Art House Grandview

Art House Grandview Art House Grandview provides opportunities and support to local artists across all disciplines.

Wendell Berry died today, at 92, at his home in Kentucky.If you've spent any real time around Art House Grandview, you'v...
09/01/2026

Wendell Berry died today, at 92, at his home in Kentucky.

If you've spent any real time around Art House Grandview, you've felt him here even if you never heard his name — he's been one of Josh's heroes for years, and his writing has shaped how this place has grown. Berry spent his life making the case for rootedness in a culture built for the opposite: work done slowly, by hand, with your actual neighbors. A place worth being loyal to. Attention as its own kind of art. That case has been under everything we've tried to build here.

Josh posted something this morning that you should know about, because you're part of what we're building here. In it, this Kentucky farmer became one of the most important voices in his life — how he thinks, how he loves his family, how he runs a company, and why he and his wife started an art center "in a town nobody drives to on purpose."

That's Grandview. That's this place.

If you've got 20 minutes, it's worth watching — it's not really a eulogy, more of a thank-you:
Wendell Berry Profoundly Impacted My Life | 1934–2026 | What He Taught Me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PooaNncg0QA

Wendell ended one of his poems with a line worth repeating: "Practice resurrection." This can apply to a town like ours.

Grateful for his sentences, and for the way he asked us to live. Rest well, Mr. Berry.

Go read some of his work. Then go for a walk.

You asked. We added a class.Fantasy & Character Drawing filled up almost as fast as we could open registration — so we b...
09/01/2026

You asked. We added a class.

Fantasy & Character Drawing filled up almost as fast as we could open registration — so we built a second section.

NEW: Saturdays, 11:00 AM–12:00 PM, Sep 12–Oct 17.

Dragons, heroes, and worlds of your own. Tweens and teens (ages 11–17) design original characters and fantasy scenes with instructor Jacob Morgan — building real drawing fundamentals like anatomy, expression, and dynamic posing along the way. Into anime, comics, or concept art? You'll leave with characters that are unmistakably yours.

$60 for the 6-week session. Some drawing experience helps, but it isn't required. Scholarships available.

714 Main St, Grandview. Link in bio to register — Saturday spots won't last long.

The first play we ever put on our stage is now here!The Curious Savage — a widow with ten million dollars, three stepchi...
08/31/2026

The first play we ever put on our stage is now here!

The Curious Savage — a widow with ten million dollars, three stepchildren who want it, and a sanatorium full of people who turn out to be the sanest in the room.

Directed by Alice Scott. Recorded live on the Art House stage. The whole thing, start to finish, free on YouTube.

Link in bio.

08/28/2026

He shook my hand with his left hand.”
Boni Tolson taught a sixth grader poetry. That was many years ago. Years later she was reading poems out loud to a room of young people and one of them came up to her and said he had been looking for her everywhere.
He reached out with his left hand. She thought it was odd. Then he raised his right arm and there was no hand there.
He had lost it in an accident, and he had come to tell her that the poems she used to read got him through it.
Nobody plans for that. You just keep showing up and reading out loud to whoever is in the room. Art House Grandview is on Main Street in Grandview, twenty minutes south of Kansas City, and this is the whole reason we keep the lights on — neighbors making real things where their neighbors can see them.
Come find us — link in bio.

08/28/2026

“I’m not hungry. I’m not thirsty. I’m not anything.”

That is Boni Tolson describing what happens to her when she paints. Hours go by. She does not notice.

She painted for about ten years straight, hardly writing at all. Now it is pretty much writing, and the same thing happens — she says she has had to learn how to stop.
You do not get that from a screen. You get it from a table, a room, and a couple of hours nobody is asking you to account for. That is what Art House Grandview on Main Street in Grandview is for, twenty minutes south of Kansas City. Neighbors making real things where their neighbors can see them.

All of her art heals. That is her line, not ours.
Come find us — link in bio.

Nobody is going to pay you for it. Make it anyway.Somewhere along the way we decided a thing is only worth doing if you ...
08/28/2026

Nobody is going to pay you for it. Make it anyway.
Somewhere along the way we decided a thing is only worth doing if you are good at it or it earns something. So people quit. The guitar goes in the closet. The sketchbook has four pages filled and eighty blank.

Here is the case for making something badly, on purpose, for no reason.
You cannot scroll and draw at the same time. Making something takes your hands and your attention at once, and for that hour nothing else gets them. Every painting is the receipt for hours that happened.

Then there is the room. The Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory reported that about half of U.S. adults experience loneliness, and that it carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking roughly fifteen ci******es a day. We lost the places people went for no particular reason. In a world that lost its third places, we built one out of art.
Wendell Berry wrote that “a good community is a good local economy” (S*x, Economy, Freedom & Community, 1993). Belonging is the word.
You do not have to be an artist. You have to show up with your hands free.

Come make something at Art House Grandview in Grandview, Missouri, just south of Kansas City. Details at the link in our bio.

Send this to the person who keeps saying they used to…

Where do you go that isn’t work or home?Dinner comes to the door now. The movie comes to the couch. The people you would...
08/24/2026

Where do you go that isn’t work or home?

Dinner comes to the door now. The movie comes to the couch. The people you would have run into somewhere are in a group chat instead. None of it is bad on its own, and all of it together means there is no reason to leave the house. For most of us the whole list is down to work and home.

So we made somewhere else for you to go. Open Studio at Art House Grandview is a room at 714 Main Street in Grandview, Missouri with the door open and the tables cleared off. You sit down with people you mostly don’t know, all working on different things. Somebody is sewing. Somebody is drawing. Somebody brought a laptop and isn’t making anything at all.

Here is how it works. Two o’clock to eight. Come for twenty minutes or stay for all six hours. There is no sign-up, nothing to pay, and nobody is checking credentials.

So bring the thing you started and stopped — the one in a bag somewhere. Or take an idea and start something.

That’s the whole idea. Neighbors making things together.

Open Studio at Art House Grandview is tomorrow — Tuesday, August 25, 2:00 to 8:00 PM. 714 Main Street, Grandview, Missouri.

What would you finish if you had six hours and a big table?

The lighter came before the match.In 1823 a German chemist made fire with hydrogen and platinum. A working lighter. Nobo...
08/21/2026

The lighter came before the match.

In 1823 a German chemist made fire with hydrogen and platinum. A working lighter. Nobody struck a match until 1826. The complicated thing came first.

And then the match won anyway. Not because it was advanced — because everyone could hold one.

We think about this a lot at Art House Grandview. It is tempting to chase the polished version, the one that impresses the room. But the work that actually moves a community is usually the cheapest to give away.

Make the match. Not the lamp.

Open Studio is Tuesday, August 25, 2:00 to 8:00 PM at 714 Main Street in Grandview, just south of Kansas City. It is free. No sign-up, no skill level. Bring whatever you're in the middle of, or come start something.

Written by Josh Scott. Make Things is our weekly essay — anyone can subscribe, from anywhere.

Tag the person who is overbuilding the thing they should just ship.

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714 Main Street
Grandview, MO
64030

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