallery along the James River Power Plant Building and Floodwall along the canal walk. Hundreds of people came on down to see the artists in action.
Jon Baliles... with beer cup in hand
The event was organized by Jon Baliles, who was inspired by seeing something similar in Venice, and Ed Trask, a musician and mural painter who recruited the other artists. Although Baliles works for the City of Richmond, he and Trask pulled off this event on their own initiative. It took about one year from conception to execution.
Craft booth.
Once upon at time, it’s fair to say, Richmond was a pretty stodgy place. It had some beautiful neighborhoods, most notably Church Hill and the Fan, and a fairly vibrant downtown. It had more than its share of Fortune 500 and other corporate headquarters, along with a good number of law firms, financiers and marketing/advertising professionals and a smatter of manufacturing. But the city was nobody’s idea of a center for innovation.
Chilling out at the art festival on a Saturday afternoon.
Richmond may never make it as a leading center of technological innovation. But it could become a respectable center for creative arts and the businesses that intersect with the arts. The Virginia Commonwealth University art program, rated the best of any public university in the country, lures a lot of artistic talent to the city. And many of those artists, like Trask, wind up staying.
Artists don’t tend to launch the kind of fast-growth companies that turn metropolitan areas into growth dynamos. But they do create an ambiance that other educated and creative people like to share. They create the conditions for entrepreneurial vitality by making Richmond the kind of place where executives from Capital One, Philip Morris or other corporate behemoths like to live when they get tired of working for the Man and want to start their own businesses.
Economically, Richmond is going through a difficult time right now. But it is reinventing itself from the ground up. Between the James River, the canal walk and the artistic community, the old Capital of the Confederacy is morphing into something very 21st century, something very exciting.
