Talking shop, bread and social practice with community artist Sean Starowitz

The Katz Drugstore building, where Westport Road meets Main Street, is beloved in some quarters simply for having survived so much of the last century. But it hasn’t made it this far into this one by being impressive. The paint remains faded, the tiling cracked, the clock tower in disrepair.

For the 20 or so artists who rent studio space inside the long-defunct pharmacy, that’s part of the point — a bit of historic architecture given quiet new function as the traffic rolls thickly past.

On a Friday evening in July, though, the space buzzes with several hundred people. They’ve come to this midtown corner for an open-studios exhibition and group show promoted through various social media — including that of the nearby Redeemer Fellowship, which owns the Katz Drugstore building. The eager crowd might have been teleported from a particularly busy First Friday in the Crossroads District.

An hour before Drugstore Open Studios gets under way, Oddly Correct, the high-end-coffee sanctuary just across Westport Road, spills over with these artists and their appreciators, and their happy chatter echoes in the small room. Behind Oddly’s bar, passing out shots of espresso and crostini pieces smeared with thoughtfully curated spreads, is Sean Starowitz.

Starowitz, despite the blue-, red- and yellow-striped apron he wears, isn’t a barista. But give him an hour to practice his pour-over style, and he could probably pass for one. The artist, who holds one of the spaces at the drugstore, has a knack for acquisition and application of practical skills. For one thing, he’s the rare Kansas City Art Institute alum given to insisting that he considers himself a bread baker perhaps foremost.

Along with the other artists renting studio space at Katz, including Gregory Kolsto (who also owns Oddly Correct), Starowitz helped organize tonight’s event. At the coffeehouse, with coffeehouse tasks to perform, Starowitz is at ease, greeting curious guests, nodding at people he knows, feeding everyone. Later, at Katz, Starowitz stands in the middle of the enormous space, surrounded by scene-hungry people shuffling from one exhibit to the next.

“Can you believe all the people that are here?” he asks, smiling in genuine surprise at the night’s obvious success. “I thought maybe a few dozen people. This is crazy. Look at all these people!”

Starowitz notices a few people milling around his own studio space and walks over to meet them. His walls are pinned with smudgy, thick-lined charcoal sketches, fine pencil drawings, photos from past projects and photocopied maps of Kansas City. A small table at the center is stacked with postcards and fliers for a few of Starowitz’s other endeavors: Fresh Bread, Bread KC, Lots of Love, the Talk Shop. Each requires a bit of explanation. He’s ready to accommodate.

Unlike most other visual artists with studios at Katz, Starowitz hasn’t made the drawings and photos the focus of his work. They’re more like visual aids for what has become known in academic circles as socially engaged art, which puts the focus not on a product but on an outcome. It’s not art that ends up in galleries and museums — though Starowitz finds himself in those environments, too.

Tonight, for the people now asking questions, he points to a pencil sketch that details a makeshift “storefront” for Fresh Bread, the pop-up bakery that Starowitz began last October. For three weekends that month, he erected a plastic-and-canvas structure, printed with a Wonder Bread-like pattern, in neighborhoods that he believed offered few options for fresh food. He sold loaves of fresh-baked bread to passers-by, charging prices that he’d calculated, thanks to research, to be economically fair. Starowitz baked the loaves at Farm to Market Bread Co. — where he has been the artist-in-residence and a bread baker since 2010 — and, for the debut of Fresh Bread, set up shop in front of the empty storefront at 3936 Main, between the midtown CVS and Oddly Correct.

“When I introduce myself, I say I’m a bread baker first,” Starowitz tells me. “I say I’m a bread baker by trade and an artist as well. A lot of my projects focus on bread, like Fresh Bread and Bread KC. Bread is this inherent metaphor for me. I view bread and art as the same — it’s the same creative process, it’s the same engagement with the work, it’s this thing that people consume for nourishment. Culture is a protein, not a dessert, and I’m trying to make that the main course in my life and my practice.”

That empty storefront next to CVS,” Starowitz tells an audience on a warm Thursday night a couple of months later, “it’s a place where I can be a baker and an artist, but also a place where I can address the messed-up politics of the CVS being the highest-grossing grocery store in that neighborhood, despite there being a Thriftway down the street.

