A new online arts directory started Monday at showup.com gives Tucson its first comprehensive Internet listings controlled by the arts community.
For people looking for a show, showup.com lists what’s going on in theaters, music venues, museums and art galleries around town, and people can buy tickets at the site.
One click can take shoppers to a specific organization’s ticket site for regular tickers or to showup.com‘s Ticket Marketplace.
“We make the decision of what tickets go up there (at the marketplace),” said Kevin Moore, managing director at Arizona Theatre Co.
The marketplace mostly carries last-day tickets that were not sold or tickets that were returned. They typically are discounted, said Matt Lehrman, executive director of Alliance for Audience, which started showup.com in Phoenix in 2004 and added a dedicated section for Tucson.
Ticket Marketplace has attracted theater newcomers as well as theater veterans expanding their entertainment options, Lehrman said.
People from dozens of arts organizations showed up for the site launch event at the Tucson Museum of Art, playing right into Lehrman’s selling point that showup.com in Phoenix led to arts organizations getting to know each other and collaborating more to build audiences – the key objective for the arts community, Lehrman said.
Arts and cultural organizations can e-mail listings and promotional art to events@showup.com to have them posted at the site.
The Metropolitan Tucson Convention & Visitors Bureau provided $50,000 to begin and operate the Web site for its first year. The bureau collaborated with the Tucson Pima Arts Council, which listed an online directory as the first priority for the Pima Cultural Plan.