Martin Jenich
The Art Party Happy Hour provides a space for ‘person-to-person’ connections.
It’s just after 5 p.m. on a school night at The Bodgery, located within the old Oscar Mayer campus on Madison’s north side. The makerspace is co-hosting December’s Art Party Happy Hour, a monthly gathering held on Tuesday evenings at different venues around the city. Primarily an event for creatives to inspire and support each other, tonight’s happy hour has two bonus features: a tour of the 21,000-square-foot workshop filled with tools for woodworking, metalwork and more, led by Bodgery co-founder John Eich, and a chili cookoff, which accounts for the tasting-size styrofoam cups people are carting around while they mingle.
Samantha Crownover, executive director of Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, and Oscar Mireles, executive director of Omega School and a former Madison poet laureate, are the co-founders of the parties.
Mireles says he and Crownover did not know each other when they and others in Madison’s arts community were invited to the Overture Center in 2018 to meet the candidates under consideration for CEO. “I hadn’t heard of [Crownover]. I hadn’t heard of Bach Dynamite Society,” says Mireles. The two had a lot of fun talking with others, and thought about how people in the art world tend to stick to their own circles. “I said we should do something like this for arts groups and she said, ‘let’s do it’ and that’s how it got started.”
The first art party was held in September 2018. Following a break due to COVID, the parties resumed in person in 2021.
About 80 people turned out to December’s party at The Bodgery, including James Kreul, who’s been a regular at the happy hours since becoming the Arts + Literature Laboratory’s public programs coordinator in June. Networking and talking to strangers pushes him out of his comfort zone — “I’m sometimes a bit of a wallflower; it depends on my mood that day” — but he says both are necessary in his new position. “I think I’m honing those skills in a very friendly environment,” he says.
Eich of The Bodgery started attending the art parties pre-pandemic at the suggestion of another Bodgery member. “Makers,” he says, come to their work from a lot of perspectives. Some consider themselves artists, engineers and crafters. Others, people who like to “tinker with things.”
The art parties, says Eich, are a place where creatives “can meet each other and try different things. I think a lot of us in small organizations stay in our silos.” The parties provide a way to “meet others, learn about what they do, be inspired, maybe collaborate or try something new.”
Lois Taylor has also become an art party regular. A graphic designer by trade, she recently returned to painting, a love she abandoned decades ago in favor of a more practical career path. Like many others, she did some deep thinking during the pandemic about what was important to her. She brought out her watercolors.
In September Taylor attended the Dane Arts Buy Local Business of Art Conference, a professional development workshop for artists, creative entrepreneurs and arts administrators. She heard about the art parties there and has been coming since. “It’s nice to be around people with similar interests who understand that, while we create with different media, we all have the same challenges as far as managing our time, paying our bills and nurturing relationships with our friends and families.”
Mireles says the parties also provide opportunities for people to discover places they might not otherwise visit, like the Madison Circus Space or an artist’s studio.
Mireles and Crownover, as well as some other individuals and organizations, including Dane Arts, have donated funds to support the parties. Monthly venue hosts now also provide snacks and beverages, but the parties are free to guests.
Mireles and Crownover are active hosts. “We look for all the lost people, connect them with someone and they start talking,” says Mireles. “And then they are still talking, 10 minutes later.”
The setup of the parties is intentional, with connection in mind. “There is never a presentation and rarely music because people want to talk,” says Crownover.
“People are having conversations and people are listening,” agrees Mireles. “There are very few spaces anywhere where that happens.”
Crownover says the parties fill a void. “I feel like there is no consistent face-to-face, person-to-person, support network for a lot of the artists in Madison and this provides that, as well as attracting people from all groups, ethnicities, cultural groups and artistic disciplines together in one space.”
First Art Party Happy Hour:
Overture Center, Sept. 27, 2018
Average party attendance:
75-125
Largest party:
approximately 200, MMoCA, Oct. 22, 2019
Party where guests could hula hoop:
Madison Circus Space, Nov. 12, 2019
Party with face painters:
Centro Hispano, Dia de Los Muertos, Nov. 1, 2022
