‘Musical meltdown moments’ : Art of Music Experience at O.C. Fair prompts visceral reactions
Before you rock your stomach with all manner of fried food, the Art of Music Experience could make for an entertaining warm-up act at the Orange County Fair.
Those who have stumbled upon the exhibit, making its debut inside the Huntington Beach building at the fair, have been transported into a concertgoer’s paradise.
Upon entering, visitors see a room full of neon signs representing many of the hotshots in music. They know the names, and in many cases, they know the faces. The imagery associated with the music is what the showcase was designed to draw attention to.
A wide variety of periods and genres of music, from Barbra Streisand and the Beatles to Tupac Shakur and Linkin Park, can be found displayed throughout the building. Artist likenesses and larger-than-life reproductions of album covers fill the halls.
Joy Feuer, the co-founder and curator of the exhibit, said future plans for the exhibit will be announced at a later date.
“The reason we love this model is we wanted the collection to be seen,” Feuer said. “This is all about its second life. These are the original works that hung in all these iconic locations from the late 1980s to about the mid-2000s. They haven’t been seen until now, so they’re being seen for the first time at the Orange County Fair.
“We love that it’s part of the fair admission, so people who come to the fair, they can come in and out of the exhibit multiple times while they’re visiting the fair. They come back again. We love it because it’s inclusive. It’s all family, it’s all ages. We’re watching people have what I love to call musical meltdown moments almost every corner of the show.”
As one works through the maze, they also recognize various industry elements incorporated into the creation of the exhibit. Stacks of instrument cases are lying about, and stage lighting comes down from the ceiling, shining colorful and creative designs on the floor while music plays in the background.
Feuer, who worked in the music industry for 17 years with EMI Music and Capitol Records, had hoped to create an experience that would lead to music lovers sharing their own stories. Those elements are part of that, but it also places an emphasis on the relationships of the musical artists and those who created the visual gateway between their soulful songs and the public.
“The way that we put the framework of this collection together was to focus on the backstory, the stories about the album cover art, the creators of the album cover art,” Feuer said. “It’s about the art directors, the graphic designers, the illustrators, the photographers, people that don’t always get the limelight in the wake of these iconic covers, but they were integral to creating them.
“Oftentimes band members are very involved in creating their art. Some are even involved in creating the font that’s on an album cover, so we really want to share that intersection.”
Interactive experiences can be found throughout the Art of Music Experience. Music lovers can rank their top 10 album covers, have caricature portraits created, and a face painting and glitter station can get them ready for the show.
There are documentary videos playing in a couple of corners. There is also a station where the oversized album covers are being created in real time. Scotty Roller, a graphic artist and illustrator and the founder of 714 Creative, finished an 8-foot square reproduction of the Foo Fighters’ “But Here We Are” album cover on Thursday. The band’s 11th studio album was just released in June.
An Orange County native who graduated from Valencia High in 1989, Roller said his start was creating a flier for a house party that a punk rock band was playing at. For as big as the music industry is, he said it acts like a small community. Everyone knows everybody.
Intermittently, he would receive requests for work based on his past creations. About 15 years ago, he said he threw himself fully into creating gig posters, which led to album covers, T-shirt designs, backdrops and more.
“There are people, young and old, that didn’t realize what went into creating not only the covers themselves, but then the advertising aspect of recreating those covers and painting them in such a large scale so that they could help promote and sell those records once they were made,” Roller said. “Once they see me and the other three artists painting and what it actually takes, then they get a whole new appreciation for what the process was, what it is, and it makes them look at it different.”
Rand Foster, the owner of Fingerprints Music in Long Beach, said he had a longstanding working relationship with Feuer. They would collaborate on promotional events when Feuer worked on the marketing side of the music industry.
When the chance came up to have a pop-up store inside the exhibit, Foster was uncertain if it would be successful. In what has acted as the perfect storm, the environment has proved stimulating for music collectors. Foster has been pleasantly surprised, referring to it as an “oasis” from traditional fair offerings.
“In my mind, I was like, ‘I don’t know. Are people going to want to carry records around at the fair?’ Foster said. “It’s a lot of activity, it’s a lot of hot, it’s a lot of bumping into things. I was like, ‘I just don’t know that that’s the best environment to have a fairly expensive bag of records under your arm.’ We kind of came into it feeling like, ‘Well, it will be a good showcase for the store. We can show people what we have, and it will be kind of [a] promotion.’
“The first day we were here, we realized that one of the vendors who sells little air-conditioning towers gives you a free dolly with purchase, and we saw people pushing around air conditioners. I was like, ‘Oh, they’re going to buy records.’”
Foster filled the pop-up shop with vinyl records. Featured among the selections was the music of Taylor Swift, whose Eras Tour has dominated headlines in the music and entertainment world this summer.
“Taylor moves the needle, and she has completely energized an entirely different part of the consumer base,” Foster said, explaining that Swift is driving a revival for CDs. “... We were teenage kids hanging out in a record store, and I know that feeling of that kid coming in going, ‘Oh, I hope they have Taylor Swift.’ I know that feeling. I certainly want to make sure that we’re a place for that.”
All the latest on Orange County from Orange County.
Get our free TimesOC newsletter.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Daily Pilot.