“For three weekends I did a pop-up bakery, where I distributed over 400 loaves of bread, the price of which I adjusted to neighborhood income level,” he says. “Nothing was over $5.”

[page]

Fresh Bread is one of the projects that led to Starowitz’s being named a 2014 Charlotte Street Fellow in March. (He got word of the honor on his 26th birthday.) Now, at an exhibition at Overland Park’s Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art that includes his art, he’s explaining the bread thing again.

The bread begins to address a social issue that he wants to fix: vacancy. Kansas City, he says, lists more than 18,000 abandoned properties, from lots to storefronts. The greatest cause of this, he believes, is urban sprawl. The greatest victims are the surrounding communities.

“This is not just an urban issue,” Starowitz says, standing in front of a slide of the deserted Great Mall at the Great Plains. “This is a suburban issue. What you’re seeing is a doughnut factor that’s happened in the city. Basically, according to the latest survey [the Mid-America Regional Council population forecast], 47,000 people and 27,000 jobs are expected to leave the urban floor by 2040. That’s not so good for Kansas City.”

He goes on to talk about Bread KC, the organization that he has spearheaded since 2010, which has awarded more than $20,000 in micro-grants to local artists. Numbers like this mitigate any feelings in the room that Starowitz has come to scold. When he names that dollar figure, applause and a few whoops rise up in the Nerman’s auditorium.

Later, Starowitz speaks of Lots of Love, another project that he heads. This one is a partnership with the Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council to transform abandoned lots into functional public spaces.

“We have been spending eight months in the neighborhood, getting ideas from the residents, thinking about how do we repurpose these vacant lots,” Starowitz tells the audience. “They can’t all just be parks. So we’ve talked to the people living there, and we’ve worked alongside the youth in the neighborhood to find out what they need. You have to meet people where they are at if you want to work with them.”

At the Nerman, Starowitz paces the floor as he speaks. He’s nervous, he admits to his audience. He knows that his practice can confuse traditionalists, some of whom aren’t sure that Starowitz is, you know, an artist.

On this Thursday night, Starowitz does seem like the odd man out. Though he’s presenting alongside two accomplished visual artists — sculptor Garry Noland and painter Amy Kligman — and his own drawings and objects fill the gallery walls afforded him here (the same stark black-and-white charcoals from his studio, and a pile of bricks reclaimed from a Lots of Love site), these aren’t the bases of his award, and they don’t tell the whole story of his work.

But whether his practice is considered art, by people who spend a lot of time determining that sort of thing, seems not to interest him much.

A few weeks before this button-down night, he and I huddle over a table at Dave’s Stagecoach in Westport on a busy weeknight, and he pushes back at art-world semantics that would categorize him as a civic servant rather than a social artist.

“My thing is, how do we create a sustainable structure for re-envisioning what the arts can be within a city, right?” Starowitz says. He doesn’t wait for an answer. “We have to reimagine what the role of the artist is, on a civic level, on a community level and on a neighborhood level. And how do we do that? I’m willing to ask those questions and take the risk and see if it’s feasible in Kansas City. I want to use the opportunities from Lots of Love and the drugstore to really reimagine the role of the artist on a civic level. With Lots of Love, we didn’t release an image until we had community input, and that was important.”

[page]

Andrew Lyles, a KCAI classmate and longtime collaborator of Starowitz’s, puts his friend’s Nerman appearance and recent Charlotte Street nod in perspective.

“Sean had a really good presentation in the gallery,” Lyles says, referring to those sketches and salvaged bricks. “But I think it doesn’t hold up to him speaking in front of an audience and showing photos. His true talent is speaking and showing literally rather than visually. I think really that that sort of ‘studio artist’ doesn’t need to be shown by Sean. What he does as an artist — the Lots of Love and the Bread KC and getting people together — that’s what it comes down to. That’s where he’s made the biggest difference.”

