Working in a Gallery in Kansas City

The other day I promised I would tell you what I'm so busy doing in Kansas City that I can't be in Colorado Springs doing my daily duty of scouring the interwebs, keeping you filled in on all that is interesting about beer around Pikes Peak. Well, I've been planning a little beer event in Kansas City at a gallery in called la Esquina, which sits no more than 2 blocks away from Boulevard Brewing Company. The exhibition is all about the neighborhood around the gallery and I've been collaborating with two other artists, Zach Springer and Elysia Contreras. When we create work for a gallery, it's usually in the form of events or activities, rather than making paintings, drawings, or sculpture. So each of us have planned an event or two that somehow links to the neighborhood and that is highlighting something that is already there that people don't know about. Now, we did indeed make drawings, but nothing that is meant to last longer than the exhibition itself, for each event we decided to create a wall drawing.

Drawing of Pancho Luna, a local homebrewer, and Boulevard Brewing.

For my portion of the event I invited Boulevard to create an exclusive beer about the neighborhood and I worked with a local homebrewer to create 'beer portraits' for a couple people who live in the neighborhood. Here's the more official text:

The two drawings on the left are of the people that Pancho has created Beer Portraits of

Boulevard Brewing has created a beer that is based off one of the brewer’s experience of the Westside neighborhood. Pancho Luna, a homebrewer and volunteer at Boulevard, has created two 'beer portraits' of people (Felix Pacheco and Pat Zamora) who are a part of the Westside neighborhood community. These beers will be unveiled and served for free to gallery visitors for one night only (Friday, June 3, 2011, 5-8pm).

Boulevard made a sessionable rye beer, sitting at 4%, to epitomize the feelings, experiences, and culture of the Westside Neighborhood. The beer was made exclusively for this show. Pancho's first 'beer portrait' is of Felix Pacheco, plumber by day, and on the weekends he builds and races remote control cars. The second beer portrait is of Pat Zamora, who is known for making hot chocolate drinks for a local church on Dec. 12th, a day when the church honors the Virigin of Guadalupe. Those beers will remain a secret until the event (unless you go to the gallery and read about them there).

Here's info about la Esquina, and Charlotte Street Foundation. Also, a Kansas City beer blog, Show Me Beer, has posted up a brief interview with me about the project.

Tracy sent me this image from Coalition Brewing

Another event that sort of culminated last week was something that I was working on for Portland, Oregon. I didn't get to go to Oregon for it though unfortunately. I've been working with a couple artists, Tracy Candido and Chelsea Haines, to plan what we called a Pub Discussion Series as part of the Open Engagement Conference, a conference all about socially engaged art practices. So, we created an extension to the conference that was centered on less-formal conference-based discussions that take place in local bars, and a type of bar crawl. I actually worked with Coalition Brewing to recreate one of my Heather Ale recipes specifically for the conference. The beer was on tap at Coalition for about 2 hours before the keg kicked. I received texts from Tracy and a couple other people that I know saying that the beer was really great and a lot of people were talking about it. Wish I was there for that!

I come back home tonight, looking forward to chilling out a little, and continuing my preparation for the upcoming Beers Made By Walking. I hope the weather is nice, it was brutally humid here in Kansas City for a few days and I forgot my shorts back home.


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