The Gallery 51 sign says it all: It's where you should be tonight. Left, the Corner Market at the 'Here' exhibit; top, thousands of pages represent genocide victims.

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — DownStreet Art completes its fourth Thursday events tonight with the latest round of exhibition openings, from the very local to an installation memorializing a horror half a world away.

Jonathon Secor, director of special programs for Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, said the summerlong arts event has been drawing tourists and residents to the city in good numbers.

"I think we've done well," he said on Thursday hours as he checked on preparations for exhibits tied to the college. "I know we've seen more people than last year."

Response from downtown businesses he's talked to have been upbeat. "They definitely feel there's been extra foot traffic, and it's showing at the cash register. We're also seeing more sales of art this year, too. Nobody's getting rich but it's going well."

DownStreet Art launched in 2008 as a way to boost traffic in and around downtown through the arts, filling empty storefronts with temporary galleries and promote existing galleries and businesses. The summerlong event nearly doubled in venues this season; the fourth Thursday of each month was promoted with new exhibition receptions to create a destination event.

Tonight's openings include "Here" at MCLA's Gallery 51, a reflection on being (or becoming) an artist under the influence of Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the largest contemporary art museum in the world.

Just a few steps from Gallery 51, former Moulton's General Store at 77 Main St. was filled on Wednesday with thousands of booklets representing Rwandans killed in the brutal genocide in 1994.

The exhibit, "800,000 Acknowledge. Remember. Renew." is artist Will Snyder's response to learning about the massacre in 2004 from a Rwandan who shared his story at Snyder's church in Pennsylvania.

Mickey Crews of North Adams, a student at MCLA, leaves her handprint on a blank page in the '800,000' installation.

"I was a first-year graduate student but I'd never heard of the genocide," said Snyder earlier Thursday afternoon, after speaking to the college writing class of MCLA professor Mary Levitt. The students will reflect and write about their impressions of the installation for the class and as part of the First-Year Experience program.

The tragedy was still on his mind when he met another a teacher who was bringing Kenyan women into the city to teach women on welfare how to garden for food. "He was calling it art," said Snyder. "I never thought about meeting a basic need with art."

So with his fine arts degree in printmaking, Snyder envisioned a way enormity and the anonymity of that faraway human catastrophe by creating 800,000 pages — one for each life lost — in 2,500 volumes, stored in 100 crates to symbolize the number of days over which the murders took place.

The pages are blank — except for those marked by the handprints of viewers contributing $5 to benefit projects renewing Rwanda. "800,000" has become both a reminder of genocide and an agent for healing.

"The handprint is the mark of life and humanity, it symbolizes life that was lost," said Snyder.

In this installation, the crates are stacked like a wall, forcing the viewer to confront it; in other venues, they have been laid out singly on the floor like a graveyard, inviting viewers to wander through and reflect.

Exhibits opening tonight will continue into October. DownStreet Art will culminate with Open Studios on the weekend of Oct. 17 and 18. Now in its sixth year, Open Studios is becoming a North Berkshire event in which artists open their studios and galleries to thousands of visitors.

For a full schedule of events, see below:

New exhibition openings include: