Today we’d like to introduce you to Christopher McGeorge.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I grew up in Petoskey, a small town in Northern Michigan. I’ve spent most of my life working and in school–both places where I’ve nourished my passion for art, history, poetry, fantasy novels, and cooking.
I moved to Los Angeles for graduate school in 2012 and shortly after came out of the closet. Finding a large queer community in LA made me realize the power of organization, community building, and visibility. It was a real turning point for me, not only personally, but also intellectually. I became much more interested in public spaces, who gets to occupy those spaces without comment, who get to structure and create artworks for those spaces, and who gets to be represented within those artworks. I also became more interested in who “counts” when we use words like “the public” and how that has changed over time.
In 2019, I finished a PhD in Art History at USC, with graduate certificates in Digital Media & Culture and Visual Studies. That’s probably not the route most people take to starting a free bakery, becoming a lead project manager for a cooperative video game and illustration studio, and directing development for an arts organization. But all of my pursuits have community building at their core. Sometimes I build that community through a mural or creating fair artistic labor practices. Sometimes it’s built by a loaf of bread.
While I was working towards my degree and writing about 19th-century British art, I joined COlabs, an LA-based arts organization that produces murals and public art installations. In addition to local work, we have an ongoing partnership with Flint Public Art Project in Flint, Michigan. I write grant applications and we source muralists from around the world to support their programming. In 2019, Flint Public Art Project funded over 100 new murals in their city and hosted an international mural festival. COVID has certainly altered our 2020 plans, but we’ve still been able to produce some great murals. This summer, we also introduced technology from PixelStix that lets viewers register to vote by scanning our murals.
Directly after completing my degree, I was fortunate enough to meet Eli Allen, who founded Wild Blue Studios. Wild Blue creates illustrations, digital art assets, and entertainment art, primarily for video games. It has been a privilege to work as a core member alongside Eli and Mitch Malloy, Becca Hallstedt, Forrest Imel, and Madeleine Julyk. As a cooperative, Wild Blue continually works to eliminate exploitative labor practices in the arts industry. In addition to the fair labor structure we provide through the cooperative, we’ve been growing our outreach efforts and provide monthly portfolio reviews for artists around the world.
Has it been a smooth road?
I’m proud that I’ve found a way for public art, cooperatively produced entertainment art, and baking to sit comfortably together in my life. The challenge is always time. There’s not enough of it to do everything I want in a day. It’s definitely a struggle to balance sometimes, and I’ve spent many 16-hour days running between the kitchen and my desk. I’ve scaled back some of the baking, but I always have to fight my impulse to scale back up. I’m trying to get better at operating in a middle ground, rather than swinging from all-in to nothing. Overall, I’ve enjoyed finding solutions to merge baking, business, art, and equity.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
At the start of COVID, I felt immensely helpless as I watched friends lose jobs and some of my favorite places close, creating uncertainty for people I cared about. I am lucky that Wild Blue has always been a remote studio (we have artists across the US and Europe) and that the pandemic has not severely impacted our business. I was looking for ways to leverage my own security to provide something to others who were out of work.
A little over a decade ago, I was a pastry cook at a small restaurant called Galley Gourmet. While it no longer exists, I used to make all of their breakfast pastries from scratch, as well as the bread for their sandwiches and the dough for their stone-fired pizzas. I decided to dust off and lean into those skills in an effort to support my community. I sent messages to people I knew who were out of work and to friends who lived alone and might find social distancing difficult or lonely. I set up a system and scheduled interested people to stop by my front gate at specific times. I have a hoard of canvas tote bags, which I wash and take straight from the dryer, fill them with fresh baked goods, and sling over the gate. People then stop by, grab some goods, and we enjoy a socially distant chat.
I started ordering bulk bags of flour from cooking supply vendors. I went through two or three vendors before finding Central Milling, which makes really amazing flour. Since March, I’ve been making bread, bagels, cinnamon rolls, croissants, cookies, donuts, pasta, and more. At one point, it was getting too hot to run the oven in my house, which doesn’t have central air. So I purchased a Roccbox pizza oven for the back yard. Sometimes instead of bread, I’ll sling pizzas across the fence.
I’ve lost count, but I’ve given out food to around forty or fifty people. In my busiest week, I gave out 32 loaves of bread, 48 cinnamon rolls, 120 bagels, six dozen cookies, and a lot of ravioli and pasta. To date, I’ve gone through over 500 pounds of flour. It’s mostly been bread flour, but I’ve also used all purpose, semolina, whole wheat, rye, and rice flour.
I wrap each loaf of bread in brown paper and then tie it up with embroidery thread. I like to stick a small flower from one of my garden pots in it too- usually heliotrope, because it’s my favorite. I asked my friend, Marcella Riley, to design a label for the bread. It was important to me that it feels like it was something official like it came from a bakery, but a bakery made for the people in my community. I’m calling the project Gateway Bread- in part because of the socially distant process of hanging the bread on my front gate, but also because I hope that the project leads me to think of other ways to support my community.
I’ve never charged for anything, and if I’m offered any money, I ask for it to be donated to the Gofundme page for 1642. I started all of this because I believe in community and in the power of food to sustain and revitalize it. There’s a quote I love by Yemisí Aríbisálà: “That which you eat enters your whole being, finds its way into your soul and touches your dreams.” I try to keep that in mind when I’m cooking for others. I really want the food I make to look, feel, and taste like a gift so the people I give it to know that I see them and care about them.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Oh, I’m quite smitten and very biased about LA… I’m probably not the best to answer this question. I’m very lucky that none of the work I do restricts me to this city. Even before COVID, Wild Blue Studios was completely remote- our members and contractors are spread across multiple cities and countries. COlabs has produced public art projects around the US and Europe. And while I suppose I could move my free bakery anywhere, there is something special about the people I’ve met that makes me want to do it here. While I don’t have to stay in LA to continue doing the work I do, I can’t imagine leaving. LA is a city full of people who start new creative enterprises, and that’s an exciting environment to be part of. I have watched friends and others launch galleries, studios, regularly occurring comedy shows, Etsy shops, short film festivals, art walks, poetry workshops and more. Often with little more than the will power and desire to do so. LA is a city full of creatives in action. But if you’re looking for some improvements? We could start with lower rents and a people’s budget.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.co-labs.us
Image Credit:
Kurtis Myers, Kendra Atkin, Marcella Riley
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