INSTALLATION/DISTILLATION
Shmidt Spirits Presents
Art Space and Marketplace — October 16, 2021
When Arthur and I first began to build out the empty warehouse space that was to become the Shmidt Spirits Distillery, one of the most daunting aspects of it was its sheer emptiness. It was a blank slate, all concrete floors and white walls. Of course some of it would be filled with the machinery of our industry—the boilers and fermenters, the still and barrels—but there was still just a whole lot of… nothing. Everywhere we turned we saw blank walls, waiting for us to do something with them, to turn them from vast empty barriers into something more.
To the largest wall in the tasting room we added a mural of the distillation process, expertly and improbably hand-chalked by my friend Brittany Herbinko, an artist from Baltimore. In the Lounge I hung up photographs I took of the long process of building out the distillery. Each of these additions didn’t just break up the expansive void of the empty space, they also brought character and meaning to the spaces they adorned.
Brittany Herbinko creating the Distillation Process chalk mural in our Tasting Room.
It didn’t take long for me to pitch the idea to Arthur: We will never fill up all this space on our own, but what if we didn’t do it alone? We could invite local artists to hang their work on our (plentiful) blank walls, to invite their friends to see what they’d done and to show off to people who stopped by to sample our spirits and tour and facilities. It would turn us from just a distillery into something more—an art space, a community hub. We’d longed to throw all kinds of events in our distillery from the outset, so the idea was instantly embraced, and we assumed we would be able to launch this art space in the middle of the following year.
That year was 2020.
At this point I feel like just saying “2020” acts as its own kind of explanation and excuse for all kinds of delays and setbacks. The Year of COVID wasn’t exactly the right time to go around trying to launch a massive in-person event drawing people from (hopefully) all over the DMV. So we put the idea on the backburner, made hand sanitizer, and struggled to stay afloat, as every business and artist did over the past year and a half.
Arthur Shmidt hand-labelling hand sanitizer.
When the vaccine started rolling out and the cabin fever reached its breaking point, Arthur and I sat down at the tasting room table and agreed that now was the time to once again start thinking of events to throw. Having seen friends of mine all over the internet strike up small shops and art projects over the course of the pandemic, I knew instantly what my first pitch would be:
But the next idea out of my mouth was: what about that art gallery thing?
From there, I reached out to my friend Joanna Salerno, who I had known in college and of whose art I had always been a fan. I pitched her the idea, and she immediately took my barebones idea and ran with it. What had originally been conceived as “how about you come and show off some of your art?” was suddenly so much more. Suddenly one artist became a whole slate of them. A single record player turned into live bands. And we’re just getting started.
Tickets to the event are on sale now, at a steep discount to early birds. We’ll be announcing artists and musical acts in mid-to-late August. Follow us on social media to keep up-to-date on all of the new announcements and additions to the lineup as they happen.
We’re excited to be back in action and finally bring our distillery to its full potential as a space for people to come together and celebrate art in all its forms, and we hope you join us!