By Dora McCann Guerreiro

Quartyard Your City Block (quartyardsd.com) and the East Village Association (EVA) are teaming up to host the inaugural evARTS Block Party! Come join us on Saturday, April 13, from 3 to 9 p.m. for this Downtown San Diego open-street, evARTS program fundraiser and Quartyard four-year birthday celebration! The block party will be located on 13th Street, off of Market Street, next to Quartyard. The mission of the evARTS program is to support and contribute to a greater artistic vibe in the East Village community; and on behalf of the community, we want to thank Quartyard for helping bring art to the public.

As the East Village neighborhood transitions from a light industrial area, into an artistic and cultural hotspot, its growth has been encouraged by the burgeoning new East Village neighborhood vibe of a soon-to-be-tripling residential population. The April 13 block party celebration will provide all who attend an opportunity to also become an active participant in bringing and supporting community public art. And of course, what’s an East Village celebration without a sampling of our emerging craft-beer and live-music scene!

Block party attendees will have the opportunity to sip on specialty cocktails and sample craft beer from participating East Village breweries with pop-up tasting tents along 13th Street (costs vary). The “neighborhood brewery rEVolution” will be represented by Amplified Ale Works, Duck Foot Brewing Company, 10 Barrel Brewing Company, Melvin Brewing, Knotty Barrel, and Little Miss Brewing. In addition to craft beer, the event will host an all-day live-music fest featuring San Diego talent, specializing in all musical genres, including The Sure Fire Soul Ensemble, The Heavy Guilt, and The Stoney B Blues Band. And inside Quartyard, attendees can turn it up by participating in the largest silent disco dance party with six local DJ crews performing back to back.

And if a craft beer, music, and an evARTS program launch isn’t enough to excite you, April is also California’s Arts, Culture, and Creativity Month — and the evARTS Block Party has been selected by Californians for the Arts as an official state-recognized and -supported event! Thanking our community leadership for their help in receiving this distinct recognition, the block party will also help celebrate a proclamation to be made by our civic leadership and representatives from the San Diego Arts & Culture Commission on the importance of community involvement in supporting San Diego arts.

By way of background, the Quartyard venue itself began as a community-based urban park project, dreamt up by graduate students of East Village’s NewSchool of Architecture & Design. Their thesis was to simply construct, from repurposed shipping containers, space activation on previously vacant land. And the Quartyard of today has now exploded into a local eatery, dog run, craft-beer garden, event venue, art space, and coffee shop — a one-stop-shop cultural hotspot. As the founder’s original design began as a commitment to transform vacant urban land into active outdoor community space, they have now become a leader in partnering with the public to launch the evARTS initiative, preserving that same commitment to transforming vacant wall space into locally and nationally recognized artistic pieces of public art murals.

All of the proceeds from the evARTS Block Party will go directly back into the evARTS program. The nationally acclaimed artist Kelly Graval, aka “Risk,” will create the first placemaking public art mural piece at a to-be-determined date. Using a color wash technique on a 6,000-square-foot/five-story building façade, his work will help brighten Market Street facing Downtown. Continually looking to create partnerships with local businesses by identifying open spaces for artwork introduction, evARTS looks forward to working with the creative community with the same innovative vision as a part of the visual East Village EVolution.

— The East Village Association is excited to bring you new neighborhood experiences. For more information/tickets to the evARTS and Quartyard four-year birthday celebration, please visit: eventbrite.com/e/evarts-block-party-at-quartyard-tickets-56522769124. Questions? Please visit EVA’s website at www.eastvillagesandiego.com, or contact: [email protected].