Visitors Get a Lift From Tour of Downtown Artists Loft District

Mary Lou Ynda specializes in the broken.

Dolls without arms, a tiny soldier without a torso, umbrella-shaped decorations that fell off wind chimes. In her downtown loft, the artist keeps drawers of twisted metal shards.

“If you looked at it on the street, you’d probably kick it aside,” Ynda said, pulling out a rusted piece of coil.

On one table stand are nine headless dolls in a row, propped against a wall, arms outstretched, sweet and sad in frothy long party dresses, like girls at a quinceanera out of a Stephen King novel.

“I hauled them out of a dumpster,” said Ynda, who uses the bits and pieces as subjects for collages and paintings. “I’m a found-object artist.”

On Saturday, Ynda, who is 64 but looks 50 and wore her reddish-purple hair in messy braids, was something of a found object herself.

About 60 downtown artists opened their lofts to the public to offer a glimpse of their studios and living spaces. Ynda was one of several artists on Traction Avenue, which was roughly the center of the Open Studio Art Tour.

In the midst of a seemingly desolate warehouse district, Traction is one of those tricky downtown streets you discover by accident but can never find on purpose. City Hall and downtown high-rises loom over the district.

Saturday’s event, sponsored by the Los Angeles River Artists and Business Assn., provided maps and brochures at Bloom’s General Store at Traction and Hewitt Street. Bloom’s, which truly is a general store to its artist clientele, sells toothpaste, rents videos and displays local artworks.

Some visitors were fans of the downtown art scene, but Terry Day, an Alhambra resident, stumbled upon the tour when he got lost leaving a Central Avenue eatery after lunch.

“I got turned around and suddenly I’m like a kid in Disneyland,” said Day, wandering through one loft. “To see the way artists have fixed these up is incredible.”

Barely a mile east of City Hall, the artists loft district has risen and faded and begun to rise again as a landmark. In the 1980s the area was packed with art galleries, most of which moved out in the 1990s to Bergamot Station in Santa Monica.

“The point is to get the neighborhood to pull together,” said event coordinator Katie McArthy, who is not even an artist. “This not only gives artists a chance to show off their work but to raise their profile.”

On Saturday, visitors could find all manner of painting and sculpture, even jewelry, for sale--though selling was not necessarily what the artists or the spectators expected.

“Not everybody wants something like this in their living room,” said artist Richard Bartlebaugh, 49, scrutinizing his “Manna”--the innards of an old television set atop a stack of boxes of 1963 military survival rations.

“I found them in the basement of a school,” he said of the rations. “I had a friend who was a true starving artist, and I gave him a box. He actually opened it and ate the crackers.”