KIP Keepers
Words by Michael Wilmarth
In 1928, Virginia Woolf gave a lecture at Girton College, a women’s constituent college of Cambridge. She was speaking to students whose assigned sex at birth presented a significant hurdle in the pursuit of their writing careers. What you need to write fiction, she argued, was space and money. The thesis of her talk would become the basis of the essential 20th century feminist text “A Room of One’s Own” the following year.
Perhaps one reason her essay still persists today is its broad applicability. While Woolf was speaking specifically about intellectual freedom and its material counterparts, the “have” versus “have-not nature” of the conflict was universal. What was once true for female authors is often true for many others: there is a reality to the gatekeeping of art, where creations, brands and writing meet stark pushback from decision makers based on tired and archaic traditional practices.
On Milwaukee Avenue, just around the corner from the Western Blue Line stop, KIP Studios has a room where many Chicago makers have found their footing. Mel Foley and Chris Elliott, who live in the Bucktown apartment building, founded the attached studio space in 2019 and began rolling out events that brought the varied and vital atmosphere of Chicago’s creative community together.
“It has to be accessible,” Elliott said of the studio. “That’s the whole point. That’s our whole mission.”
Elliott and Foley sat down for a Zoom interview in front of the studio’s tall, glass windows. Behind them, ferns hung from the ceiling and white walls marked the shadowy background back. “We don’t want to turn people away because it’s not our brand or whatever,” Elliott said. “Everything is KIP. There’s nothing that isn’t able to fit in here.”
Cost is an important part of accessibility, and many new artists don’t have much money to spend on shows or market slots. Brands like Dose, which came into the scene in 2011, focused on sustainability but were known to accept only established vendors—and the fee could be hefty. Foley remembered thinking that something more accessible could be set up for beginners with less capital.
“If these things can be scaled up, they can also be scaled down,” Foley said.
Foley and Elliott met at Columbia University in Chicago. Foley studied art administration and Elliott, marketing. Foley and some roommates had moved into a Bucktown loft her sophomore year. She described it as gray and dingy, like a warehouse. It sounded like a good, low-maintenance place for college students, and the extra space made it great for college parties. For a couple years, students circulated aimlessly between the rooms, decompressing after weeks of study and work. But, eventually, ideas began to take shape.
“It was like, okay, how can we get this community of people that clearly love this space and want to gather—how can we do that in a productive way? What’s the common ground here?” Foley said. “I think that was always art.”
In November 2019, after weeks of intense painting and prepping, Foley and Elliott put out the call for artists under the name Modern Market. To their surprise, they received hundreds of responses. When 35 of those applicants set up in their apartment, it stretched the building’s capacity to its limits. Even by pre-pandemic standards, it was packed. They charged on a sliding scale based on each artist’s means, and that averaged to about $20 a person. The pair had no low expectations for the number of guests, but turnout mirrored the enthusiasm of the applicants, perhaps because of the holidays.
“We said ‘if 40 people walk through the door, great.’” Elliott said. “But at the end of the day, we had close to 300 guests come through and shop.”
November’s bustling market encouraged Foley and Elliott to pursue more ambitious events the following year. Romantique, a love-sex-romance themed event, featured a dominatrix who took guests into a room to “play” while guests watched from outside. There was a “seven minutes in heaven” room where guests sat on a couch and watched a video while a timer counted them down. Proceeds went to the Chicago Period Project, which helps underprivileged residents with access to sanitary products.
Romantique and the following events that year were themed and aired the unique vision of its hosts more than the general markets. The events curated exciting, outré fixtures and made them feel comforting and familiar. It was an opportunity to see through the eyes of two friends who inhabited beautiful spaces and had good relationships with the people in them.
I have long wondered what product Elliott and Foley offer and realized it’s more than just the extra space. Many people have white rooms. Few have the personalities to fill them.
The first event I attended at KIP was Pasta Night. A facebook ad led me down that dark stretch of Milwaukee Ave. where I would first meet Foley and Elliott. Side by side, they moved about the event welcoming their guests. Foley talked quickly and emphatically, Elliott more slowly and deliberately. It’s a striking balance that has served the studio well. Foley churns out big ideas, Elliott widdels them down. They finish each other’s sentences and have recently synchronized their tooth-brushing schedules.
Pasta Night was one event in a series where various comedians improved around a crockpot of pasta sauce that was served with noodles at the intermission. Between acts, the two MCs, dressed in flat caps and suspenders, carried on a hilarious throughline that the fate of the whole night, perhaps the whole world, depended on keeping the other from ruining the sauce. The pair improvised passionately, stumbled frequently, and thrilled the small crowd. Walking onto the stage to eat felt a little like communion and a lot like catching dinner at a friend’s house. When the performances wrapped up, guests lingered on couches and talked while The Godfather projected silently on the wall and trains rumbled by, outside in the dark. On the cold commute home, a gratitude burned in me that I had been present, at the beginning nonetheless, of something unmistakably precious.
Not long after, COVID-19 shut down the city, and with it the visions that KIP Studios had planned on bringing to life. Eventually, they were able to begin to rent the space for contained photo and video shoots, and in February they hosted their first guest event—masked and limited to 15 people at a time, but a step in the right direction.
One reason for their success could be that Foley and Elliott have dreams not unlike those of their guests. Like the artists that set up shop in their loft, the Kip Keepers are also chasing a dream that they are simultaneously creating. After separating for a time and working for both corporate and independent brands and designers (Foley stayed in Chicago, Elliott went to Miami), Foley and Elliott reunited in Chicago.
“You're working for someone else's dream,” Foley said. What they were looking for, it seemed, could not exactly be found anywhere else.
The pair’s time together hasn’t been without failures, but a little bit of perspective has kept them moving when things turned out differently than they expected.
“I learned that you have to not be afraid to fail,” Foley said. “Nothing is truly a failure. If you see it as a failure because you didn’t make a profit, or because people didn’t show up, you’re not looking at it from the perspective you need to [in order] to grow.”
Toward the end of our interview, Foley and Elliott told me about an artist who set up at one of the events they held in their debut year. Rachel Ward, a Chicago ceramicist, has been with KIP throughout their journey. Last Christmas, when KIP arranged gift boxes filled with art from local Chicago artists, they did some reminiscing. After the first event, Ward said they had customers and mused that there were people walking through the world wearing their product.
“I love that story,” Elliott said. “We had nothing to do with their pottery, right? We just invited them here, and they did the rest.”
