 I'm Ron Nelson. I'm the executive director here at the Long Beach Museum of Art. When I first heard of Pow Wow and I know many people have, I knew that it had happened in Hawaii. I knew that it was happening in Hong Kong. So I wanted to be boots in the ground. I really worked from an intuitive level, but I also really want to see an artist in work and I want to see what that's about. And I went and within minutes I was just amazed. So I knew that this needs to come to Long Beach. I think art is just freedom of expression. It's sort of unbridled creativity. Art is what the artist wants to do. My name is John Hall. I'm the lead director for Pow Wow Long Beach. I've been involved with Pow Wow for about three or four years now. I got involved mostly because I have a lot of friends who are artists who participated in Pow Wow and they told me it was really awesome and that I should check it out. One of the best things in my mind about Pow Wow Long Beach is how much it represents a community project. Pow Wow is a bunch of people who basically drop everything that they're doing and focus on large scale public art for a couple of weeks. There are benefits to public art. You get into the gentrification conversation pretty quickly, but it does have some really positive impact on the neighborhood. One of the only negative feedback we got from the community last year was that they would like to see more local participation. Alright, we'll start. I'm Gary Musgrave. And I'm Jeff McMillan. We're the Dracula's from Long Beach. Long Beach, California. We had these little sketches that we were working on and the one that they selected, they were like, okay, let's go to town on this. And to see it from like a small, you know, maybe eight and a half by eleven size sketch and then to bring it up to this scale is it's really... I mean, it's beautifying the city. Yeah, totally. I mean, when I see the murals, especially I guess where we're coming from in terms of inspiration, I really feel like it's like a fond memory of a little golden book or something like that, like a children's book or something where I want to go see it. It's beautifying and at the same time it's inclusive. Everybody can come out and enjoy that. Yeah, it becomes hotspots for the city where people come here like, let's go check out the murals and, God, there's, you know, twenty to thirty of them, you know. And it's cool to, you know, mark off your little checklist like I saw that one, I saw this one. It becomes almost like a scavenger hunt because some are more hidden than others. Over the years, through powwows coming back and insisting on doing really rad creative work, people have really been drawn to the neighborhood and it's transformed in a big, big way. It's like a marathon, right? Yeah, yeah. It's like you wanted to do it. You enjoyed doing it when you did it. But then there's the aftermath of like, especially when you don't do marathons. You have like the post-Project Blues. They want to show this art within their community and that's the kind of transformation I think that public art can have. And it can have for a society and it can have for any particular community. You're like, oh, I'm so tired and beat up and just like, but man, I would do it again.