New art collective Hear-Arts opens with multimedia celebration

The arts landscape promises to change with the first installment by Hear-Arts, a new arts collective in the greater L.A. area. The event, which occurred throughout the day and evening on Saturday, November 21, included music, contemporary art for viewing and purchase, and opportunities to create one’s own masterpiece at the show.

Paint:Lab, a public studio space in Santa Monica which opened in March of 2009, hosted this first event of Hear-Arts, a collective founded by Lori L. Zaitz.

Throughout the afternoon, the space offered an open house for the public to see and purchase the art of Russian contemporary artist Alexander Gore at his first West Coast showing, to indulge in their own painted creations at the studio, and to listen to the sounds of Soltar, an 18-foot-tall electric guitar, which was on display to the public for the first time. This unique guitar is solar powered, allowing it to run on solar energy during the day and then plugging into the grid to run at night. Created specifically for the 2009 Burning Man festival, the guitar was conceived and built in honor of the late Les Paul.

The evening portion of the event, also held at Paint:Lab, was by invitation only to press, art dealers, and professionals in the music industry. This part of the day-long show was intended specifically to celebrate the opening of the Hear-Arts collective, with cocktails, live music, and more opportunities to experience Soltar and Alexander Gore’s work.

The group’s Web site describes Hear-Arts’s focus as striving to represent a variety of arts within a "collective understanding." The group sees itself as a kind of synthesizer, bringing different parts of the art world together.

In terms of choosing the most appropriate works to display under the auspices of the collective, Hear-Arts selects unique works that strike the collective as notable, as having the potential for many levels of interpretation, and that inspire them to want to share the works on a larger scale.