The Ave is all about the art

For 15 years, Art on the Ave has brought art to Tacoma’s Sixth Avenue. But through the years, the street and festival have changed. The Ave has transformed from grungy hang-out into a yuppie destination, with public art pieces, a food co-op, spas, shops and upscale eateries. The festival, one of the city’s largest, also has seen a decline in actual art.

But this year’s Art on the Ave on Sunday, July 14, brings back art in droves, offering an assortment that includes professional chalk painters and sand sculpting.

“We’d gotten feedback from attendees at last year’s festival that there wasn’t enough art,” said festival director Angela Jossy. “They wanted to see more performance art, more live art. Each year, we’re dependent on which art vendors choose to show up. So we decided to go ahead and ask a whole lot of professional artists to come and show their work, and bring hands-on stuff for people to do.”

Past Art on the Aves have featured art that included live octopus mural painting and sewing-machine performance art. The live music and stage acts, such as singer Vicci Martinez or magic shows, have been a constant draw. But lately, it’s been mostly music, vendors and a bit of food from Sixth Avenue restaurants. So the art lineup this year is particularly impressive.

Take Steve Platt, for instance

. He’s a professional 3-D chalk artist from Selah who makes sidewalks look like flowing water fountains or steeply dropping canyons. Or Brent and Ethan Terry, a father-and-son sand-sculpting duo from Mill Creek, whose award-winning sculpture draws on Brent’s architectural studies. They’ll sculpt from one side of a giant pile of sand in the O’Reilly Auto Parts parking lot, while festivalgoers can try their hand on the other, helped by tips from the Terrys.

But that’s just the tip of the art iceberg. Metal sculptor Saign Charlestein, who makes props for TV and film, will wield a blowtorch to create his work, while Patricia Haase will sculpt in clay, and Tacoma’s FabLab will show off high-tech 3-D printers and laser cutting machine . There also will be live painters, glassblowers and graffiti muralists, many of whom will bring hands-on opportunities.

Possibly the biggest single attraction will be the Tacomapoly game. Played on a 45-by-45-foot piece of vinyl covering the Sixth Avenue and Pine Street intersection (outside Starbucks), the game reimagines the Monopoly board using Tacoma businesses instead of streets. Hand-drawn (and duct-taped) by the C.L.A.W. guys (Cartoonists League of Absurd Washingtonians) on the back of a recycled billboard, the game can be played by anyone who wants to make a donation (big or small) to the Sixth Avenue Business District, which sponsors the festival.

Participants will get a lanyard with a Tacoma landmark symbol, roll giant dice to move around the board and earn or spend Tacomapoly money, closely monitored by a celebrity judging panel who will broadcast the progress of the game.

The winner of each 10-minute game gets a voucher for Sixth Ave district merchandise.

“And if people don’t follow the rules, there’s even a mock jail cell,” Jossy said. “It’ll be really silly, Mad Hatter-style justice. But it’ll be a lot of fun.”

Add all this to the festival’s usual offerings: a Grub Crawl (which began last year, allowing festival-goers to sample $6 dishes from competing restaurants (see story on Page 6); three stages of live music from Ben Union, The Fame Riot, Not From Brooklyn, The Fun Police, Nolan Garrett and an undisclosed “national act”; and a Pin Up vintage car show and treasure hunt.

Finally, the festival has added free Wi-Fi throughout Art on the Ave, along with a cellphone application that lets you plan where to go.

At a time when other local festivals come and go — the Urban Arts Festival has announced it won’t happen this year, for instance – the sheer planning energy of this year’s Art on the Ave is admirable.