Art revelers drink beer while admiring Eamon Ore-Giron’s installation at the 18th Street Arts Center Gallery during the 3rd Annual Beer, Art & Music Festival (BAM Fest) on Saturday, October 6, 2012.

Bam Fest  celebrates the best of locally produced art and music in conjunction with a variety of delicious craft beers. The festival featured  35-plus breweries, 4 bands, 3 galleries, open artist studios, an artist market, and gourmet food trucks.

Known for being the first Craft Beer Festival in Santa Monica, this year’s attendance reached capacity with 1,500 atendees. Santa Monica resident and owner of Santa Monica Pizza Kitchen, Kaveh Karimi, says, “BAM Fest is probably my favorite event of the year. It brings a community together and truly helps a great cause.”

This year 18th Street teameded up with LA craft beer industry veteran Martin Svab (formerly of Stone Brewing Co. & Naja’s Place) to help facilitate the beer side of the festival. Participating craft breweries ranged from big to small, including the popular and larger Sierra Nevada Brewing and Ballast Point Brewing Company to the smaller but equally great Angel City, Monkish and Beachwood Brewing. From cool-fermented lagers to warm-fermented ales, the craft beer offerings at 18th Street’s Beer, Art and Music Festival offereded a range of styles for tasting enjoyment. For the beer connoisseur, this year BAM Fest showcased unique and unreleased beers on tap, including a rare Smog City barrel-aged beer. This year included a Duvel-Moortgat Brewery tent featuring a number of the Flemish family’s Belgian-style beers. And for those who was  not as fond of beer there was an area to sample some of Southern California’s finest wines as well as home brewed sodas by Pacific Gravity Home Brewers Club. Just as any artist painstakingly toils over each detail of a masterpiece, today’s craft brewer goes to great lengths to produce unique, award-winning works of art. With the marriage of beer, art and music, BAM Fest has brewed a one-of-a-kind fundraising event.

The music line up for BAM Fest was just as diverse as the beer samples. From the addictive rock & roll sounds rooted in rural blues, early country, and Appalachian folk music of “The Americans,” to the sultry vocals, feminist chicana lyrics and powerful Japanese Taiko drums of “Lysa Flores and East L.A. Taiko” the featured music at 18th Street’s festival made the attendees groove. The Los Angeles-based trio, “American Bloomers,” is founded on authentic pop music that is steeped in classic rock and folk harmonies, while “The Dustbowl Revival” mix a spicy roots cocktail with their dance-inducing live sets that merge old school bluegrass, swamp-gospel, jug-band, jump blues and the hot swing of the 1930's. Between band sets, artist and DJ, “Freshair”  fused an array of musical styles and  kept the crowd jamming.’

BAM Fest attendees also got the special opportunity to explore a dynamic installation of new work by 18th Street’s Lab Artist, Eamon Ore-Giron. Incorporating sculpture, video, painting, music and performance Ore-Giron references the alternate guitar tuning scale E-B-G-D-B-G unique to the Central Andes, by likening this indigenous Spanish musical scale with the merger of folk, pop, historical and conceptual references throughout his interdisciplinary artworks. Themes of tourism, revolution, design, and public sculpture are at play in the works, while formal questions about the relationship between functional sculpture and introspective form are explored. In addition, artworks are available for purchase at an artist marketplace organized by past 18th Street Artist Fellow, Ana Guajardo, and the resident artists who live, work and create daily at 18th Street open their studios for attendees to experience works in progress.

The bold and flavorful authentic Mexican dishes by the Border Grill Truck or the sublime banh mi and Vietnamese tacos from the Nom Nom Truck were featured at the event. The  half-pound “maneater” sized burger from Baby’s Badass Burgers or a family-farmed pork bratwurst or spicy “hot” dog with signature Devil Sauce from Let’s Be Frank Was a big hit.  Fresh Brothers Pizza offered complimentary pizza samples.

18th Street Arts Center’s mission is to provoke public dialogue through contemporary art making. We value art-making as an essential component of a vibrant, just and healthy society. 18th Street provides a hub for contemporary art through two program areas: 1) A three-tiered Residency Program that fosters inter-cultural collaboration and dialogue and 2) A Public Events and Presenting Program that focuses on engaging the public and revealing the art-making process through exhibitions, events, talks, publications and other opportunities. Our Residency Program supports artists in three ways: Short-term residencies, for national and international visiting artists who live at 18th Street for 1-6 months; Medium-term residencies, of 3 years to advance California artists’ careers; and Long-term residencies that mentor Californian artists and ‘anchor’ organizations.