Amy Tipton is nothing if not resourceful. In 2013, shortly after opening her now-shuttered Belltown boutique Sassafras, she decided to resurrect the neighborhood’s monthly art walk, which had fizzled after Roq La Rue Gallery moved south to Pioneer Square.

“I found an old map of the locations that used to participate, then reached out to the owner of the Facebook page — he was living in South Dakota at the time — and transferred ownership over to me,” Tipton says. “We started with five locations. It was me walking around to businesses asking for $20 so we could make posters.”

Twelve years later, the Belltown Art Walk has grown to include nearly 30 participants in the blocks between Broad and Union streets. For Tipton, a former Microsoft employee who has lived in the neighborhood for years, bringing back the monthly event (which happens every second Friday) was a way to support local artists and enrich the community. “I love to see the pure joy on people’s faces, she says. “It’s free, and people bring their kids and their dogs. There is this feeling that people can come and be themselves.”

In addition to spearheading Belltown Art Walk, Tipton operates Slip Gallery on First and Bell, which focuses on providing emerging artists with opportunities to show their work. An adjacent storefront, delightfully named Slide, allows Tipton’s guest curators to mount two shows simultaneously while creating cross-pollination between the two spaces. In off hours, Tipton opens the gallery up for workshops, everything from figure drawing to self-defense.

“I don’t think about it as my gallery,” she says, noting that she’s been able to keep costs low due to grants, and she doesn’t take any commissions off of sales — a rare approach in the art world. “I think about it as our gallery — the artists and the community.”

Recently, Tipton helped organize the Downtown Seattle Art Walk, focused on galleries and studios in the city’s core, and the Central District Art Walk, which now includes a dozen stops. And who better to consult than someone who has seen success in getting people out and involved in Seattle’s creative scene for more than a decade?

“Before the pandemic, we had maybe 40 or 50 people at art walk, and now we’re looking at 200 to 300,” Tipton says. “We’ve been doing this consistently for 12 years straight. Even when it was 18 degrees in January, people still came.”