The birth, death and rebirth of Santa Cruz’s First Friday art tour

Twenty years ago, two guys showed up at my office with an idea they wanted to float by me. 

At the time, I was the arts editor at the Santa Cruz Sentinel. I knew one of the guys fairly well. The mononymed Chip (“Just Chip,” he would say by introduction) ran The 418 Project, and was involved in so many other arts/performance organizations, I began to suspect he was not one person, but one of several clones. (Would explain the odd, vaguely AI-sounding name, don’t you think?)

The other guy that showed up at my office that day I would eventually come to know well. But at the time, I didn’t know him at all. He was a New York-raised artist and dot-com refugee named Kirby Scudder who wore a trucker’s hat like it had been surgically screwed into his skull. Kirby had a salesman-like talent at presenting any idea as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Chip and Kirby — often archly referred to around town at the time as “Chirby” —  had been engaged in a guerrilla-style effort to establish quickie, temporary art “galleries” in empty downtown storefronts and other nontraditional spaces in much the same way that weeds grow in cracks in the sidewalk. And they came up with an event that would bring more attention to these weird little pop-up art spaces. Inspired by a monthly art tour in Sacramento called “Second Saturday,” they opted for an alliteration of a different kind and called their idea “First Friday.”

Today, First Friday is a Santa Cruz institution, featuring 43 venues across the county (it’s probably well north of 50 counting those who hold events on the first Friday of the month but don’t register with First Friday). June’s First Friday event will include a special 20th-anniversary exhibit at the Radius Gallery at the Tannery Arts Center, featuring the work of 39 Santa Cruz County artists, some of whom are well-known brand names associated with First Friday, others first-timers. 

First Friday is a sole-proprietorship small business, essentially a one-person operation, and that one person is artist Bree Karpavage, who took over from Chip and his wife, Abra Allan, both of whom moved to Colorado five years ago. (The couple has recently returned to the Bay Area.) 

In the early days, First Friday was always an iffy proposition. Kirby Scudder had convinced both business owners and city officials to allow him to set up temporary galleries, even in high-profile locations. At Pacific Avenue and Church Street, he began to show art, and sell a lot of it, in the window of the recently closed Wherehouse record store (now Urban Outfitters). But he was less successful at getting people out to art events on the first Friday of each month.

“We got to several points where we were just like, ‘Y’know, this is just not working,’” he said. “We tried our best, but it just was not happening.”

Remember, this was an era before social media and before smartphones. Chip and Kirby publicized First Friday with the decidedly low-tech means of printed flyers and maps, expecting art lovers to pick up their cues from there. 

Then came Scudder’s epiphany that, he said, came to him in a dream: First Friday needed a tour guide. 

“The problem is, people don’t know what to do,” he said. “What people need is their hand held, not maps. They need a guided tour.”

The first guided tour of First Friday attracted six people. But that number grew dramatically every month, to 30 or more. 

“People were loving it,” he said. “I mean, Chip and I were taking the art thing so seriously, we didn’t realize: ‘You know what this thing is? It’s a social thing.’ And the minute we understood the social part of it, it just took off.”

Soon, the temporary galleries scattered throughout town — half-forgotten names such as The Attic, the Mill Gallery, the ? Gallery, the Dead Cow Gallery — didn’t feel so temporary. At the same time, however, many of the more traditional downtown businesses were reluctant to participate. (The city’s most prominent arts organization, the Museum of Art & History, in that pre-Nina Simon era, wasn’t interested.) But even that began to change.

“It took, like, six or seven years before the venues began to really get it, and they started to participate. And when I say ‘participate,’ I don’t mean just agreeing to stay open and do something little. They began to be the drivers of the whole thing,” said Scudder.

Many at the city were big fans of Scudder’s efforts to seed an arts-oriented culture downtown, especially then-mayor Emily Reilly and then-redevelopment director Ceil Cirillo. Chip became the director of the Downtown Association, and though he stepped back from direct involvement in First Friday, he remained a big supporter in his new role. At one point, Scudder was even able to obtain a bus to taxi art lovers from venue to venue. Visual artists were getting their work in front of new eyeballs, and even musicians and performing artists got into the act, playing on unusual stages. Businesses involved in the early days of First Friday were also diverse, from the legendary (but sadly now defunct) coffeehouse Caffe Pergolesi, to the Santa Cruz branch of the Thomas Kinkade Gallery (yes, that happened).

