Fresh Filter: Northwest Coffee and Chronicle Coffee's Spring Art Exhibition

Northwest and Chronicle have new art in all three stores! The show was curated by baristas Rachael and Katie. They scheduled the art to change in all stores simultaneously, and held one opening representing all artists. The opening was at Chronicle on April 11th. Their mission is to get work by contemporary local artists in the stores, in order to enhance the look and feel of each individual store.

Clayton
Annie Sayers’ work is brightening up the Clayton store. Annie is from Kansas City, and completed her BFA in Painting at Washington University in St. Louis. She will receive her Masters in Education this May. Annie’s work focuses on pattern and repetition within society, exemplified in her large scale paintings of crowd scenes and abstracted aerial views of urban areas. Her work questions the way that repetition within America flattens our lives as it flattens into pattern in her paintings.

Chronicle
Grace Hong’s work is in Chronicle Coffee. Grace is from Birmingham, Alabama, and completed her BFA in Printmaking at Washington University in St. Louis, and now works at the Regional Arts Commission in St. Louis. Her gouache paintings are constructed by her taking a screenshot of a street view image on google maps, then layering an image over it of a paper crane in the process of being folded. She then uses bright colors to paint in the pattern that has been created. These paintings are on cardboard, evoking the imagery itself – transient, easily destroyed, not archival. The paintings, set in the North City neighborhood where Chronicle is located, show how beauty and grace exist in within the abandoned buildings of our middle American city.

Central West End
Anya Liao’s work is in the Central West End store. Anya is from Wuhan, Houston, and Honolulu, and completed her BFA in Printmaking at Washington University in St. Louis. She currently works as a math teacher and afterschool teacher in St. Louis. Anya’s large scale charcoal drawings on fabric flutter in the breeze at the Central West End store and roastery, punctuated by her shrines scattered around the store. Her charcoal banners depict women balancing the harshness of this world with humor, and her shrines show regard for the accumulation of people and times. Anya’s work about race, ritual, and queer bodies resonates in the CWE store – a space that has been reappropriated several times for different uses, currently functioning as a workshop and store. Her work similarly carves out space for the traditionally marginalized, and honors them without ever losing a sense of humor and tenderness.