ENCINITAS — Artists, banners and lampposts. Every city has them, but not every city knows what to do with them.
Encinitas does thanks in part to its annual Arts Alive Encinitas event — and now it seems — San Francisco does, too.
Last weekend, Danny Salzhandler, president of the 101 Artists Colony, who helped to create the Arts Alive Encinitas banner event, went up to Ingleside, a community 7-miles from downtown San Francisco, to attend and serve as “counsel” in their inaugural Arts Alive Ingleside banner unveiling.
Last year, Richard Kurylo, project manager with San Francisco’s office of economic and workforce development, took in the entirety of the banner unveiling in Encinitas. He was there, he said at the time, to basically “copy” the event to bring it up north.
On May 1, with the guidance of Salzhandler, Arts Alive Ingleside was unveiled, along with 74 banners that now hang from lampposts along the Ocean Avenue corridor from Manor Drive to Phelan Avenue.
Their goal with the event: “To promote the arts in the revitalization and economic vitality of the Ocean Avenue corridor.”
“It was like a mini-version of what we did,” Salzhandler said of the Ingleside unveiling. “They were thankful that I gave them that information and it seemed to work out pretty good.”
Of the 74 artists involved in the inaugural event, Salzhandler said they seemed “pretty excited” about it.
Salzhandler sent the Ingleside organizers essentially the playbook on putting the event together — everything, he said, including a full page of what problems to expect. And sure enough, he explained, they ran into all of those problems.
There’s always problems, Salzhandler said, adding that in this year’s event here, the banners were printed 7-inches too long, something he had to accommodate for.
While revitalization of the Ingleside neighborhood was part of the reason for the Arts Alive Ingleside event, in Encinitas the event that started some 16 years ago was more about helping to showcase local artists and their work.
Taking notes of his own, Salzhandler said there were some things at their event that he’d like to incorporate down here.
One of things he liked was that they were able to take bids for their banners online, as part of the auction process.
“We’re going to try and look at that, figure out how they did that,” Salzhandler said. “So we can take some of their good ideas and use them here.”
Still, after all of these years, he said he recognizes that they may have to do something different for the next events.
“There are so many artists, and so few light poles,” he said. “But then again, there’s so many banners to auction off every year, it gets a little tough. We’re just coasting along like we’ve always done it.”
But now, the banners lining the Coast Highway have been taken down, been given a wash and are being prepped for the live auction Sunday at the Cardiff Town Center at Birmingham Drive and San Elijo Avenue.
The reception starts at 1:30 p.m. with the auction beginning at 2 p.m.
“We hope for a big turnout and get a bunch of banners sold,” Salzhandler said of the auction.
Bids for the silent auction are still being taken by calling the Leucadia 101 Main Street Association at (760) 436-2320.
All of the banners are available for viewing online at artsaliveencinitas.com.
