Brian Slattery Photos
Tuesday evening at Three Sheets on Elm Street found not a band onstage, but a vast assortment of paper with arrays of compelling images on them — from owls to goat people to skeletal horses, as well as letters, dingbats, and geometric shapes — along with scissors, pieces of cardboard, and glue sticks. The tables and chairs in the room were full of people using those materials to make collages — and try what Three Sheets and Hershey, Penn.-based brewer Tröegs Independent Brewing had to offer.
The collage-making comprised the latest installment of Brew & Glue, an event billed as a “DIY collage happy hour” held on the second Tuesday of every month at Three Sheets. Organized and facilitated by Ileana Garcia and Sara Scranton, hosted by Three Sheets, and sponsored by Tröegs, Brew & Glue offers free materials to make the collages, plus tickets for a raffle at the end of the evening. But mostly, it gives people a chance to try some beer — and express their artistic selves, whether they’re professional practicing artists (as some participants were) or just folks who want to make something cool on a Tuesday evening.
Garcia.
Garcia and Scranton came up with the idea of Brew & Glue in 2019 when Garcia was working at Hull’s Art Supply. “Three Sheets wanted to collaborate on an art-related event with Hull’s,” she said. Scranton “wanted something where people could drink while they did it, so painting was out,” she said with a laugh. “So I came up with this concept, which is that you have an opportunity to make a collage in a really chill setting. There’s no pressure to make one specific design, or one kind of thing.… Everyone can cut paper, and everyone can glue, so that sneaks up on people.” It’s not difficult, “but everything down from the choices they’re making, the selecting of the images, what they put it on, and how they arrange it — that’s creativity. It kind of sneaks up on them.”
Garcia and Scranton then reached out to Tröegs, who “very kindly became a sponsor for the event,” Garcia said. “They made it so that, if people are coming down here, they’re not just able to make a collage, but enjoy some great prices on beer. They also always bring something to give away.”
The first Brew & Glue happened in May 2019 and ran through February 2020 until it was, of course, interrupted by the pandemic shutdown. As Three Sheets began to run events again, Scranton contacted Garcia with the idea of reviving Brew and Glue. Garcia was game, and “Tröegs was still on board, so that made it easier to resuscitate it.” They started up again in May of this year and have been doing it steadily since.
Phil Marchello, the Connecticut sales representative for Tröegs, was on hand to support. “We were all for it and jumped right on in,” he said of both the initial run and its return after the shutdown. Tröegs has been supporting arts for at least two decades; its brewery in Hershey, Penn. has an art gallery in it, and the brewery runs art contests, including giving artists a chance to design labels for new flavors. “Being a big supporter of the arts, this was kind of a dream event for us. You know, feature a couple beers, have people get to know us, and support local arts.”
As people quickly filled the tables, covering them with art supplies, food, and drink, Garcia moved about the room to meet everyone and see how their work was progressing, and how they were using the materials she had brought. “I try really hard for people to have new stuff to work with every time,” Garcia said of the images she finds. “That’s where my involvement ends, because I’m not here to tell anybody what to make. I mostly just find the weird stuff that’s going to make them want to keep coming.”
Garcia scours public-domain archives for her images, whether from the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, or old books from the library. “A lot of stuff is from vintage card collectors, who scan their vintage cards and post them on the internet,” Garcia — as is the case for several of the holiday-themed images. For this holiday season, however, Garcia focused on “winter folklore,” she said. “You have your Krampus. You have your julbocken” — a Yule goat dating to pre-Christian Scandinavia. “There’s your snow princess. There are some weird demons from Finland that steal children in the night. I did my research on different traditions around the world so people can get exposed to new things. I don’t only want to give them the snowman and the Santa Claus. I want to give them something a little bit more.”
“A lot of creativity comes from just exposing yourself to new things,” Garcia added; it’s about “what you do with that information.”
Garcia delights in seeing “how many variations people make using the same set of images. You would think if everyone was getting the same set of images that the collages would look very similar, but they never do. They never look the same, and that’s my favorite part.”
Your reporter may have made his own collage, a perfectly normal piece comprised of goats, horse skulls, a man dressed as a goat creeping around the house to scare children, a staring eye, a globe, a few stained glass window illustrations, and a big, round owl head.
Behind me, one group of collagists was attending the event for the first time, and were taking to the task with gusto.
“I really like this snowman,” one artist said.
“Yeah,” Garcia said. “It reminds me of a snowman my grandmother would make.”
“Yeah,” the artist answered, “except evil.” They agreed it was the coal-black eyes that lent the image a tinge of malevolence.
“This is so therapeutic,” said another collagist as she cut paper.
In its bend toward unusual imagery and its celebration of doing things fast, in company, and maybe a little under the influence, the collage night is something of a tribute to the DIY aesthetic of punk zines from decades past — a look that has proven to have real legs.
“It’s what they had” to work with, Garcia said of her punk progenitors. “You don’t have to have fancy art materials. You don’t have to spend a lot of money.”
She also noted the way the aesthetic helps people lower their inhibitions to create. “I think a lot of people are scared to do things badly, and the punk rock zine scene is all about doing it badly. It takes the pressure off. People are free to do whatever they want to do without embarrassing themselves. Working at an art store, you get a lot of people coming in who say ‘I’m not creative, but I think this is a really cool thing and I want to try it.’ You may not feel like you’re creative, but the fact that you’re reaching out for that creative impulse and trying to feed it — that in and of itself makes you a creative person. Everybody has it in them, and anything I can do to feed that in people makes me happy.”
Brew & Glue happens every second Tuesday at Three Sheets, 372 Elm St., from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Materials provided free of charge.
