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At face value, Mestizo Coffee House is a simple java joint at the base of an apartment complex near the North Temple viaduct that separates downtown Salt Lake City from the valley’s West Side.
Step inside and you quickly realize how mistaken that impression is. You feel the sensation of a black-and-white world giving way to Technicolor, à la The Wizard of Oz.
Tantalizing aromas from the kitchen tease the air with scents of cinnamon and hot chocolate. Vibrant colors burst not only from the paintings on the walls, but from the walls themselves. Some patrons click away on laptops or intensely read books in silence, while other tables buzz with excited chitchat about plans for Friday night.
An adjacent gallery space is filled with the work of young artists from Mestizo’s neighborhood. And if you peek through a window in the coffeehouse’s western wall, you’ll find yet another room, this one the working studio of one of Utah’s most prominent contemporary artists, Ruby Chacón, who owns Mestizo with her husband Terry Hurst.
“It’s just like an apartment building, right?” Chacón says. “But when you actually introduce people to the inside of the space, it’s different. And then they tell other people.
“A lot of people come in and say it just feels really good in here. They feel it’s a safe space. I get told that a lot. And it’s good. That’s why we call it a coffeehouse. We’re trying to create a home for people to come to, not just a coffee shop.”
Chacón and Hurst certainly have far more than a simple coffee shop on their hands with Mestizo.
They have a performance space with open-mic nights for aspiring musicians and poets. They have a meeting place for all manner of activists and academics to volley ideas and organize. They have the constant energy of enthusiastic young people in the neighborhood who use Mestizo as a source of both education and entertainment.
In short, Chacón and Hurst have arguably the most significant art hot spot within Utah’s borders, inside that nondescript West Side apartment building. And it’s fitting that Mestizo sits right where Salt Lake City splits itself into east and west—architecturally, economically, and otherwise—where Mestizo’s mission to break down barriers in the community can reach out in either direction.
A Multifaceted Multiculturalism
Besides Mestizo’s practical roles as a coffee joint, art studio and gallery, it is also home base for the Mestizo Institute of Culture and Arts, dedicated to strengthening the Latina/Latino community, as well as Mestizo Arts and Activism, an after-school program.
Interns and apprentices flit about as Chacón talks about Mestizo’s projects, like a mural program that takes Chacón and her crew into the community to create dazzling public art pieces. The Bridges Over Barriers project and the intricate mural painted for the River’s Bend Senior Center are prime examples.
When members of the community asked about drawing classes, Chacón recruited artist and University of Utah art professor Jimmy Lucero to volunteer. The Salt Lake City Brown Berets turned a conversation with kids about cars into a workshop on low-rider car models. Those sessions eventually helped a group of inexperienced young artists curate and display their work at the annual Arte de Latino show at Park City’s Kimball Art Center.
“That’s sort of how we work,” Chacón says. “Very organic. What are the needs of the community? What are they trying to express? And how do we shape that into a program? Our mission statement is about creating access to community. So what we try to do is encourage people to be actively involved in creating the programs, or helping with the curating.”
Mestizo’s programs also serve the neighborhood in entirely practical ways. Chacón recalls being at a neighborhood meeting when one resident noted that incidents of graffiti had dwindled, perhaps unaware that Mestizo’s programs had opened their doors to those artists to work on large-scale murals and canvas instead the walls of local businesses.
Mestizo’s existence and its various programs don’t just change its West Side neighborhood. They change the kids involved even more.
Veronica Perez was working as an accountant when Chacón’s work inspired her to quit and focus on her own artwork. She joined the mural apprentice program and worked alongside Chacón on the River’s Bend Senior Center project. In the spring she was one of the competitors in the 337 Project’s “Face Off at the Urban Gallery” at Neighborhood House.
Nineteen-year-old Brittney Flores has been an artist apprentice and intern, and although she’s only been painting for a year, she sounds slightly amazed at what the programs have meant for her. The first mural she worked on hangs at the University of Utah, and she notes, “I’ve met professors and artists from Westminster College and the U. I’ve met the mayor.”
Nicol Razón is a 24-year-old intern who’s done some curating at the Mestizo gallery. After she started hanging out and working with Chacón, she would rave to her friends about the space, only to find they already knew about it.
“I was talking to an actor friend of mine, and she was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I did a monologue there,’ ” Razon says. “Coffeehouses really are there to help build communities.”
