For profit business

Thank You For Coming

The first milestone we reached was opening our doors December 5, 2012. After 9 months of fundraising, drawing, re-drawing, building, permitting, re-permitting, installing, inspecting, re-building, re-installing, and re-inspecting, we opened as a fully permitted restaurant, allowing us to legally sell food to the public. Throughout the process, our friends and neighbors continuously offered their hands and tools, making it possible to finish, install, and outfit TYFC for under $20,000. We’ve begun building a volunteer force and forged dozens of relationships, enabling us to source local produce, accept time dollars as currency, or offer a class on the History of Art and Food. We are proud to have hosted 3 diverse residency projects by multidisciplinary artists who each contextualized food in a different manner through their work at TYFC-- Cristina Victor/ L.A.Novela Special: "As the daughter of Cuban-American exiles born and raised in Miami, exile experience is at the root of my desire to contextualize a sense of cultural displacement. Through performance/food events, I create environments where parody, contradiction and nostalgia are ingredients to addressing the complexities of representing identity. My practice often involves appropriating stereotypes present in mass media, specifically about Latinos, through my alter ego Miami. By way of humor, kitschy aesthetics, and 'authentic' food, I intend to seduce people into a situation in which they are immersed in stereotypes that are familiar yet very clearly performed." Jennifer June Strawn/Superstition & Sustenance: "Reportedly, superstitious belief is on the rise in modern society, neck-and-neck, it seems, with an ever-widening faith in scientific fact. The purpose of this project is to examine the mechanism of superstition, its role in our private and public lives, and its relevance. As sensitive creatures vulnerable to the harsh realities of the world we live in, superstition, as a complicated system of smoke-and-mirrors—regardless of its actual efficacy—is necessary to our survival as a species. Through the scope of whimsy, play, and humor, my mission is to present superstition in the form of food and food-for-thought." Japanther/69¢ Only: "In our research, we found that a nickel in 1930 is valued, coincidentally, at 69¢ today. But while automats used to provide public dignity for pennies on the dollar, in 2013, questions about value, quality and service are still highly contended. Our intention in creating a 69¢ Only store is to provide a place where people can eat and hang out affordably in LA. We’re challenging ourselves to fully consider the costs and value of things that are too-often omitted in the conversation: labor, modern manufacturing processes, etc. It is without a doubt that we will need to rely on creative resource gathering, careful proportioning, DIY processes, and the generosity of friends and strangers to realize a 69¢ Only store."

1 Submitted Idea

  • 2013 Grants Challenge

    We are an experimental food and art space in Los Angeles.

    Thank You For Coming is an experimental food and art space in Los Angeles that opened its doors to the public in December 2012. We are a collectively-run and permitted restaurant -- this means that our crew rotates through volunteer and artist residency programs which offer people with varying interests and skills opportunities to cook for the public, play with a space, and experiment accordingly. By presenting these opportunities and their resulting ideas in a permanent and public restaurant space, we are able to provide accessible, unexpected, and participatory cultural experiences for Los Angeles residents. By intentionally operating Thank You For Coming as a place that draws ambiguous lines between art space, community center and food facility, we want to demonstrate that arts and cultural vitality can thrive in everyday spaces and via the endeavors of everyday life -- in our case, as it pertains to the basic acts of eating and feeding and through the universal medium of food. This school of thought can help move Los Angeles towards providing access to arts for all because its low-barrier process invites the populace to create and participate in its own creative experiences, thereby encouraging the proliferation of autonomous cultural production in countless pockets of the city, whether occurring in living rooms, neighborhoods, restaurants, libraries, parks or parking lots. Thank You For Coming was conceived and built on dreams, lots of people power, and a highly-involved collaborative process. We are a rag-tag crew of teachers, builders, scientists, gardeners, activists, and artists, but we are all firm believers that we have the ability to harness our own creativity and bring attention to it through careful resource appropriation and a do-it-together, collaborative approach -- which means that in the process, we are creating our own culture (and sometimes, economy) and building our own community. For as long as we remain open, we are committed to figuring out different ways we can transfer this empowering outlook to as many participants as possible.