Through Sherman Way

We used to flip a plastic trash can lid upside down, sit inside it, and push each other down the hill. It was a moderately steep residential street. Burning plastic under our legs. No supervision. Just gravity and asphalt.

From my house you could just see more houses. Stucco and driveways repeating themselves block after block. I grew up across from an elementary school, and that campus was my entire geography. As a kid, I played handball against its walls and skated in the parking lot. As a teenager, I snuck out climb the roof, and watch the streetlights hum over rooftops that all looked the same. One afternoon my dog escaped and barked outside my classroom door. Home and public space overlapped.

“Biking distance” in the Valley meant something different than it did elsewhere. It meant crossing major thoroughfares. It meant weaving through dense traffic. It meant Sherman Way.

I was never interested in the mall version of the Valley. The fluorescent caricature exported in the 1980s — the Valley Girl as shorthand for superficial suburbia. You couldn’t escape the strip malls. The malls were a center point. It structured the map whether you liked it or not. But instead of going inside, we drifted to the abandoned mini golf course behind it.

We sat on cracked concrete where the fake waterfalls no longer ran. We climbed over barriers that were meant to keep us out. We made something out of the margins of what was built for consumption. The mall was there. We just chose the edges. We were inventive and restless.

Long before subdivisions and arterial roads, this land was home to the Tongva and Fernandeño Tataviam peoples. It was a network of thriving villages connected through seasonal waterways, oak woodlands, and trade routes that tied the region into a broader Southern California system.

In 1797, Spain established Mission San Fernando Rey de España, reorganizing the land under colonial agriculture. It later shifted through the Mexican ranch era into American private ownership. In the early 20th century, the Los Angeles Aqueduct enabled annexation; access to water bound the Valley to the growing city of LA. After World War II, housing policy, freeways, and aerospace industry expansion transformed it into one of the nation’s largest suburban regions- planned primarily for residence and movement, not congregation. Places built this way do not automatically generate visibility. They generate neighborhoods.

Growing up, I didn’t know this history as deeply. I knew that when people wanted to participate in something visible and electric, they went “over the hill.” In the early 2000s, when I started making art, that pattern became impossible to ignore. In 2008, Addy and I went to a warehouse show in LA where I exhibited work and friends’ bands were playing. At some point we looked around and realized how many of us were from the Valley — the musicians, the organizers, the audience. We had all traveled away from home to be part of something that didn’t seem to exist where we lived. But it did.

The San Fernando Valley holds nearly two million residents. Entire neighborhoods here are larger than some American cities. And yet, we introduce ourselves to non-Angelenos as “LA-based.” Rarely “San Fernando Valley.” Over the last 20 years of doing this work, I’ve had the privilege of stepping back far enough to understand that this is not about a lack of talent. It’s about structure.

Art in the Valley is not absent. It’s decentralized.

It’s in garages and backyards. In storage units where bands rehearse. In immigrant households layering tradition and adaptation. It doesn’t announce itself through tightly packed arts corridors because the region wasn’t designed for clustering in that way. It’s dispersed and in the margins.

Funding models often favor compact districts with clear boundaries. Cultural tourism follows walkable nodes and transit lines. Investment compounds where visibility already exists. The Valley’s scale and layout operate differently. Our neighborhoods are expansive. Our corridors are long. Movement here has historically depended on cars and distance.

That doesn’t make the region culturally empty. It makes it harder to see. As a teenager riding through Sherman Way traffic, I felt like we were constantly searching for something to plug into. Now I understand that feeling differently.

If artists left to build careers elsewhere, it’s because recognition accumulated in other parts of the city. “Los Angeles” carried more weight than “San Fernando Valley,” because cultural capital tends to gather where institutions, media, and philanthropy are already concentrated. For years, I watched artists from the Valley cross the hill for opportunity, for visibility, for legitimacy. I did it myself. That migration made sense. The infrastructure we needed existed there.

But the landscape is shifting. As the city grows more expensive and centralized districts become less accessible, more artists are staying in- or returning to- the Valley. Not as a fallback. As a practical and creative choice.

This is the moment that matters. The ingenuity has always been here. What hasn’t always been here are the systems that allow it to anchor.

The work now is not to rebrand the Valley or compete with downtown. It is to build connective tissue for what already exists- across long corridors, across neighborhoods that function like small cities, across communities that have been making culture without formal scaffolding for decades.

I grew up riding through traffic looking for somewhere to belong. Now I’m committed to helping build the kind of infrastructure that makes belonging visible- here.

If this is a moment of possibility, then clarity matters. A meaningful cultural presence in the San Fernando Valley will not emerge organically from momentum alone. It requires deliberate structure:

1. Permanent, artist-controlled space. Short-term pop-ups generate energy. Long-term real estate builds ecosystems. The Valley needs secured cultural hubs: owned or protected spaces where artists can work, exhibit, gather, and remain without displacement cycles resetting progress every five years.

2. Distributed infrastructure, not one arts district. Because the Valley is geographically expansive, tt requires multiple nodes connected through programming, transportation partnerships, and coordinated calendars — a network rather than a nucleus.

3. Funding models that recognize scale. Traditional grant frameworks favor compact, walkable districts. Valley-based cultural investment must account for our distance, car-dependency, and decentralized visibility. Metrics should include regional reach, school-based engagement, and corridor-based public art — not just foot traffic density.

4. Professional pathways that anchor artists locally. Residencies, apprenticeships, public art commissions, teaching opportunities, and paid administrative roles must exist here. When artists can build full careers in the Valley, cultural capital compounds locally.

5. Civic alignment that treats culture as infrastructure.Public art, creative workforce development, and artist-led programming should be integrated into economic development plans, transit corridors, and neighborhood revitalization strategies. Culture should not be an afterthought added once construction is complete; it should shape planning from the beginning.

6. A shared narrative.Visibility compounds where identity is claimed. The Valley needs artists, institutions, and residents who name where they are. Not as a subdivision of somewhere else, but as a cultural region in its own right.

7. Regional recognition proportional to reality.The San Fernando Valley is larger in square miles than the rest of the City of Los Angeles and holds roughly half of its population. It is not peripheral geography. It is half the city.

As Los Angeles prepares for the World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, systems are being built to move visitors through venue corridors and into surrounding neighborhoods. Sepulveda Basin will host events. It sits at the 405 gateway at the threshold between the Valley and the rest of the city.

If the Valley is treated only as a venue site or pass-through zone, the pattern repeats.

If it is recognized as a co-equal cultural region with mapped arts destinations, coordinated programming, and investment along transit corridors, the moment becomes catalytic. Otherwise, we are left with hundreds of thousands of displaced locals who make up over 2 million visits to the Sepulveda Basin per year.

Visibility follows infrastructure. Infrastructure follows recognition. The Valley must be planned as part of the whole, not adjacent to it.

None of this is theoretical. It is structural.

The Valley does not lack creativity. It lacks alignment, permanence, and reinforcement.

And those are solvable problems.