Now in its fourth year, POW! WOW! Long Beach is centered around a week-long event in Hawaii. The event has grown into a global network of artists. POW! WOW! organizes gallery shows, lecture series, schools for art and music, creative community spaces, concerts, and live art installations across the globe.
For one week at the end of June POW! WOW! Long Beach will become a live canvas for murals painted by two dozen different artists throughout the downtown corridor and beyond.
As RLn reported in 2017, business owners were reluctant to allow their walls to be sprayed over with paint when POW! WOW! first came to town. But since that time property owners have come around and donated wall space. Hundreds of local volunteers have followed in support as well.
Long Beach Museum of Art executive director Ronald Nelson is credited with changing Long Beach’s attitude towards street art after spearheading the 2015 show Vitality and Verve: Transforming the Urban Landscape. The show brought world-renowned artists to paint temporary murals in LBMA galleries.
This Long Beach event is part of other similar events which take place around the world. The festival is expanding to cities and countries such as Taiwan, Israel, Singapore, Jamaica, Washington, D.C., Guam, New Zealand and Germany. The central POW! WOW! event happens on Valentine’s Day week in February in the Kaka’ako district of Honolulu. The occasion brings more than a hundred international and local artists together to create murals and other forms of art.
There is also a POW! WOW! School of Music. It is dedicated to enriching the lives of aspiring musicians through mentorship, community involvement, and providing a creative, comfortable, safe space for artistic expression. Its purpose is to offer an educational platform, granting young local musicians the opportunity to meet and connect with music professionals, but also exposure to unfamiliar musical territories that expand their horizons.
Time: 7 a.m. June 24 through 12 a.m. June 30
Cost: Free
Details: www.powwowlongbeach.com
Venue: Downtown Long Beach