Object and environment designer Paul Hickman says, “I was just over in the west coast of Michigan, and when you talk about Ann Arbor, people automatically say, that’s a great art town because they’ve got the Art Fair, and it stops there.” Although Hickman sees the value of the Ann Arbor Art Fairs, he points out that “a large percentage of local artists don’t participate, for a variety of reasons.” Art Walk aims to expose the full-range of the area’s local art scenes.

“There is a tremendous art community who lives here, so the idea is to raise the level of awareness of what’s available locally, not just who comes in once a year during Art Fair,” says Hickman.

One of the unique opportunities that Art Walk provides visitors is allowing them to visit spaces that are usually closed to the public — in particular, artists’ studios. Artist and Public Art Commission Chair Margaret Parker gives the example that “a lot of people don’t know this, but on the west side of Ann Arbor there are a lot of artists who have studios in their homes. So that is an area that has a lot of interesting places to see, and you have to be in the hunting and gathering mode to find everybody,” she says.

Parker makes a point to add that “these are artists who are working hard enough so that they want to advertise what they’re doing and advertise how they are working, and invite people to come and see how they are doing it and where they are doing it. These are artists that are of a certain seriousness. They are working artists.”

The addition of Saline is a major development. Two Twelve Arts Center program coordinator Cindy Barnett explains, “We have a group of artists that meets every Friday here at Two Twelve, called the Cake Eaters, and we told them about Art Walk, and we also told the Downtown Merchants Association in Saline about it, and they wanted to be involved in it as well. So we connected the artists with the downtown merchants.

“Some of the artists in Saline are way out, or they don’t have a studio per se, and so this way they can be featured in the downtown area thanks to the merchants opening their businesses up to them. Then some of the artists decided to have their own spots in the Art Walk guide,” she explains.

Another big development is the involvement of the Arts Alliance, which now acts as Art Walk’s fiduciary, so that it may function as a non-profit. President Tamara Real explains that Art Walk fits into the Washtenaw County Cultural Master Plan (PDF) that the Arts Alliance has been developing. “Art Walk really dovetails very closely with a couple elements of our cultural planning project. It’s a great way of helping people just to recognize how wide and vibrant our cultural sector is — and particularly the individual artists. This is a really great way to showcase it,” she says.

Real also thinks that Art Walk will help “build the professional business skills of the artists, helping them to become more successful selling their work,” and that the event “fits into the idea of building up our creative economy,” she says.

Parker also sees a strong connection between the Art Alliance’s goals and those of Art Walk. “This is a perfect vehicle for helping to build a more regional program for Art Walk,” she says. She explains that, next year, it is likely that Ann Arbor will be dropped from the title, “because it doesn’t apply any more,” she says.

Considering all of the different types of artists and organizations involved in Art Walk, from university spaces, to commercial spaces, to private spaces, Hickman thinks, “It’s really good that we are all working together, instead of isolating ourselves. I have a real strong opinion that Ann Arbor doesn’t exist without the U of M, and vice versa — it wouldn’t be recognizable, it would be totally different. Saline doesn’t exist without Ann Arbor, but Ann Arbor doesn’t exist without all of its other outlaying communities, and we need to work together.”

Sometimes individual towns resist being lumped into a general category, like the Ann Arbor area, for example. Each of the communities in Washtenaw County have their own unique identities and cultures. However, Hickman sees Art Walk as “a way for the art community to be networked together. There’s this attitude, good or bad, that Ann Arbor is the big brother. A lot of people think that’s bad, but you’ve gotta think, you’ve got this great hub and here are the spokes,” he concludes.

In conjuction with Art Walk, the University of Michigan's museums are presenting "Behind-the-Scenes Days." Full information available at the U-M Meaningful Objects events page.

Jennifer Eberbach is a free-lance writer who covers art for AnnArbor.com.