San Jose will be losing a longstanding music venue with a reputation for giving budding local artists audience exposure.
The Art Boutiki will close at the end of December after 16 years of providing an eclectic space for artists of all genres and creating a community for music lovers in San Jose. The music venue also doubles as a shop that features graphic novels, a large selection of Tiki items and more. With the loss of Art Boutiki, music venue offerings will be whittled down to a few places, including The Caravan Lounge, The Ritz, SJZ Break Room and the soon to open Pete Be Center.
Attendance at the Art Boutiki has been down 25% from last year, and it hasn’t been profitable since the pandemic, owner Dan Vado said.
“We’re dying a slow death here, and there was no pathway to break even,” Vado told San José Spotlight. “I’ve been working without a paycheck since COVID.”
Art Boutiki is a rare San Jose venue, where budding artists from all music genres are invited to perform. Photo by Joyce Chu.
Alexandra Urbanowski, CEO of SVCreates and San José Spotlight columnist, said Art Boutiki’s closure is devastating for the city’s music scene, where the all-ages venue served as an incubator for local talent.
“Losing this platform deepens a significant gap in our music scene and reinforces the sentiment that local musicians and bands must leave the city to build careers,” Urbanowski told San José Spotlight. “Art Boutiki wasn’t just a venue, it was a community lifeline. Its absence will be felt for years to come.”
The Art Boutiki started in 2009 in what Vado describes as “an accident.”
Prior to the music venue, Vado was running a graphic novel publishing business. When the recession hit in 2008, Vado decided to strip some of the book offerings and looked at downsizing into another building. But the landlord wanted him to stay and offered a deal. With the empty space, Vado turned the warehouse into a performance area and gallery — and Art Boutiki was born.
A few years later, it moved into another building at 44 Race St. From the start, Vado’s vision has been to provide a quality venue for young artists to have a platform, with a superb sound system and lighting. The venue was open to all ages and musicians of all backgrounds, welcoming jazz artists, indie, pop, punk, metal and more. It was working its way up to having five shows a week, and then the pandemic hit.
Vado thought he would bounce back after the pandemic waned, but things only got harder as costs increased and sales decreased. The jazz crowd migrated to the Break Room when it opened in 2021, trickling more business out of the Art Boutiki.
Now Art Boutiki only offers shows two to three nights a week.
“I thought people would come out (and) people didn’t,” Vado said. “It has showed me that there is no real support for this particular place. We made it into a nice place. My belief was always, as we support the local musicians who came here, that the work that they put into their music would be equaled by the work that we put into the presentation.”
Kevin Ryan, guitarist and vocalist for Family Obligation, played his first big show on Art Boutiki’s stage three years ago.
He said there’s no other venue like it in San Jose — The Ritz is for mainstream artists, The Break Room is exclusively for jazz and The Caravan Lounge is primarily a bar. Without Vado giving his band a chance, he wouldn’t have been able to have a platform.
“It’s always so much fun to play there,” Ryan told San José Spotlight. “Everybody’s always so nice. It just feels like home. To lose it, it’s going to be a gut punch.”
Without the Art Boutiki, artists like him will have less opportunities to live out their dreams, Ryan said. San Jose will also lose an important third space for people to connect and find community.
“Dan is one of the few people that’s willing to give people a chance,” Ryan said. “It’ll be a really big impact on the music culture of the South Bay.”
At age 66, Vado is not sure what he’s going to do next after he closes the venue he poured his life into. But he wants to end the year with a bang by throwing a New Year’s Eve party where he will perform some songs.
“It just feels bad, (but) I think there’s a part of me that is happy to just have some resolution and to move on,” Vado said. “I’ll be going out on a high note.”
Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyces_speaks on X.