Parts & Labor invites you to a Contemporary Art Month bash at The Laundromat! It’s going to be a great time!

See recent work by resident Becky Brown, coupled with performances by resident Birddog, with local openers Bill Baird and Jack Mitts.

6:30-7:30 — Art Opening in the Laundromat

7:30-9:30 — Performances in the Courtyard

Free wine, beer, batched cocktails, and noshes.

Come hear Parts & Labor Resident Birddog perform with local acts Mitts and Mikey Vibe at Rathskeller Bar. Taps will be open!

7:15 — Mikey Vibe
8:00 — Mitts
8:45 — Birddog

Swing by the house to see Kat Chamberlin’s work in progress in the studio. Then you’re invited into the living room for a presentation by the artist. Beverages and snacks will be served on the porch.

From the artist: “Like my internet persona, I am a contrarian ferociously in love with love. My work is not about a malevolent patriarchy. I don’t believe in utopias. When I speak of motherhood, I talk about it as a metaphor for authoritarian governance. Parents and children, lovers and friends must negotiate their individuality while balancing dependence. Boundaries are materially delineated;  fragile glass as weapon, softly flocked heavy bronze, carved supple walnut, and sharp aluminum. I’m interested in relational materials; an invitation to touch, caress, fondle, rub, step on, or to restrain and repulse. I believe there is value in conflict, and growth through friction. My objects push and pull between materials, demanding me to be aware of how often my body desires what my reasonable mind resists. “

Artist Bio

Kat Chamberlin (b. 1981, Amsterdam, NL) lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work has been featured at notable institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Chicago Cultural Center, Baltimore Museum of Art and BRIC. She has shown at Helena Anrather, Hesse Flatow East, Tiger Strikes Asteroid (NY), Selena’s Mountain, Guest Spot at the Reinstitute, and Beverly’s among others. Kat completed her MFA in Performance Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and is the recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, the Toby Devan Lewis Award and the William Dole Award. Kat has been a resident at the NARS Foundation, Lynda Benglis’s Santa Fe Compound Residency, the BRIC Media Arts Fellowship and the Makrolab Station as a resident ‘lab rat’ in the Slovenian pavilion during the 2003 Venice Biennial.

Swing by the house to see Chris Baker’s work in progress in the studio. Then at 6:30, you’re invited into the living room for a presentation by the artist. Beverages and snacks will be served on the porch.

Artist Bio

Chris Baker is a graphic designer and artist based in Holland, Michigan, where he lives with his wife and daughter. He earned his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2023. Playing on the line between Graphic Design and Art, his work shifts between the external and internal, the representation of self and others. The focus of the work becomes language, translation, culture, and learning. He has designed books, brands, and websites for many artists, as well as galleries, museums, and non-profits. This sort of design work informs the art he participates in. With a focus on graphic language, he works with an attention to symbols, like letter forms and numbers, which are then pushed toward abstraction through defamiliarization. Subsequently topics like memory, record, time and space arise. He works in a variety of mediums from painting to printmaking through code based practices like javascript, html, and css. His work can be found in the gift shop at many art museums around the world.

Join resident artists Chris Baker and local artist and Keytsone teacher Josh Welker for a family monoprinting workshop in the art classroom. A monoprint means you can make just one print from each printing plate. In this workshop our printing plate will be wax paper that has been colored heavily with regular old crayons.

All supplies will be provided. Just bring yourselves and your creativity! Because of limited space, RSVPs are required. Email meaghan@partslaborsa.org to let us know you’re coming.

Swing by the house to see Aleisha Fitz’s work in progress in the studio. Then at 6:30, you’re invited into the living room for a presentation by the artist. Beverages and snacks will be served on the porch.

Aleisha Fitz (b. 1988) is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Colorado, USA. Composing primarily in sculpture, her work engages figuratively and dimensionally while exploring themes of the natural sublime, home and the human animal, and the dual realities of strength and fragility. Using tactile and elemental mediums ranging from metal and wood to fiber and clay, her methods emphasize process, examine assumptions of scale, and contrast linear structures with organic forms. Her gentle and sometimes playful approach is world-building, implying movement through light, balance, and form. Since 2021, Fitz has resided in Mexico City. Her work features in various national and international collections. 

The crew behind Parts & Labor warmly invites you to our second annual Supper & Small Works Auction at everybody’s favorite east side eatery, The Magpie. Come hear about the mission and vision of Parts & Labor over seven courses of delicious cuisine while browsing a curated assortment of small works up for auction. This event is the perfect opportunity to enjoy a night out, support caretaking artists, and maybe even take home a new piece for your collection. We'd love to see you and we appreciate your support!

Swing by the house to see Sonya Berg’s work in progress in the studio. Then at 6:30, you’re invited into the living room for a presentation by the artist. Beverages and snacks will be served on the porch.

During her residency, Berg has continued her recent work of collecting and composing imagery of nature in interior spaces. Gathered as casual snapshots over years of traumatic life events, the quick shots are then translated into photographic prints, collages, and textural paintings. For Berg, the imagery acts like map coordinates for her memories, reminding her of the people, places, and feelings that made up a particular moment in time. By processing the imagery through a series of removals and physical reframing, Berg explores not only how we might reconsider our stories, but also why we nurture natural life in our built spaces, and what that means about us.

