ArtWalk’s opening reception at Pinot’s Palette featured an oddity of the modern world — guests’ cellphones only came out for one reason: to show other people photos of their favorite art pieces.
Nancy Mimno grinned as she held up an image of a sculpted giraffe-inspired creature for someone else to admire. Nearby, Diane Piper explained how geometric patterns communicate a piece’s message before pointing out her painting of a cat, Fluffy.
Eventually, chatter overtook the room’s background music, a crescendo that forced people to lean in to follow the conversation.
The liveliness contrasted with many attendees’ day-to-day routines. Some worked day jobs. Others were stay-at-home parents. Many spent an hour or more a day in solitude with a canvas or block of clay. This can make it difficult for some creators to see the beauty in their work.
“Artists in general tend to be very inward-looking,” said Shehab Hossain, an artist and ArtWalk volunteer. “Most artists I know have a lot of doubt in whether their work is good enough to be shown so I think this gives everyone an opportunity to literally put it out in a window.”
Every fall since 2015, ArtWalk has featured art in shop windows of Lexington Center for a month and a half, a tradition some say unites residents in a shared love of art.
“I think people are really excited about being a part of a larger community of your local artist peers,” said Cristina Burwell, executive director of the Munroe Center for the Arts. “It’s the opportunity to be inspired by seeing other people’s stuff and the pride of having your own stuff.”
About a dozen years ago, Innessa Manning sat down for coffee with Burwell after a brief call and proposed the idea for ArtWalk — a walkable art show each fall that would pair local artists with retailers in the town center. Manning said she and a group of other residents believed it would attract more foot traffic to shops, promote the local art scene and revitalize downtown. Two years after the first event, Upasna Chhabra joined the organizing committee, helping Manning and Burwell recruit local businesses and set up the art in the shops’ windows.
“We’ve been able to put our strengths together in a jigsaw puzzle way,” Burwell said. “But there’s a lot more people that come to help us.”
On Sept. 30, the committee and its volunteers collected, organized, and installed art in the 30 participating storefronts from about 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. This year, ArtWalk includes more than 200 pieces from 75 artists. Each piece displays a card with the price and the artist’s contact information.
“It’s a great community event,” said Eric Michelson, the co-owner of Michelson’s Shoes. “We support any type of event that gets people to walk through the downtown area… but we especially love to see the artwork in town. It really brightens up the center.”
For artists launching their creative careers, the windows offer an audience. Katie Brandeau returned to making art professionally after working in research and development for Disney.
“I actually have a purchaser that’s interested in purchasing one of the pieces and it’s only been there for, not even, a week,” she said at the opening reception. “Selling a piece or two would be amazing but also just getting any sort of contacts or visibility is just incredible.”
Heidi Mann has a similar story. She earned her bachelor’s degree in illustration at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and spent years creating visuals for computer games. She said producing what others wanted for most of her artistic career drained her, so she committed herself to being a stay-at-home mom. Now, five years into a new career as a full-time painter, she said she’s grateful for the visibility ArtWalk brings to her work.
“As an artist, you’re usually in a bubble and not many people see your work. This is a great way for a broad range of people to see your work, especially if you’re starting out,” she said. “But even if you’re not starting out, it’s just an opportunity to get yourself out there and for other people to see it too.”
Hossain said visibility builds confidence. He specializes in urban night photography and science-fiction inspired light paintings, a type of camerawork that captures objects painted with light through an open shutter. He didn’t believe his work deserved to be put on a wall until a friend encouraged him.
“Every time I’ve shown work it’s always been like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you did this’ or ‘I didn’t know other artists who did this type of work live in Lexington’,” Hossain said. “It has been a really great networking opportunity to meet others and help others along as well.”
The organizers plan for those connections.
“I often see the artists talking to one another about their techniques and how they did something, and they’re just very interested in that,” Manning said. “That takes place as we’re setting up. We’ll pair up a couple volunteer artists to walk together to different locations so that happens organically there and then also at the ArtWalk reception that we host.”
ArtWalk runs through Nov. 17, but the organizing committee has already started planning for next year.
“We’ve talked about this often, about how we can do more events through the year,” Chhabra said. “But it takes a lot of work to pull it off, the reminders, getting all the emails out, and all of that. So, given all our bandwidths, we are still going to try to do more.”
This story was written by a journalism student in Boston University’s newsroom program, a partnership among the university, The Lexington Observer and other news organizations in the Boston area.