The lounge was roaring with talk. The women were hot, if few and far between. And, on the floor of Neumo’s Crystal Ball Reading Room, Mon Frere’s 21-year-old guitarist Kyle Swisher was hammering away to the vocals of 19-year-old Noela Johnston.

The scene was typical for the Capitol Hill nightclub, except for two things. It was a special event — The Stranger’s annual “Big Shot” showcase of bands. And, thanks to the event's sponsor — Art Patch, a new Seattle nonprofit that’s taking on tobacco and its role in the arts community — the event was totally smokeless.

No ashtrays. No butts. No stink.

It was the first event of its kind for Art Patch, a feisty little organization that’s turning the tables on cigarette makers such as Lucky Strike, which infiltrated the Seattle scene last year by funding Big Shot, the Genius Awards, the Center on Contemporary Arts, and Consolidated Works.

In return for the money, the venues passed out Lucky coasters, napkins, and matchbooks — a corporate form of guerilla marketing specifically targeting the young. In response, Art Patch’s March 4 event at Neumo’s sported buttons, napkins and posters with its anti-smoking “brand” — an image, more or less, of two cigarettes bent in the shape of an X.

Despite signs noting it was a “Smoke-Free Event,” Neumo’s packed in 1,200 people. Those who had to smoke simply stepped outside.

“That was a powerful demonstration that I’m no less cool or hip smoking outside,” says Roger Valdez, founder of Art Patch and manager of the Tobacco Prevention Program of Public Health - Seattle King County. “By showing that to people, we probably made more in-roads than saying smoking is bad, it’s going to kill you.”

That, Valdez says, is what Art Patch is trying to do: demonstrate that people will respond better to anti-smoking efforts that come to them and support their lifestyle than to the stern messages typical today in public health educational campaigns.

The idea, Valdez says, is a paradigm shift for Public Health, which funds Valdez’s 14-person tobacco prevention unit through tobacco settlement monies.

Last May, after news broke in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on the extent of Lucky’s local arts funding, Valdez decided to fight back. He hired a group of design students from Cornish College to develop a counter campaign that would expose tobacco’s marketing to artists and youth — and point out how starved Seattle’s younger arts groups are for funding.

“If you don’t fund [the arts] and everything is the Cheesecake Factory or McDonald’s, is that what we want? No, we want to see a crazy band at a little venue we can walk to without being hit with a bunch of Lucky Strike promotions.”

“I want people to make a connection between art and health,” Valdez says. “I want people to grasp the idea that a healthy community supports its arts community.”

So far, Public Health has funded about $47,000 in projects, including $20,000 for the Art Patch logo and materials (such as fake parking tickets that promote the group’s website — http://www.artpatch.org/). Earlier this month, Art Patch gave $2,000 to Seattle’s Theatre Babylon so it could move to a new location — rescuing its current production (“Influence”) from a Fire Department shutdown at Union Garage.

In December, the group filed papers to become its own nonprofit organization led by Don Hudgins — who was, ironically , the director of CoCA during last spring’s “Art Pack” show, a series of miniature artworks that Lucky Strike commissioned to give away in packs of cigarettes.

Hudgins is currently working on “Cartoonists Take Up Smoking,” a set of 300 editorial cartoons ­ including works by the P-I’s David Horsey — that will open April 7 at Seattle’s Artworks Gallery.

Such projects will not compete with other arts groups for funding, Hudgins says. Rather, Art Patch and its five-member board — led by Megan Kennedy, wellness program director at Cornish College — plan to find new funding sources, probably in the health industry.

A health maintenance organization, for instance, might find it useful to market itself at Patch events, Hudgins says.

“For the price of one good-sized billboard, you could fund five small arts organizations in Seattle for a year,” Hudgins says — along with getting a logo in front of a year’s worth of eyeballs.

“The billboards are here today and gone tomorrow,” Hudgins says, “but events in the arts community are legend.”

Art Patch presents “Cartoonists Take Up Smoking,” a traveling exhibit of more than 300 editorial cartoons lampooning smoking and tobacco industry issues, April 7-30 at Artworks Gallery, 1914 Fourth Ave., Seattle. Opening reception April 7 with a special reception April 22 for curator Alan Blum. Both free, 7-10 p.m. Info: www.artpatch.org.


The great Seattle smoke-out: Artist Jamey Baumgardt and Art Patch director Don Hudgins before Baumgardt’s parodies of cigarette packs. Photo by Mark Sullo