Join Austin-based artist Sonya Berg and her family for a sun print/cyanotype family activity using plant material, ice cubes, and bubbles!

The cyanotype, invented in 1842 by English chemist and astronomer Sir John Herschel, and used by the photographic pioneer Anna Atkins, produces distinctive Prussian blue images. We promise it’s very straightforward and appropriate for all ages!

Iced coffee + breakfast tacos will be served.

RSVP to meaghan@partsandlabor.org

Swing by the house to see Andrew Hendrixson’s work in progress in the studio. Then at 6:30, you’re invited into the living room for a presentation by the artist. Beverages and snacks will be served on the porch.

Bring the whole family out for a collaborative drawing and painting project. Van Gogh’s “The Sower” drawn in black & white will be cut into thin strips, then each child gets a strip to paint however they’d like, not knowing what the image had been. They go away briefly to work on their own creation, and then the many small pieces are reassembled to reveal a an image.

Breakfast tacos + iced coffee will be served.

Parts & Labor invites you to visit Ada Wright Potter’s open studio, in which she’ll be working on a site-specific installation during the length of her residency.

In the artist’s installations she re-stages the material qualities of photography, using reflective mylar and mirrors to capture and play with light, calling up a filmic process. Wright Potter also employs transparent and translucent materials, like acetate and mylar, to mimic analog film while invoking a feeling of hi-tech ephemerality. Because of the vast quantity of images that we each create, but mostly never print, we generally engage with digital images as an archive of files. The images themselves have become less weighted and hide from us in plain sight. We misunderstand them as insignificant while in fact these files trace real occurrences. Wright Potter’s response is to re-imagine this ephemerality, to make physical the qualities of the photograph. I physically invert the photographic ground to disorient the viewer. The prints are digitally altered, illuminated and flipped on their axis to muddle recognition. In doing so, Wright Potter hopes to create a space we don’t have; a space between material sensation and the theoretical understanding.

www.adawright.com

Welcome Meg and Frankie Lipke to San Antonio with a potluck dish and a poem!

Each Sunday evening a group of San Antonians—artists, architects, social workers, playwrights, and more—gather to share a meal and read poetry together. And this week Parts & Labor gets to host with the Lipke’s at the Arcineiga house!

407 Devine Street, Lavaca, San Antonio, TX 78210
5:30pm

All are welcome. Bring a dish and a beloved poem to share.

Join resident artist Meg Lipke for an artist talk in which she will explore the role research of archaeological artifacts, specifically pictograms, marks, handprints, and symbols found on Paleolithic cave walls, plays in her painting and sculptural processes. While in San Antonio, Lipke will do extensive research at the Gault site, famous worldwide for its documentation of the Clovis period, which lasted from around 13,400 to 12,800 years ago. Deep history and grand compositions have been endemic to her work’s graphic eclecticism. “Perhaps it is due to this holistic approach the works are both free and fraught in equal measure-as if hopefulness and resignation are acknowledged as both constant and coexistent-and in this way Lipke provides us with succinct indices of our time,” wrote Broadway Gallery in a recent exhibition press release.

We hope you will join us for this fascinating talk!

Details: 407 Devine Street at 4 PM

Children’s activities will be provided as well, so bring the kids along.

Join Parts & Labor’s first-ever artist in residence Michael Gac Levin for a family-friendly opening on Friday, February 23 at 5 PM. The artist will exhibit nine small works, which were begun in his Brooklyn studio and completed during his residency.

Levin’s paintings aim at the mystery and the intensity of childhood. At the core of his work is a lighthearted, diaristic drawing practice guided by repetition and humor. Riding a wobbly line down into memory, he finds images that speak to our predicaments in the present and the uncertainty of the future. As they feed into paintings, the drawings take on color, bringing associations to nostalgia, the nocturnal, and the fantastical. His reflective, dreamlike compositions offer views of a world in which everything is animate and purposeful. A world where anything might suddenly rise to speak, stalk or play. A sense of archaic monumentality pervades the images, but feels as soft and yielding as a pillow fort or a loaf of bread. As a father of two young children, he understands his work as a way to reimagine traditions of masculinity, authority, and patrimony. Planted among the grateful ruins of a haunting past, his paintings are dreams of what we will leave behind ourselves.

Welcome Mike and Melina Gac Levin to San Antonio with a potluck dish and a poem!

Each Sunday evening a group of San Antonians—artists, architects, social workers, playwrights, and more—gather to share a meal and read poetry together. And this week Parts & Labor gets to host with the Gac Levins at the Arcineiga house!

407 Devine Street, Lavaca, San Antonio, TX 78210
5pm

All are welcome. Bring a dish and a beloved poem to share.

Description

Each Sunday evening a group of San Antonians—artists, architects, social workers, playwrights, and more—gather to share a meal and read poetry together. And this week Parts & Labor gets to host! All are welcome. Bring a dish and a beloved poem to share.

The crew behind Parts & Labor warmly invites you to a Supper & Small Works Auction, our first-ever fundraising dinner and small works auction at Liberty Bar, a beloved south San Antonio artist hang.