Lawrence Art Guild studio tour opens artists’ workspaces to public

A sculpture-filled yard in Old West Lawrence and an alley studio behind an Illinois Street home gave the Lawrence Art Guild’s Art Spaces tour its most memorable stops, turning city blocks into a self-guided map of where Lawrence art is made.

The free tour ran Saturday, May 2, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, May 3, from noon to 6 p.m., with the guild describing it as an open-studio event that invited visitors into artists’ homes, studios and other working spaces across Lawrence and surrounding Douglas County. The guild’s event listing said the 2026 tour included 45 artists at 21 locations, while another local report put the count at 20 stops and more than 50 artists, reflecting the way individual sites often held more than one creator.

That format gave the tour a citywide, open-house feel rather than a standard gallery crawl. In Old West Lawrence, Nick Schmeidler welcomed visitors into a yard packed with sculptures made from salvaged metal and wood, the result of what he called a longtime “full-time hobby” that grew from years of collecting parts from junkyards, flea markets and other discarded sources. Schmeidler said he is drawn to materials that catch his eye and then lets the pieces evolve from there, often welding or assembling them without a rigid plan. His work also carried a built-in local memory: his Lawrence home and art were featured on HGTV’s “Home Strange Home” in December 2012.

Another stop highlighted a different side of the same idea. Dave Loewenstein and his son, Andrés, hosted visitors in an alleyway studio behind their home at 645 Illinois St., showing how the tour reaches spaces that usually stay hidden from view. Loewenstein moved into his longtime East Lawrence studio at 411 E. Ninth St. in 1997 after leaving his bakery job at WheatFields, and a 2023 profile described that space as a collaborative hub for nearly 30 years. His East Lawrence Waltz mural at Hobbs Park, completed in 2006, reflects the same community-minded approach that made his studio a natural fit for the tour.

The Lawrence Art Guild, founded in 1962 by a small volunteer group of Lawrence residents and recognized as a Kansas 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 1990, has long framed its work as promoting and growing the visual arts in the community. Art Spaces fit that mission by letting residents meet artists, see the creative process up close and buy directly from local makers, keeping more of that economic value rooted in neighborhood life.