Soon, Scudder became involved in the planning stages of the Tannery Arts Center on the site of the closed Salz Tannery — he essentially moved in at the Kron House, rechristened as the Dead Cow Gallery, on the Tannery campus, becoming the Tannery’s first full-time resident. He was also pursuing other big art projects — a documentary film about traveling through California, an installation involving temporary spotlights along West Cliff Drive. So he handed over the reins of First Friday to Chip and Abra Allan, who was running Motion Pacific dance studio. Social media blossomed, helping publicize the event. A smartphone app was developed. The weekly Good Times published a pull-out guide to First Friday every month.

By the 2010s, First Friday was a bona-fide local success story, animating downtown streets every month, and that’s where the story might have ended.

Then came 2020.

Bree Karpavage had agreed to take control of First Friday before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19. As a kind of apprenticeship to the role, she helped plan the events of the early months of 2020, but wasn’t slated to assume sole leadership until May of that year. 

We all know what happened in the meantime.

In an epic example of bad timing, Karpavage began her new job deep into a worldwide shutdown. She was given the keys to the car just as all the roads were closed. “It was a well-oiled machine, that suddenly came to a grinding halt,” is how Karpavage herself puts it.

The essence of First Friday, a social in-person event taking place in small, intimate public settings, was exactly the thing that everyone was told to avoid during the pandemic. Karpavage pivoted. Karpavage turned it into an Instagram-based event. 

While that’s not ideal, it did provide First Friday a lifeline. On one side of the double-edged sword of the pandemic was the loss of in-person social connections. On the other side, a new interest in creativity.

“During that time,” said Karpavage, “art was like a sanctuary for a lot of people. Not only were people creating it, new people were creating it. People took up a hobby. Many people looked to art as, ‘Oh yeah, this is the good part of life.’”

Karpavage also runs a local makers market and she saw a big influx of creative products from locals, or “COVID makers,” as she called them. 

As 2021 dawned, Karpavage was faced with the task of rebuilding First Friday essentially from the ground up. She reached out to businesses that had participated before the pandemic to get them excited about the event’s return. Of course, some of those businesses were gone. She lowered the fee for participation and sought to build relationships with other merchants and businesses.

When three of the biggest art galleries in the county — Radius, the R. Blitzer Gallery and Curated By the Sea (now M.K. Contemporary Art) — decided to launch a co-branded show of local art, First Friday used the opportunity to relaunch. 

Like a radical haircut finally growing back, First Friday emerged in the post-pandemic era as a different thing than its pre-pandemic incarnation. New businesses signed on, and Karpavage tapped into the latent thirst on the part of many people to revive a purely social life. She began to expand her vision, moving First Friday from a downtown-oriented event to include more regions and cities in the county. 

Today, First Friday is embracing new venues from Green Magic Yoga to the tiny Minnow gallery, from the Art of Santa Cruz in Capitola Mall to the Far West Fungi mushroom shop downtown. Institutions like the MAH, the Museum of Natural History and the Santa Cruz Art League are enthusiastic participants. As the event reaches its 20th anniversary, Karpavage is looking to places like Capitola and Watsonville as opportunities for growth.

“There’s a bunch of art-related institutions that are doing it now,” said Kirby Scudder, “You have yoga places, automotive places, insurance companies. The list is like … wow. And they’re all enthusiastic and really into the artists that they’re showing. And that’s what we wanted in the first place, a healthy place where artists can show their work, and for people to honor their work and buy it. I’m super proud of what’s happened at First Friday, but it’s due to a long list of so many people. We were just dumb enough to start it.”

“Changing Space: Celebrating 20 Years of First Friday Santa Cruz” takes place at the Radius Gallery at the Tannery Arts Center. Reception, Friday, June 7, 5 to 7 p.m. The exhibit runs May 29 through June 23.

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