Peter Gurnz and BOXeight: Bringing the Party Back to Downtown LA

BOXeight started out as IMG-81. Why the name change?

We decided to go with the name IMG-81 because I had written it on a pair of pants a couple of years ago, while running a clothing line, and I wore them all the time, and the name spoke of image, there was a symmetry to it, so the name stuck. But we never trademarked it or anything, we didn't have the money to do all of that kind of stuff.

Then all of a sudden last month, the city approached us and developers and they want us to do all of these things and produce Fashion Week events and clubs and Art Bars and different things, run for City Council. So I said alright and we did and then we get a huge amount of exposure and written up in all these newspapers for the Fashion Week events. And then I get a nice little letter from the law firm that represents IMG, the worldwide leader in fashion and sports entertainment, saying that we couldn't use the name.

So, after calling some friends, trademark lawyers, etc, we called an emergency meeting to find a new name. But we were lucky enough that we were early in our exposure so all we had to do is call up the newspapers and say 'no, no, no, it's got to be BOXeight'. We got it together one night and trademarked it the next day.

How exactly did BOXeight producing some of the shows for Fashion Week come about?

Last year I was asked to run for the Arts, Culture and Education Director seat on the Neighborhood Council. Which I did. And given the fact that 50 artist are in the group and that was about the most amount of votes anybody got for any one category, I won. And there, I met with a few downtown activists. Specifically, Brady Westwater, vice president and founder of the Neighborhood Council, 4th generation Downtown resident and all of these different things and Gary Warfel, who is a real estate developer, one of the partners of one of the larger condo development firms. Gary really recognized, he's from New York, as I am, born and raised, what happened with the Village and everything that happened down there, the boom.

Yesterday, I was having lunch down the street and I see these four developers in a Smart Car, with their hard hats and blueprints, zooming down the street and 2 years ago when I moved here, there were gun shots and people shooting up and smoking crack around every corner, and know you have these little Smart Cars running around.

It's amazing what's happening now. But some of the developers have recognized that none of this is going to happen and be successful without the arts. No one is moving down here unless there are arts and entertainment, things to do at night, culture. And we have really become sort of the spotlight on the map of Downtown, our name has been branded as the arts organization here.

There is a multitude of other artist organizations and artists here, in the Arts District, in every nook and cranny in Downtown there's a painter or band or someone doing something, but we're sort of the largest weaponized group or army that is working to produce these kinds of things. They came to me and wanted to know how we could work together and get their names philanthropically aligned with the arts community.

We had a big meeting in February and we realized we had all the tools to put together something - funding, developers, property, artists, photographers, models, connections and resources - so what do we want to do? I'd said that Fashion Week was two months away, maybe we could so something there. Brady agreed.

He made ten phone calls and all of a sudden there are newspaper articles and all these other things and Gary's writing checks, the Delijani family is donating theaters, some of the top designers in LA saying they love the venue and want to headline, bands saying they want to perform, sponsors coming to us.

It just happened, ya know?

Did it take a lot of work? Yeah, but it was easy to do. We didn't hit any roadblocks, there were no detrimental occurrences. Everywhere we looked, we had support - funding, donations - it all happened. And we will be doing that from season to season.

What's going on with ArtBar?

ArtBar was a similar conversation with Gary Warfel, who is one of the partners who recently bought the Grand Avenue Club, which has had it's own bad reputation as far as an entertainment venue. He and his partners have been working very hard to change the idea of it. It used to be this afterhours club for many years that was the focus of a lot of crime, a lot of bad attention. They're trying to create a new life for it.

The club has been around for 100 years, Elvis, Motley Crue played there, it used to be Myron's Ballroom, back in the United Artists, Charlie Chaplin days. There's no reason we can't bring some new life into it.

There are ongoing conversations about how to involve BOXeight in that and utilize that corner, which is a great location and the venue is wonderful. We are trying to take over the club on the nights that we can and make some positive motions towards that. Drastic changes may come soon that will allow us to make a permanent home or gallery space there.

We have filled up our building and we don't have space for in-house exhibition and we were planning on buying the building we're in and putting our gallery on the first floor, that didn't happen, so the Grand Avenue Club may be a new location for us. In the meantime, we are still trying to create these events, be it a fashion event or an art show or an open mike night or movie night, we want to be offering the community and our members an opportunity to expose themselves or learn something or watch a movie or take a yoga class and give the community an opportunity to participate with our members, we want to create more avenues to merge those two goals.

The Grand Avenue Club is great because we can do live performances as well. As a group that focuses on emerging talent, that includes bands also and the club gives us an opportunity to present those types of performances too.

The ArtBar is something that we are really hoping to launch, we've had a couple of trial runs on it, but it something we plan on having permanently, perhaps open nightly, maybe focus some really big events around the Art Walk Night, and use ArtBar as sort of an afterparty spot for all of the different galleries or people that are coming downtown to see artwork.

When we throw an event, 2000 or 2500 people are coming to it and that's about the same number of people that are coming down to visit the different galleries on Art Walk Night as it stands right now, so you put together people from our event and people from Art Walk and you've got a group of 5000. Maybe the next month, you get 6000. And with the residents moving into the new developments over the next year, that number grows and grows and we create more and more to do for our neighbors here and throughout Los Angeles and create more exposure for our artists.

It's one of those things where is Downtown wins, we all win. The more anyone of us can do to create life here, it becomes win - win for everybody.

Images provided by Peter Gurnz