Lite + Brite’s Guide to Austin Studio Tour 2024

Austin Studio Tour may be this city’s weirdest and wildest times for events. You can witness things like sparks-flying welding taking place to light applause amongst a chill kegger, a UFO bar staffed by aliens, or a fake record store complete with fake records—all activities we’ve taken part in during past years.

AST is a collection of hundreds of FREE events and art shows that take place over two weekends of November (Nov. 9-10 and 16-17) at venues throughout the city. These venues include traditional art studios and galleries, but also ordinary people’s houses and yards, theaters, office buildings, parks, condemned buildings, and anyplace else you can think of. Here’s a map of all the official spaces. Artwork is for sale everywhere at a huge range of price points, or it doesn’t cost anything just to explore and admire.

The best way to do AST is to park once, walk to every nearby art space, and just see what you find. This approach once led us into some random girl’s apartment and we wound up hanging out there for like an hour. It’s still unclear whether she was in fact an official Studio Tour stop or whether she just wanted company, but either way she fed us chips and tea, so it was an hour well spent.

There’s more to AST than one person can ever do; like SXSW, you just have to come to peace with the fact that you will never see it all and appreciate whatever it is that you do see. Here are some of the stops we’re going to try to prioritize, though there are certainly many, many more that are worthwhile that we’re not even aware of.

If you want to go on an organized journey from one studio space to the next, Ride Bikes Austin is leading a cycling tour to three studios. Almost Real Things is running their annual ART bus tour to three different studios every day of AST. Or you could just go straight to Almost Real Things HQ and check out their art market.

2324 Studios, a beautiful arts space which is managed by Almost Real Things, will this year for AST be hosting 30+ artists as well as flash tattoos, free drinks, live demos, and an art installation by the Paper Committee (a local artist whose work we like so much that we bought some at a previous year’s AST!).

Grackle House has mastered the art of a good Studio Tour stop. Live music, free drinks, backyard animals, bird-related videos, poetry, tons of artists, and good vibes, all at a cool Austin family’s home.

Bolm Arts is a great one-stop shop. One year we saw some artist do a “virtual hot dog speedrun” here. This year they’ll have 25+ artists and “the crow’s nest: a micro gallery incubator for experimental art and media installation.”

You know we love to see spaces being used in unexpected ways, which is why we are big fans of Good Dad Studios, a boring old office building that’s been turned into vibrant studio space for 130+ artists.

Co-Lab Projects always has cool site-specific art, and this year is no exception, as 10 artists are displaying work in and around their culvert.

Speaking of unique spaces, Sweatt House Art Gallery is in this gorgeous 1880s home in East Austin, and the Studio Tour gives you the opportunity to see about a dozen artists’s work in there, plus you get to see inside a historic home, which I love.

Alternatively: who needs real space?! The Displacement Collective is a VR experience connecting “a freestanding doorway at a physical location with its mirror image in a virtual environment.”

Highland Collective is a big warehouse which was home to our favorite installation during 2022’s AST (you can still visit its website, though sadly the installation itself is long gone). This year they promise wall-to-wall balloon sculptures.

It is extremely unclear what will be happening at Factory on 5th. According to their AST page: “Factory on 5th will feature the a means of communicating dada-punk philosophy utilizing postmodern-multimedia in a style of existential-expressionism. That’s one way to say it, all the other ways to say the damn thing are not expressed with words.”

Thee Gay Agenda is producing “an immersive art experience that celebrates the creative vision of trans artists – showcasing a diverse range of mediums through performance, visual art, and installations.”

Those are just some spaces that we’ve liked in the past or that have caught our eye this year, but know that there are countless others that could be every bit as good. Go click around the Studio Tour map—or just start walking—and see what you find. And if you come across anything great, tell us about it, and we’ll be sure to spread the word (or at least to check it out for ourselves).