First Friday in Las Vegas

November 9, 2008 · Filed Under Entertainment, Music, Social Networking 

Yesterday was another first for our family. We headed on down to Downtown Las Vegas to check out First Friday, an art & music festival that takes place on the… wait for it… First Friday of every month.

From the First Friday website:

First Friday is produced by Whirlygig, Inc., a Nevada non-profit arts organization founded in October 2002. First Friday has grown from 300 attendees in 2002 to today’s monthly attendance of 5-10,000. The event now encompasses more than 20 city blocks with five blocks closed to vehicular traffic to create a pedestrian area for the outdoor festivities. This grassroots community festival has become “Las Vegas’ favorite community art event” with gallery hopping, free exhibition spaces for artists, live entertainment, street entertainers, shopping food, beverages, and more. More than 80 galleries, restaurants and retail businesses work together to make the First Friday experience unique to the Las Vegas downtown arts district. Volunteers currently jury the art, work the information tables, set up and tear down parts of the event, place the trolley signs, coordinate the trolley guides, and sell soda and water to benefit First Friday. As Mayor Oscar Goodman says, “First Friday is the best thing that has ever happened to Las Vegas.”

Since we had never been, we thought there was a possibility that there were many others who had never been as well. So, we scheduled a last minute meetup for our Tweetup Las Vegas group. Big thanks to Jake & Nate from Black Diamond Digital for letting us use their office as a meeting place. They are only a block and a half from the festivities, so it worked out really well.

We met at BDD around 5:15 and had a chat with a couple people who had heard of Twitter, but had never used it. I gave them a quick tutorial and they both seemed very interested in using it. A few more from our group showed up and we hung out and talked about photography, social networking and hockey until around 6:15. We then headed down to First Friday and walked around checking out the different artists. There were painters, jewelry makers, musicians and even some break dancers. I had a great time taking a bunch of photos, especially of the break dancers.

As we were heading back to BDD we stopped by the Art Factory. This place was absolutely awesome. It’s a two story building with SEVERAL room inside. Each room was taken up by a different artist showing off there work. All types, all genres, all styles and all of them cool. Even though the place looked pretty busy to us, we were told that this was one of the slower nights. Yikes, makes me wonder what it’s like when it’s busy!

The event was really cool and I’m glad we finally made it out. Hopefully I can talk Jake and Nate in to letting us use that as a starting point each month for our twitter meetups. That would be very cool.

See you there next month.

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