New student-created coloring book reimagines Los Angeles

Alex Zarchy was going to major in a pre-med field, but now she’s creating a 46-page coloring book featuring the mesmerizing art and stories of 15 Los Angeles-based artists, intersecting the world of art and social change.

Set to release Thursday, “Snapshot: L.A. Artists” includes multiple works of original art from painters and street artists such as WRDSMTH and Bunnie Reiss to Lucid Morgan and Hedy Torres. Thirty percent of the book’s proceeds go to those artists. 

Zarchy, a sophomore majoring in public relations and NGOs and social change, found her interest in art when she discovered Art Share Los Angeles on a family outing. 

Art Share Los Angeles is a nonprofit art space dedicated to helping local emerging artists of all kinds in their growth, both personally and professionally. What began as an old textile factory in the 1920s is now a not-for-profit with artistic spaces, including 30 affordable housing units for emerging artists, studio spaces and an art gallery with free submissions.

“We walked in, and it was home,” Zarchy said. “I immediately knew that this was where I needed to be spending all of my time, unfortunately for them.” 

With Art Share in her back pocket, Zarchy felt that creating the coloring book and donating the funds to the nonprofit was a large but necessary effort. 

But Zarchy wasn’t in this alone. She had help from co-creator Holly Harris, a sophomore majoring in biology at Texas Christian University. After being sent home from college because of the pandemic, Harris developed the concept for the project and Zarchy seemed like the perfect collaborator. 

“For some reason, the idea of an L.A. artists adult coloring book just kind of popped into my head, and I was like, ‘Wow, this would be so sick,’” Harris said. “I clearly remember I almost didn’t text Alex … But I was like, ‘No, it’s Alexandra. I’m just gonna text her and see what she thinks,’ and here we are. Eight months later.”

When figuring out a direction for the coloring book, Zarchy and Harris wanted to focus on emerging and established artists alike, who make L.A.’s art scene what it is today. 

Choosing Angeleno-based artists to feature in the book was intentional, and so were the causes that the book supported. With Zarchy and Harris’s passion of tackling homelessness in L.A., they decided that 25% of the proceeds would go to the Midnight Mission, a homeless shelter and service provider for those in L.A. Being that Zarchy and Harris will not be profiting off of the book, the remainder of the book’s proceeds, 45%, will be donated to Art Share.

“We really thought that this book was an all-encompassing view of Los Angeles, and since that was the case, the fundraising had to [raise] money for these two really gigantic facets of Los Angeles culture, which is art and unfortunately, homelessness,” Zarchy said. 

Art Share Los Angeles is located in the Arts District, next door to Skid Row, an area that comprises .0001% of L.A. County’s land area yet has 3% of the county’s homeless population.

Being that the Arts District and Skid Row are neighboring areas, artists affected by homelessness would use their creative work as an outlet, painting and artistically cultivating the surrounding areas. 

Though beautiful, many new businesses took the area’s newfound beauty as an entrance for gentrification, pushing out smaller businesses and nonprofits such as Art Share, motivating Zarchy even further to create the coloring book. 

“I think that it’s about supporting the population that made this incredible part of the city what it is while also supporting those people who want to perpetuate that creation and art that is so hard to find in the big businesses that are moving in here,” Zarchy said. 

With that, and the sudden onset of the coronavirus, many businesses in the arts began to sink. Art Share Los Angeles has found ways to raise money with events such as its Home Share virtual performance series, where artists use Art Share’s space for Zoom livestreams, but that didn’t bring in enough funds like its pre-coronavirus operation had.   

While the proceeds from the book will help the organization, Toni Figueredo, Art Share’s gallery coordinator, hopes that the coloring book also engages and teaches audiences about L.A. and its many facets like homlessness. 

“We’re a nonprofit, genuinely fighting to stay alive,” Figueredo said. “So if you can have fun, color, interact, but also get to know that there are problems that you need to wake up about, that’s definitely a fundraiser we wanted to be part of whether it made us money or not.”

Finding artists to contribute to the coloring book was no small feat. Zarchy explained that after a slew of unsuccessful emails, she and Harris took to Instagram to find artists to feature in the book using its effective communication tool, direct messaging. Being sure to find artists who had a presence in L.A. and communicated issues that many Angelenos experience such as homelessness, racism and gentrification, the duo found 15 artists. 

Missing the bustling streets of L.A. and its murals, Zarchy wants the book to epitomize the feeling of seeing this art for the first time and understanding the real-time history of the city being made. So in addition to the artwork, the book includes interviews with the artists explaining what inspired their works. 

“We wanted to make an encapsulation so that people could feel like they were walking around [and] talking to the artists who painted [the art],” Zarchy said. “And understanding what motivated these works that really make L.A. what it is.”

Harris echoed the same sentiments, adding that what makes this book so different from other adult coloring books is the included narrative component and artists’ perspective. 

“What’s interesting is you’re really combining these two different components, which [are] the coloring pages and the art, and then the narrative component of ‘Why did the artist choose to create this art?’” Harris said. “It just makes it so much more interesting to be able to color in this coloring book because you actually know the reason behind it and the motivations, and then you get to make the piece your own further by coloring it.”

Zarchy hopes that art’s infamous pompous label can be diminished by the book’s promotion of art accessibility and affiliation with Art Share. 

“I hope that people become less afraid of art and that art becomes less of a pretentious realm than it has been because art does not just exist within galleries where you need to spend $20 to go visit,” Zarchy said. “Art doesn’t just exist within museums. It exists with so many people in this city. It exists on street walls, it exists in free galleries that are made just to expose people to art, like [Art Share].”

One of the artists featured in the book, Jeremy Novi, who is known best for his stenciled koi fish street art, has a dream of making safe spaces for queer people around L.A. These spaces would create a visual comfort for queer people. Zarchy wants readers to question the availability of these safe spaces for artists and non-artists alike.

“I want people to … walk around and think, ‘Is this a visual safe space?’” Zarchy said. “‘Is this city a visual safe space for everybody who lives here and everyone who inhabits it?’” 

One of the most important pages in the coloring book doesn’t actually have any art on it. The dedication page attributes the book to Cheyanne Sauter, Art Share’s executive director, and someone less expected, Zarchy’s mother. Zarchy lost her mother six years ago and hopes that the book illustrates the importance of her mother’s life on her own.  

“It makes me happy that such a wonderful soul’s name gets to be on this project that brings me so much joy and that she in a way gets to be part of this,” Zarchy said. 

“Snapshot: L.A. Artists” will be available Thursday and can be purchased at ArtShareLA.org, Amazon and Barnes and Noble.