Meet Matt Valerio of Long Beach

Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt Valerio

Matt, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My name is Matt Valerio (sometimes referred to as Matt Bomarr, due to my past “music career”). I’m based in Long Beach.

I grew up in New Hampshire, which was a great place to grow up, but as I started to develop different interests in my teen years in regards to the arts (film, music, visual art), it quickly became apparent that New Hampshire was not the ideal place for me to flourish. I needed to branch out. Fortunately, I had a couple of like-minded friends who felt the same way, and we had spent a good chunk of our teens playing together in bands that confused the locals. After high school, we formed a weirdo experimental electronic/underground hip hop group called Restiform Bodies and got the attention of a Bay Area art and music collective called anticon. We toured the world, put out records, and made a lot of art. After about 10 years in the Bay, after many other members of the collective had relocated, I relocated as well, with my future wife, moving from San Francisco back to the East Coast, this time living in New York’s East Village. We lived there for about 4 years, had a kid, and made the decision to move back to California, this time Southern California. When we moved back here, I was having a very hard time finding art shows and quality art galleries. I used to spend a lot of my free time in NYC planning out gallery-hopping days, where I could walk or take the train to multiple galleries throughout the day at a leisurely pace. It was so easy to do this in the city, and I was so inspired all the time. I loved having such easy access to so much great art. I got really frustrated when we moved here and the art was much harder to find. Most of the art that I did find, it was just people biting Basquiat or Warhol, or having the same old pop culture icons in their art (Biggie, Marilyn Monroe, just celebrity-dominant art). It wasn’t original, and it was very frustrating. I was like “Is this what LA art is all about?” Fortunately, I made it a point to start to really seek out local galleries, and just started following their Instagram pages and looking for art I liked. After a bit, I had the idea to help other folks new to the area (and the LA county locals, for that matter) find good art. I put together the Art Openings LA Instagram account. It was mainly serving as a public repository of all the shows that I’d personally like to attend, and if people wanted to follow it, great. If not, it would at least help me remember which shows I wanted to check out. I started following the artists and galleries whose stuff I liked, and started posting about their shows and tagging them. As a result, they started reposting my posts to their followers, and people started to notice that my account was a helpful resource. I’m proud of the fact that at this point (as I near 10 years of running this account as a hobby), I’ve amassed over 10k followers, completely organically. Sure, the average of 1k followers per year doesn’t sound like a lot, but more than half of those follows have occurred over the past 2 years or so, so that feels nice. It takes up a lot of my time, but I love it. It’s turned into a rewarding little hobby. I love interacting with the artists and galleries, and I love to curate things and be a trusted, reliable source for good art. Some of my favorite artists have started following the account, which always makes me smile. To be honest though, living down in Long Beach, and being fairly introverted, I don’t make it out to most of the openings I post about, but I often will make it a point to see the shows at some point during regular gallery hours when it’s quieter and there’s more space to walk around and see the art. I do miss being able to hit a handful of galleries in one day, on foot, and now I have to make an entire day out of it if there’s art I want to see, driving from one end of town to the next, but I do my best to plan art days for myself, and sometimes drag my wife and 10 year old daughter with me when it’s something I think they’d like as well.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Honestly, there haven’t been many challenges. Early on, as I was growing the account, I was unsure of whether or not the time I was putting into it was worthwhile, as initially, it did take a while to grow, and interaction/engagement was low for a bit, but then I started getting fairly frequent feedback, which was pretty encouraging.

I think one of the biggest challenges now is the amount of time I spent putting together the posts, vetting the submissions, scheduling the posts, etc. Sometimes, I do wish I could turn it into a job, since I love doing it so much, and I’m recently unemployed, but then again…I’m not too business-savvy, and I think a big part of the appeal of the account is that it’s a free, curated resource, done purely out of the love for the art. I’ve struggled to figure out a way to monetize it, even just a little bit, but that being said, it’s not a dealbreaker. At this point, I’ll continue to do it out of love (but if anyone has any suggestions, let me know!)

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I’ve acted as a project manager for creative agencies and film companies for quite a while. I worked at a startup in Venice when we first moved back to California. It was called RYOT, and we made a lot of virtual reality documentary films, eventually getting into augmented reality storytelling as well. It was great, because it merged my love of technology, art, and music. I worked there for a little over 8 years. I handled music supervision/licensing for a few of our films, including some that premiered at film festivals like Sundance and the TriBeCa Film Festival. I miss doing that kind of work, where I can spend my days interacting with creatives and tech nerds.

Also, during my early days at RYOT, I helped produce a web series called Brick By Brick, where we would have street artists come into our office and create their art on a cinder block. They’d be interviewed during this process, and it was fun to see what people who usually do large scale murals and whatnot were able to do on such a small “canvas”. Doing this actually helped me make some connections with some artists in the area as well, while I was hungry to find the quality art. Definitely a great stepping stone in my process of finding art I was interested in. You can find the episodes of this series on YouTube if you search for Brick By Brick RYOT.

Before that, when I was growing up, I spent a lot of time working in record stores, record labels, music distributors, radio stations, etc. I have a lot of passion for that industry, but it’s changed so much over the years, and it breaks my heart that so many artists can no longer rely on music as their livelihood.

When I was involved with the anticon. collective, I made a lot of art. Played a lot of live shows, toured the world, recorded a lot of music, did some remixes for some fairly well-known bands, and made a lot of visual art. I dabbled in video art for a bit, where I put together found /obscure video collages edited to my own music and debuted those at shows, including at SXSW and even in Berlin. These days, I spend a lot of my time making dumb one-off t-shirts for myself when I get an idea of something that usually only I will like. I’ve done a few weird coffee table books as well, but the number of random artistic hobbies I have is kind of ridiculous and there are too many to name here.

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
In my life….good luck has played a huge part. The fact that the anticon. label (which was a label my friends and I were absolutely obsessed with as we were making music in NH) expressed interest in what we were doing and invited us to move from NH to Oakland so we could create art and they would put us on tour and put out our music was one of the luckiest moments to ever happen to me. It completely shaped the trajectory of my life. I can’t imagine what would have happened had we stayed in NH. I’d be in a very different place right now, not just geographically. Everything that has happened since that 3,000 mile move, all the connections I’ve made, meeting my wife, becoming a father, it’s all a direct result of that move, so I consider myself very lucky.

In regards to the Art Openings LA account, sure…I definitely consider myself lucky. I’m lucky that my taste in art is something that people trust and something that resonates with people.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.bomarrblog.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/artopenings.la
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/artopenings.la
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-bomarr-valerio/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/bomarr
• Other: www.mattvalerio.com (my portfolio site, under construction)

Image Credits
the only one that needs credit is the one of me in front of the colorful wall. It was taken outside the Other Art Fair in Santa Monica in 2019 by my wife, Erin Brown.