Overview:
What was once a largely unregulated, grassroots event came with more structure. Outdoor exhibitions and art vendors were concentrated to the north along Fulton, while most food vendors reigned to the south in the Brewery District.
Thursday night you could see a number of very Fresno things in plain sight downtown — cars overflowing into makeshift parking spots in dirt lots, food trucks from every cuisine taking over the streets and a guy in a dinosaur mask bouncing to the rhythm of a local ska band’s live mashup of Smash Mouth, Third Eye Blind and Chappell Roan.
You guessed right: ArtHop has returned to the streets of downtown Fresno.
Thursday marked the first iteration of the longstanding event to reintroduce a street fair on Fulton downtown, 10 months after the city abruptly shut down the outdoor activities that had spawned from the event born in the city’s art galleries 30 years ago.
The city’s unpopular decision left an ugly mark on the community, and some are still reeling from that.
“When that happened, the ‘Hop’ wasn’t happening anymore” said Maricela Hernandez, the Outreach & Development Coordinator at the Community Media Access Collaborative (CMAC).
CMAC is an ArtHop venue in the Mural District downtown off Van Ness and Calaveras.
“We just saw a complete decline of life on our side of town,” she said.
But Thursday night was a change.
Hernandez said she was “pleasantly surprised” by how lively things were at the Mural District’s ArtHop Block Party. She was busy most of the night giving visitors CMAC tours. The 11 artists CMAC hosted were making sales. The aforementioned ska band, For the Record, was drawing a crowd with their energetic performance in the alley outside the CMAC building.
Still, it’s going to take time to rebuild.
The abrupt change broke trust between the city and community members, many of whom protested the city’s decision last August.
Some even decided to boycott ArtHop subsequently, including Diego De La Vega, who was disappointed by the ban on outdoor vendors.
“It felt like the little guy was getting picked on,” he said.
There’s also some rebuilding to do in terms of turnout. At peak attendance, ArtHop drew as many as 15,000 people to the streets of downtown.
Though the crowd Thursday grew to hundreds as the sun set and the 90-degree day started to cool down, it was “not as big as it used to be,” said Brian Tingle, co-owner of Thai food truck Pen-Ta-Zapp along with his wife.
But that didn’t stop them or other folks from turning out Thursday — or from considering coming out again next month.
“It could bounce back for sure,” Tingle said, adding that Pen-Ta-Zapp would possibly return to the Brewery District on future ArtHop nights as well.
‘ArtHop was this perfect thing’
Thursday marked De La Vega’s first ArtHop since the city banned outdoor activity.
Part of what he missed was the excuse to go out with friends someplace other than a bar.
“It’s fun to do something that’s not centered all around drinking,” De La Vega said.
“For my friends that aren’t drinkers, for my friends that are under 21,” he added, “ArtHop was this perfect thing that was pub culture, not bar culture.”
It was also Jennifer Rincon’s first ArtHop back since before last August, but as a vendor.
Rincon is a beader and tarot reader who’s been vending at ArtHop for the past four years.
Thursday night she set up shop in the Sun Stereo Warehouse in the Brewery District, where a modest crowd was trickling in early in the evening.
She isn’t sure the city will ever replicate the “genuine magic” that was ArtHop before the city’s crackdown.
But she also thinks the past 10 months started a needed conversation about how important art is to the community in Fresno — and can offer a valuable lesson for younger artists especially.
“For the younger kids, I think it’s a good thing for them to see this,” she said. “We had it, and then they took it away, and then people really championed for it, they really wanted it and they made it happen.”
How the June ArtHop was structured
Thursday’s ArtHop looked a little different than its pre-street-fair-shutdown self, and quite different from the last 11 months of ArtHop sans-street-activity.
What was once a largely unregulated, grassroots event came with more structure. Outdoor exhibitions and art vendors were concentrated to the north along Fulton, while most food vendors reigned to the south in the Brewery District.
Three groups took the lead on organizing these different hubs downtown.
The Fresno Arts Council, the longtime organizer of ArtHop, managed what its executive director Lilia Gonzáles Chávez called the “Gallery on Fulton.”
That covered the area stretching from Calaveras in the Mural District area all the way to the edge of the Brewery District on Inyo.
Fresno Street Eats and Tioga-Sequoia were running things mostly for food vendors along the block south of Inyo to Mono — the only area Thursday night where streets were blocked off and open to pedestrians and bikes only.
The Downtown Fresno Partnership organized a “Battle of the Bands”-like set of performances at Kern Plaza featuring competing corridos, its CEO Elliott Balch shared.
Once Mariposa Plaza reopens, the Downtown Fresno Partnership hopes to organize live performances there on ArtHop nights as well.
The organization is reapplying for Measure P funds this year to help fund these performances.
How we got here
The May announcement marked the end of an almost yearlong hiatus for street activity on ArtHop nights.
The city originally cited concerns related to extreme heat as the reason for the cancellation. But other reasons surfaced over subsequent months, including concerns over inadequate policing and finding organizers with sufficient liability insurance policies to get a permit for the event.
The city’s decision drew sharp criticism from artists and vendors in town, who said they felt punished for making ArtHop a success capable of drawing as many as 15,000 people downtown.
It also drew out tensions over what defines the longstanding event, with some venues lamenting that street vendors diverted attention from the galleries where ArtHop was born.
Vendors and artists countered that ArtHop’s evolution and growth was a grassroots success, giving downtown Fresno some much-needed momentum and attracting a younger crowd to spend time there.
What about Why Not Wednesday?
After the city put a stop to the street fair downtown on ArtHop nights last August, its answer to that was a new street fair on the third Wednesday of each month downtown called Why Not Wednesday.
Last month’s Why Not Wednesday was ultimately canceled due to an unforeseen issue on Kern Street, according to a May 21 post on Instagram from Why Not Wednesday’s account. The event will return June 18 — though its fate beyond this month has yet to be determined, according to Balch.
The return of the popular ArtHop street fair has raised some questions about the future of Why Not Wednesday, however, and Balch said they’ll be assessing attendance before another one is planned.
The event’s attendance was only a fraction of ArtHop at its peak, though it was showing modest growth in the warmer months.
“We’ll be taking stock of how ArtHop works and what the response continues to be with (Why Not) Wednesday,” he said, “and decide if it’s something that continues.”
