Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Art start: Downtown storefront is humble beginning for city’s first association

Kitty Boeddeker and her husband, Ron, arrived here six years ago from Santa Barbara, Calif. He set out to build a $5 billion resort known now as Lake Las Vegas. She set out for art.

This was Henderson then, she says: No art classes, no art association, no art gallery.

"It was a simple case of selfishness," Boeddeker said of her decision, finally, to form the Henderson Art Association.

She was standing at the counter of a small downtown storefront Thursday. The walls were bare, freshly painted white, and the room was empty except for four fake ficus plants and a bleak linoleum floor that will be under carpet by Oct. 1, when the building becomes the organization's first home, the Old Town Gallery.

For a city of uniform master-planned communities and rolling golf courses, and for a patchwork downtown struggling to revive itself, Boeddeker's endeavor represents a rare opportunity to unite -- or at least smash together -- the new and the old parts of town, which historically have tended not to mix.

"It's something brand new so we'll have to watch and see how it goes," said Michelle Romero, redevelopment program coordinator for the city. "But we think it will increase general foot traffic, tie the two parts of the city together. And there's no reason they can't work together."

A similar venture has earned plaudits in Reno. That city's redevelopment agency brought art to its aging downtown in 1997, buying the old Riverside Hotel for $4 million, partnering with a pair of private nonprofit art foundations, and finally opening artist lofts in October 2000.

"It was a matter of a slow evolution that snowballed," said Dorene Soto, economic development manager for Reno's redevelopment agency. "It's made a tremendous difference in our ability to attract other development and national arts programs."

Reno used a redevelopment formula that has worked around the country, said Candy Schneider, president of the Nevada Council for the Arts, which dispensed $782,000 in state grants last year.

"No one comes in the evening for entertainment or leisure in these older areas. But the arts do a fantastic job of revitalizing them," she said.

Besides, Schneider said, golf courses and schools are not the only aspects of quality of life people ask about before moving to the Las Vegas Valley.

"Even the development authority will tell you," Schneider said. "The executives, the middle management of corporations, they're used to attending the opera, the ballet, outdoor concerts, of having their kids take music and painting classes. An art association is part of that."

For now, the Henderson Redevelopment Agency is providing the art association with seed money only indirectly, through money being donated by the Downtown Business Association. Other private organizations have donated paint and lights.

Downtown landlord Leonard Smith may be the nascent association's biggest benefactor thus far. He's halving the rent for the first year.

"My wife called me stupid," Smith grumbled, "But rents have dropped way down, and I figured as long as I've got two restaurants and a hair salon, I figured art would go pretty good."

Beyond bridging political factions and pumping up downtown economics, the association should also add warmth to the chill of the suburb's 9-to-5 lifestyle, artist Roy Purcell said. Purcell is an honorary member of the association who in 1974 opened the Clark County Heritage Museum, then known as the Southern Nevada Museum, and last year published "Portraits of Nature," a desert naturalist's book of engravings and watercolors subsequently picked up by schools and libraries across the state.

"If you have a bunch of people who are totally uneducated, you have one lifestyle," Purcell said. "If you have a bunch of well-educated people who know about the arts, literature and music, that's another lifestyle. It just adds to the overall depth of a community's experience, rather than just the cold of the business world."

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