I don’t know artist and musician Amber Hehl very well, but she recently shared a story that struck me as quintessentially Amber Hehl.

Some kids were trying to teach her a viral TikTok dance, and she went, in her words, “hog wild.”

“And they’re laughing at me like, ‘Why are you doing it like that?’ But I was doing it like that on purpose,” Hehl said. “Because the point of dance is to move the body. It helps your lymphatic system. It’s a primal urge. It’s not a trend.”

Whether she’s making art, dancing or living, Hehl moves to the beat of a different drummer.

Hehl has an art gallery called Easy Tiger in the Broadway Arts District that is so much more than an art gallery.

It is also a thrift shop, performance space, community center, clubhouse and some things that are harder to define.

Easy Tiger changes so often that people who have been there don’t always recognize it when they come back.

“They come down and they’re like, ‘Oh, there used to be this other thing down here.’ And I’m like, “Nope, it’s the same thing.’ They’re seeing in real time what it’s taking to make something (after starting) from nothing.”

Easy Tiger emerged from a season of profound personal struggle. That struggle unfolded during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period that ultimately reaffirmed Hehl’s faith in the healing power of art.

“I was just really stressed out,” she said. “I just had a lot going on. I was about ready to end it. Then I found out that I was on the spectrum. It put things into perspective. I realized that for my whole entire life, what had been saving me were these other artists who had been putting out poems that let me know that other people had feelings this deep and intense.”

Hehl said her own work began to seem like some sort of record of survival.

“I realized that that’s what had been saving me, that even my own songs that I wrote and the pictures that I drew were like love letters to myself.”

In her art and at Easy Tiger, Hehl said she seeks to make difficult things more bearable for the people who are going through them.

“Honestly, lots of times what I’m really trying to do, and it feels like it’s working, is that I am transmuting things – ugly things – into something more palatable. Because beauty can inspire joy and hope. It’s not that I don’t have some darker things in my pieces. But really, what I’m always trying to do is change something that’s hard into something that is palatable.”

When Hehl talks about Easy Tiger, it is almost as if she wants it to be all the things the rest of the world is not, especially in these divisive, judgmental times.

“Because really, what I was looking to do is to build a place where it was safe to feel joy,” she said. “Where it was safe to feel feelings without some kind of scrutiny.”

Hehl said there are people who never fully emerged from the pandemic.

“People really didn’t kind of shake off that shell,” she said. “They’re still wary. They’re scared of people. They’re scared to be themselves.”

Hehl sees her role as helping rebuild the sense of community she believes has frayed in recent years.

“That’s what I am here for,” she said. “If you see my business card, it says ‘artist, poet, muse, model.’ I’m here to be a model in the community of what it looks like to be a community member…So, it’s like, how can we make the community better? Like the mycelium: we need that strengthening network. That’s what we’re really lacking. People are sad. They don’t even realize how sad they are.”

During upcoming First Fridays in the Broadway Arts District, Hehl said she will start presenting 15-minute artist showcases: poets at first, then musicians and other creatives.

It’s a way of replacing isolation with shared experiences and making friends out of people who otherwise might have remained strangers.

“I have a passion for people,” she said. “I care about people, and I always have.”

On the east and west coasts, a creative who wears a lot of hats is called a multi-hyphenate.

Hehl’s creativity cannot be expressed in hats.

“It’s like my entire life is lived as art,” she said. “Like, my person. You know, my clothing, my expression, my thoughts. It’s just the way I live.”

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