Extra Helpings: Why Austin Restaurants Make Excellent “Gallery Spaces” For Local Artists

Artists 🤝🏻 Restaurants

When it comes to visual art, Austin doesn’t enjoy the same lofty reputation as Houston. H-Town is home to an active and dynamic art scene with world-class museums, esteemed galleries, and abundant street art, and although Austin’s street art landscape is on-point and its gallery network is small but mighty, opportunities for local visual artists pale in comparison to those available to local musicians and comedians.

But Austin restaurants are eager to change that by offering up their wall space to painters, collagists, and photographers. To get a sense of how Austin’s hospitality industry and its creative community work together for mutual benefit and what they can do in the future to strengthen their partnerships, we caught up with a couple of notable eateries that famously display local art and an artist who’s been showing at Austin restaurants for more than ten years.

Local art and locally owned restaurants have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship in Austin for generations, and different venues feature different styles. More old-school spots like Chez Zee in Hyde Park and Bouldin Creek Cafe in Bouldin Creek stick to a classic approach of displaying framed art on their walls gallery-style, while venues like Zoé Tong in Zilker and Jo’s on South Congress embrace street art on their exterior walls (in the case of Jo’s, their famous “I love you so much” mural has become an integral part of Austin graffiti culture). Some hospitality businesses use their wall space as a staging ground for employee art; at Central Machine Works in East Austin, a space that regularly shows work from Austin artists, their annual summertime Employee Art Shows are a must-visit for neighborhood art enthusiasts and are evidence of CMW’s close and personal relationship to Austin’s creative community.