“I tell people Sean is a visionary, and it’s very refreshing because he’s young and, to a certain degree, he’s kind of fearless, which works for the work that we’re doing,” says Dina Newman, of the Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council. She recruited Starowitz in late 2013 to revive the Lots of Love project, which was conceived in 2011 by a previous KCAI class.

“One of the things that I appreciate most is that he always puts the residents front and center,” she tells me. “It’s not about him. We’re repurposing vacant lots as more than just a pretty site. We really want these lots to become dedicated space for safety and creative design, and to transform them to benefit the community’s health and wellness, and just putting a garden on a lot may not necessarily do that.”

Lots of Love has so far committed to two spaces: the Meet and Greet Lot, located at 3700 Woodland and funded by Capitol Federal Savings Bank, and the Let’s Play Lot, to be located a block away and funded by Local Initiatives Support Corp.

Construction began on the Meet and Greet Lot in July. While excavating the site, Starowitz found the brick foundation of the house that used to exist in the space. He has salvaged that masonry and plans to create a walkway with the pieces. On a torturously hot day, Starowitz leads me around the in-progress lot, pointing out where he plans to put a fire pit, a community mural and a fruit orchard.

“I’m learning as I go,” he says. A rash from a brush with poison ivy dots his arms. “I don’t have it all figured out. I never knew how to tear up an asphalt driveway with a Bobcat before. That was fun.”

“I can sleep at night knowing Sean’s got this project,” Newman says. “When you’re working in community, it can’t be about your agenda. Sean gets that. He gets it from day one.”

“Freshman year, he was making and drawing and thinking a lot, and he had lots of ideas,” Lyles tells me, recalling his early acquaintance with Starowitz. “It couldn’t just be an object or a drawing or a painting. It had to be something that took up space, and it had to be with more than one person — it had to be a community.”

When the two were sophomores at KCAI, Starowitz applied to the now-defunct Interdisciplinary Arts program at KCAI — an unconventional track that fused broad-spectrum creative media and encouraged students to think about their art outside studios or gallery walls. Bread KC owes something to those lessons, and it’s also traceable to a Chicago project called Sunday Soup, a similar micro-grant funder with which it is affiliated.

“Sean’s been interested in working with all sorts of groups of people in addition to the kind of folks who would be interested in alternative arts funding,” says Bryce Dwyer, a co-founder of inCUBATE — the organization that created Sunday Soup. The two met in Chicago in 2010, and it was clear to Dwyer then that his colleague’s practice wasn’t going to end up on a wall.

“Although the model for Sunday Soup has spread to other cities internationally, the constituent for that project tends to be people, in whatever city, who are involved in arts professionally,” Dwyer tells me. “But some of the work that Sean has done, like Bread KC and beyond, shows that he’s especially interested in engaging with people who might not have personal experience with the art context yet, and that’s really interesting. There’s definitely a national platform for that.”

Starowitz’s newest enterprise also draws some inspiration from the Windy City. It’s called Talk Shop, and he bills it as a temporary experimental cultural center. The yearlong initiative recalls Chicago’s Mess Hall, which ran from 2003 to 2013 and featured eclectic, ambitious programming: poetry readings, public meetings, lectures. There was never a cover charge, and because of a peculiar rent agreement, the collective of artists running it never needed to turn it into a nonprofit.

[page]

Starowitz stumbled into a similar serendipity with the empty storefront at 3936 Main, the site of Starowitz’s Fresh Bread events that is also owned by Redeemer. The space was originally an entrance to Morton Hall, which Redeemer gained ownership of in 2008.

“That space has been designated for church use,” property manager Joshua Murray says. “The square footage there is exempted from property taxes currently, and so when Sean brought us the idea of doing the Talk Shop, that was one of the conditions present — that the space wouldn’t be used for profit, and nothing could be sold within it.”

“It’s been a big dream of mine to do a storefront space for a long time,” Starowitz says. “There’s no commerce. It’s just this thing where if people know about it, they can use it. For me, it’s that model of having an open-door policy. Why does art have to be this 6–9, 12–5, Saturday–Sunday experience? That’s the beauty of the Talk Shop — a lot of that space gets used Friday and Saturday nights, so for us, we take those nights off. But Sunday through Thursday, it’s free rein.”

