The Santa Cruz Institute of Contemporary Arts orchestrated a new level of drumroll and spotlight on Santa Cruz downtown visual arts at the April First Friday Art Tour. It was a distinctly uptown feeling that brought hundreds of people downtown last Friday to graze and converse from gallery to gallery looking at and reputedly buying art, snacking and priming their glasses with gallery hospitality on a balmy spring evening.

I started at the new Dead Cow Gallery, a raw, clean, well-lit space carved out of the old administrative offices of the Tannery Arts Complex, showing intriguing drawings in “Emotional Landscapes” by Pauline Wood. Jaywalking to the Michaelangelo Gallery across lower River Street, it was delightful to see that gallery look so polished and the exhibition of “Animal Portraits” by Penny Brozda just spread the smile wider. The artist and entourage were dressed in formal evening wear, presided over by a well-turned-out elder gentleman in tuxedo and trimmings, making it all the more fun. Brozda’s paintings are lively and highly individual impressionistic portraits, full of appreciation for her subjects.

From the “NoWay” district North of Highway 1, the enterprising ICA provided a bus shuttle to several hubs downtown, but my party found it a short and colorful walk to the new art wing of Lulu Carpenter’s coffeehouse at the Octagon Gallery, exhibiting small photographs by the Great Morgani. The streets buzzed from there to Felix Kulpa and the other side of town, where the Hide Gallery showed lush portraits of Telopa, who used basically the same composition to achieve very different effect by changing the nuances of tone around the face and bosom of the young woman adored in his central images.

I made a return visit to The Attic after the tour. Here, recent woodblock prints by Bridget Henry are exhibited very simply. Her large-size, small-edition multi-impression prints are poetic and highly charged illustrations that use the weight of symbolism from mythology or tarot to spin mysteries. She uses bold and often opposing colors that vibrate against each other to deliver the maximum impact with limited colors and to activate viewers’ innate recognition that each small line is made by carving away what surrounds it.

“The Wind” is mounted on a panel, with a series of black/brown tree trunks marching across the horizon, rising from the grassy bristle of lines in orange and chartreuse against a background of brown. A wedge of blackbird sits on tree branches where jagged chartreuse wedges of leaves quiver against the rose-madder sky. In the foreground, a hunched man walks while the long hair on the top of his head whips in a black-brown frenzy.

The next First Friday Art Tour is May 4, when more galleries, more buses and a Museum of Art and History opening promise an even more rich art experience.

Maureen Davidson is a Sentinel columnist and arts writer. She can be reached at mo.Davidson@sbcglobal.net.