Arts and Activism
It’s a Wednesday night in late spring and the Mestizo gallery space is filled with gaggles of giggling high schoolers and college-age kids. Groups of four or five loosely divide themselves according to the art projects they’ve worked on.
One group has a documentary film loaded onto a laptop, ready to screen for the curious at a moment’s notice. Another crew has copies of its self-published newspaper, while still another has created a GIS map of the West Side.
The occasion is a fundraiser for the Mestizo Arts and Activism program, which teaches West Side kids how to conduct research on social issues in their community and turn that research into art, whether it be a painting, a poem or a play.
A small table holds a selection of silent-auction items: posters, prints, original artwork and T-shirts. The Arts and Activism program is raising about $15,000 to send 50 young people to Houston to present their research and projects at a convention of similar groups from across the country. And they’re trying to gather that money in $5 and $10 increments, through small fundraisers like this one. No one’s walking in and simply writing a $15,000 check, something known to happen at fundraisers in Park City or wealthier communities along the Wasatch Front.
In fact, the Mestizo Arts and Activism program itself is funded by the cobbling together of various grants and the dedicated work of three University of Utah faculty members: Matt Bradley of the Honors College, Caitlin Cahill of the Department of City & Metropolitan Planning and David Quijada of the Department of Education, Culture & Society.
Their interest in working with kids from under-represented communities brought them together to form the Arts and Activism program. They partnered with Mestizo to make it happen where they knew the community was engaged.
“We wanted to focus on art, research and activism as the core pieces of how we could work with youth,” Bradley says. “We started looking around for people we could partner with, and Ruby and Terry were kind of an obvious fit.”
“Even though we have different contributions and different ways of working, we share a respect for the possibility of young people to make change in their community,” Cahill says.
The trio apparently hit a nerve with its concept, because the Arts and Activism program has grown quickly in terms of kids interested in participating; indeed, some of the original high school kids want to continue working with the program, even though they’ve “finished” and gone on to college or full-time jobs.
As a result, the three U professors have to spend considerable time putting together a budget through grants, in addition to teaching the “youth researchers” in the program how to conduct serious research.
The rewards come from seeing the program’s youth not only engage with their community through the research, but in seeing what they do with that research afterward. Sometimes it comes out in a spoken-word performance, sometimes through a paintbrush.
Regardless of the medium, the youth researchers find ever-creative ways to project a political and social voice they might have never known they had if it weren’t for the Mestizo Arts and Activism program.
“Sometimes you can say things or learn things or process things or understand things through the arts that are really hard,” Cahill says. “Sometimes the focus on how you understand yourself and engage with the political process comes through better through art.”
While the kids from the community don’t enter the Mestizo Arts and Activism program as experienced artists or researchers, they leave as both. And who knows? Among their ranks could be the next Ruby Chacón, the owner of another Mestizo-style spot for young artists to flourish.
Truly Public Art
Two Salt Lake nonprofits join to create a West Side urban art gallery for all ages.
It’s an unusually wet early summer weekend, and nine artists are battling at the “Face Off at the Urban Gallery,” an 18-hour painting showdown that is a prime example of the kind of public art stunt that makes the 337 Project a true Salt Lake City treasure.
Named after the address of the group’s original presence in Salt Lake—a condemned building-turned-art gallery-turned-pile of rubble—the 337 Project is now an ongoing nonprofit led by founder Adam Price and specializing in guerrilla art events that bring the public in close contact with some of Utah’s finest contemporary artists.
At the Face Off at the Urban Gallery, the gallery in question is actually Neighborhood House, a West Side nonprofit providing daycare and other services to low-income children and adults. And in the past two years, the 337 Project and Neighborhood House have joined forces to create some of the coolest public art pieces in the valley.
The collaboration between the two entities came naturally, says 337’s Price. A board member for Neighborhood House was enamored with the original 337 Project and its ongoing mission to bring art to the people via special events and its Art Truck (think of a bookmobile for fine art), so she suggested inviting 337 Project artists to help beautify the Neighborhood House space.
Last year, several artists competed in a juried contest, using the Neighborhood House’s nine huge garage doors as canvases. This year’s Face Off followed in a similar style, but this time the public was invited to watch the artists scramble to create some intensely vivid pieces.
The garage doors will remain on display until the next 337 showdown. But like other 337-inspired works, the Urban Gallery is only temporary, so you have to catch it while you can.
Neighborhood House
1050 W. 500 South
Salt Lake City
nhutah.org
337 Project
Salt Lake City
337project.org
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