When I arrived in Portland, Maine, I dove head first into meeting artists in the community. There was a Friday Art Crawl the first week I was in town and within a month, an artist's collective hosted an open house. Both I attended and introduced myself to loads of artists to see what they were up to, find out more about the local art scene and hopefully make some great connections.
But I met 4 great artists simply by attending hiking MeetUps. Each of them had a different area of focus; graphic design, landscape painter, ceramicist, and textile and stationary designer. That's absolutely not what I would have ever predicted, but I consider it very, very lucky. Two of them became great friends and the other two most certainly would have too if I had stayed longer.