For the Talk Shop, that means open-ended public programming: lectures by visiting artists or social practitioners, art installations, roundtable discussions, monthly discussions of topics such as the concept of a “third space” (the place, Starowitz explains, that isn’t home or work but allows you to find balance).

The deal with Redeemer took a few months to iron out and was made official in May.

“The Talk Shop is in the same vein as Lots of Love and Bread KC,” Lyles says. “All that work is connected. We were specifically talking about spaces, and the Talk Shop kind of happened because Sean had his studio space at the Katz, and he met a few other artists there. He sort of framed it as a mini Bread [KC] without the grants, where you’re hanging out and meeting people and having meaningful discussions.”

Among the first talkers will be Alex Elmestad, a St. Louis artist and museum programmer who collaborated with Starowitz on Bread for Work, a three-day event inspired by Bread KC. Also lined up is Christina Kim, an eco-fashion designer and artist who lives in Los Angeles. Kim plans to implement a large-scale, community-oriented art installation; it will be her first U.S. work outside L.A. and New York City.

“I think it’s important that small spaces can be sort of laboratories,” Dwyer says. “You can try doing things in a space that’s temporary that you couldn’t do if you worked at a local nonprofit gallery that’s been around for 20 years that has stakeholders and all these expectations. It’s important that people have all these small places to experiment with; otherwise, we would stop inventing.”

“I think sometimes, if you look at social practice and relational aesthetics, it just looks like a lot of different people having dinner parties, and it can look really exclusive and not that interesting,” Starowitz says.

It’s a warm evening in late June, and he is at Lyles’ West Side home for a not especially elite dinner party to talk social practice and relational aesthetics (and fundraising). Over a meal at a picnic table in the backyard, Starowitz and Lyles are meeting with the Johnson County Library’s John Helling and a media-production teacher at Blue Valley North High School named Charlie Huette, who are among the core Talk Shop team. (Not present are graphic designer Taylor Pruitt, and fashion and storefront designer Lauren Tweedie.)

“I think we can take visual aesthetics, architecture and design and blend them together here,” Starowitz adds. “I don’t just want to do yoga and an art space — that’s just not interesting anymore.”

Helling and Huette nod and take notes as Starowitz continues. “We need to think about elevating the visual experience,” he says. “I think we can be at the level of ‘This is what social engagement looks like for Kansas City’s standards,’ but also in a national conversation of socially engaged artwork and practices. And I think we can be the first ones to do it here in a storefront space. That would be pretty bitchin’.”

Dinner wraps up, and I ask Helling, Huette and Lyles, “How did you get interested in the idea of the Talk Shop?”

There’s a pause, and Starowitz emits an awkward laugh as three fingers point to him.

“I always try to build a project where if you take me out of the equation, the project still happens,” Starowitz tells me. On this night, later in the summer, he has just returned from a trip to L.A.

He’d planned the trip around presenting a project and interactive game called The D-Train: A Dialogue Lab at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. After that, he would hang out with opera director, 2014 Polar Music Prize winner and mentor Peter Sellars, and with organic-food pioneer and restaurateur Alice Waters, owner of Berkeley, California’s Chez Panisse. (He would also end up meeting Christina Kim.)

He’d also been invited to participate in that city’s first edition of Brutally Early Club — for which people are invited to a 6:30 a.m. creative meeting that, ideally, pumps them up for the rest of the day. The curator, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, founded the first such group in London, in 2006, and meeting him was reason enough for Starowitz to say yes.

[page]

His role was to bake bread for the 20 or so attendees expected at architect Fritz Haeg’s home, the day’s meeting site. Starowitz spent a sleepless night in a kitchen, and in the morning, more than 70 people showed up. Starowitz delivered an impromptu presentation on the intersection of bread, art and his practice in Kansas City.

“I fucking marathoned it,” he says. He laughs and says he’s feeling a little jet-lagged. He seems, at this moment, to want to disappear from the equation.

“I was gone, and Lots of Love functioned without me, which was the greatest thing,” Starowitz says, “knowing that I’m not necessary.”

