Copyright The Austin Chronicle
Under loom-woven trees and on handstitched gardens, Iris Kwon’s whimsical renditions of Austin artists row kayaks with paintbrushes and rev motorbikes into boomboxes, interpolating a community of creatives into colorful characters – fitting for the 2025 Austin Studio Tour guidebook. “It’s almost like everybody’s going to a playground, and meeting everybody, and having a good time,” Kwon says. “I wanted this studio tour to have a festive feeling to it.” That jubilant feeling is in the air all across Austin as the annual free showcase of local art opens Nov. 8-9 and 15-16 for its 23rd year. When original tour founders Big Medium announced their closing in February, many Austin artists and fans worried that this colorful festival would fade away. Almost Real Things (ART) picked up the paints and palette in their stead, preparing the citywide canvas for its largest-yet celebratory cruise of creative spaces with 722 participating artists in 319 locations, and a few new additions. Kwon, a Georgetown-based artist who creates vibrant eccentric works under the name Child Appetite, is a first-time tour participant thanks to expansive policies implemented by the tour’s new stewards. Her at-home studio sits just outside the city limits, and finding an Austin ZIP-code-host for her paintings felt out of reach in the past. ART had a sense that lots of artists were stuck in similar spots. Expanding opportunities for artists to show their work was one of their first priorities. “We didn’t want not having a space to show your art to be a barrier to participating,” says ART co-founder Natalie Earhart. “Affordable space for art in general is hard in Austin.” An artist friend told Kwon about the adaptation, and she jumped at the chance to be a part of the tour. “I was super excited,” she says with a little laugh. She’ll be hosted by ART themselves. During the application process, Earhart, already a fan of Kwon’s work, asked her to illustrate the guidebook cover. “Since Almost Real Things is actually a publishing magazine organization, they really liked the analog version of the booklet for artists,” Kwon explains. With over 300 pages of artist information, curated tours, and an expansive map of all the participating spaces, the guidebook is one of ART’s favorite innovations on the beloved studio tour tradition. They imagine loyal art-trail trekkers collecting the guides, each future one featuring a different cover artist and an updated directory of Austin artists. “The whole tour is just this giant ray of sunshine,” says ART’s other co-founder, Zachary Zulch. “This is like the culmination of that 10-year process that we’ve been building. It’s a half passion project, half [what] we built a business around.” “It’s all very surreal for us,” Earhart adds. “We’ve participated in the studio tour for the past eight years as artists, then as event organizers, and we even worked with Big Medium for some of the marketing, so we were very familiar with the logistics of the tour.” Still, Earhart, Zulch, and their team started from scratch, reading over past surveys and sending out fresh applications. They expanded the tour to two citywide weekends, offering artists more flexibility to set their own schedule, with more evening events and earlier studio openings. To help make all that variation accessible, they created an online directory in addition to the physical guidebook, where attendees can search for spaces by hours, type, and activity. The message, to artists and attendees alike, is simple, and eloquently summarized by Kwon herself in the title of her vibrant guidebook illustration: You Are Always Welcome in Our Playground. This article appears in November 7 • 2025.
