Kathy Leonardo Photo:Gregory Dahl
LA Art Party Newsletter
LA Art Party is an event listing website. A go-to guide for what’s happening in the Arts and Entertainment World in the LA area. Each Wednesday at noon weekly events are posted and a Pick of the Week is featured. Then each Friday at noon additional events will be listed for the Weekend Update. This also includes the best deals in restaurants, special local promotions from retail stores with giveaways for festivals, red carpet events and more!
”Magic Circles” at MOCA
Mayor Villaraigosa, Levitated Mass LACMA
Graham Nash
Herb Alpert
First Fridays on AK
Ed Moses
Larry Bell
Peter Alexander
Attaway
Robert Berman
Ellwood T. Risk
Sona Mirzaei
Jules Muck
LA Art Show
Event Review: Venice Arts DJ'd Whiskey and Music Party, March 3rd!
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Venice Arts is a local non-profit organization that runs education and mentoring programs in documentary photography, filmmaking and multimedia primarily targeting Los Angeles-area low income youth. They're an astonishing and very successful group that has grown tremendously in the last few years since my very own teenage son took photography classes there 3 or 4 years ago. See student image to right, by Jeannette Vasquez.Kathy Leonardo and I attended a special evening recently that was a combination party and fundraiser for the Venice Arts Youth Art Internship Program, and advanced component of Venice Arts' free Art Mentoring Program for low-income youth which was established in collaboration with the Venice Media District in 2007.
The program places highly skilled high-school age students in internships at creative production and post-production companies throughout Los Angeles. Two new internships are being launched this spring – one at GRAINEY PICTURES in Marina del Rey and the other at COLD OPEN, a Venice Ad Agency.
The evening was quite lively, and included music spun by DJ Jacques, lots of delicious food (I can attest to the delicious part) donated by local restaurants like Outback Catering, Venice Beach Wines, and 26 Wines, and best of all, a whiskey-tasting with the Bourbon Baron, something I highly recommend anyone staging a fundraiser in the future look into. Whiskey makes the "fundraiser" component go down much easier. Student image to left, by Claude Velas.
There were also some amazing photos taken by current Venice Arts students during the fall workshop and "best of" work from their archives which could be bid on.
In addition to helping out one of the best causes around (students), we had a swell time and enjoyed ourselves quite a bit. And probably due to the whiskey tasting, we didn't mind a bit that we didn't win any raffle prizes, which included a night at the Hotel Shangri-La and gift certificates to local Venice restaurants. Oh, well. Maybe next year.
For more info about Venice Arts, see their website at http://www.venicearts.org/.