Later, Starowitz goes back to Talk Shop: “Charlie, Andrew, John, Taylor, Lauren — these people are far more interesting than me, and they don’t know that. The beauty of what I’ve been able to do in Kansas City, with Bread KC and Lots of Love and with any of my projects, is that I surround myself with some of the most interesting people in this town. That’s the best part about it. I don’t need to do anything.”

When I call to ask Lyles exactly how Starowitz presented the Talk Shop to him, I can almost hear him shrug through the receiver.

“One day, he sent a few of us an e-mail and met with all of us,” Lyles says, “and basically he said, ‘I can’t do this without you guys.’ And we were like, ‘OK.'”

On Sunday, August 18, the Talk Shop Indiegogo campaign started its monthlong run with a $10,000 goal — funds earmarked to pay monthly utilities and cover the costs for guest speakers and artists. The amount raised came to $4,215. That’s enough, Starowitz says, to get the Talk Shop going. He plans a soft opening in late October. The rest of the money will come, he says, from small fundraisers held along the way.

“What personally interests me in this project is that I don’t actually know what’s going to happen,” Huette tells me in the final days of the online drive. “The whole thing just breathes opportunity, and Sean’s a very good connector. He’s very good at bringing people together, and I think, for any kind of civic thing to happen anyplace, you have to be able to do that. When I look at Bread KC and Lots of Love and now this project, I think that, as a connector, Sean’s role in Kansas City arts is invaluable.”

Starowitz’s busy West Coast itinerary was only the latest set of invitations in a fast-moving career that has steadily expanded his circle of friends — and his sphere of influence.

In November 2013, the Columbus Museum of Art asked him to work with its Art Lab and Project Pivot to develop youth-program initiatives. In February, Starowitz traveled to Madison, Indiana, to curate a four-day interactive installation and exhibition called The Dialogue Lab: Impossible Madison with 225 high school and college students. And in the spring, the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition asked him to curate the Momentum Tulsa 2014 exhibition, featuring three artists whose focus is on social engagement. That show opens October 3.

John Friend, co-owner of the Farm to Market Bread Co., has watched Starowitz’s national profile rise. The bakery’s artist-in-residence position was created for Starowitz, he says, to give the KCAI graduate some “leeway” to work on projects and to travel.

“We’re just impressed with him being invited all around the country,” Friend says. “His projects often have a charitable side to them, with giving back to the community and a local focus, but what he is doing locally is being picked up around the country, and people are asking him to help them with projects in their local neighborhoods. We’re proud of that for him.”

“Sean is directly building things in communities with his work,” Huette says. “He walks in and does work and then he walks away, and he leaves something behind that does something for the community.”

But more and more, the question comes up: When will Starowitz leave behind this particular community?

Erin Olm-Shipman, the former executive director of Bread KC, moved to California this year, but she doesn’t expect Starowitz to leave here anytime soon.

“Maybe it was like a perfect storm of other things going on in this city, and him getting this undergrad degree here and already having that intimate relationship with that group of artists that came out of that program and that year,” she says. “It seems like every time I hear about someone doing something really awesome from the Art Institute, nine times out of 10, they’re a product of that specific [Interdisciplinary Arts] program. And also, the city is on the verge of this major revitalization, and people are more open to the types of ideas Sean has. Sean can just make you feel like all of your ideas are great … and before you know it, you’re really excited about this new collaboration he’s proposing.”

And for all of the connections Starowitz can claim, here and elsewhere, his primary collaborator right now might just be the city itself.

“I think KC has a lot of potential with where we are right now,” he says. “And if people can just see what we can accomplish when we lock arms and tear down this sort of country-club mentality of exclusivity and try to make something greater than ourselves, and that comes from within a local community rather than outsourcing it to places like Chicago or New York or L.A., it can be organic and interesting.

“Gregory Kolsto has a great quote about how Kansas City just happens to people, and I think that’s a great philosophy to have. I like being here and feeling the need to contribute and trying to make a difference in my community.”

Editor’s note: Helling, a source quoted in this story, writes occasionally for The Pitch as a paid contributor.