On Chestnut Avenue, a Building Is Slowly Turning Into a Portrait of the Neighborhood

A building at 1401 Chestnut Avenue has started changing, and it will keep changing through the fall.

The transformation isn’t a renovation or a new coat of paint. It’s a community art project taking shape piece by piece on the exterior of The Color Condition’s East Austin studio.

The project, called Color Match, invites people into the studio to make individual pieces that are then added to a growing installation outside the building. No art experience is required. By the time the finished work is unveiled on Nov. 7, it will include contributions made during a series of community workshops held from August through October.

Three events remain on the calendar.

The artists behind the project

The Color Condition is the collaboration of artists Sunny Sliger and Marianne Newsom, who began working together in 2010 after connecting through Shamrock Studios in Dallas and discovering a shared interest in color, pattern and movement.

Their work has since appeared well beyond the studio. The pair has created installations for Austin City Limits Music Festival and Lollapalooza and exhibited at places including the Nasher Sculpture Center and Galveston Arts Center. In 2014, Sliger and Newsom also spoke at TEDxSMU about their practice and the possibilities they saw in transforming ordinary materials and spaces.

Those ordinary materials are a big part of what makes their work recognizable.

Their installations, which they call “streams,” are made from materials such as tablecloths, shower curtains and painters’ drop cloths. Cut and assembled into long strands, the pieces move with the wind and change with the weather, sunlight and surroundings.

Color Match takes that approach and makes the community part of the construction.

How Color Match works

The idea is intentionally simple: come to a workshop, make something and contribute it to the larger installation.

Every piece created during the series becomes part of the work outside the Chestnut Avenue studio, where it can be seen from the street.

Participants do not need an art background or previous experience. The artists describe the installation as a public record of many individual contributions and a reminder that community is “not something we find, but something we build.”

That idea carries through the way this year’s workshops have been organized.

The series began Aug. 29 with an event for single parents and their children. On Sept. 26, the studio will host a workshop for adults who are not currently partnered. Then, on Oct. 24, the project expands to a session open to families, singles, couples, friends, neighbors and newcomers.

Rather than asking people to arrive already knowing someone, the workshops give them something to do together.

You can show up, work with your hands and talk if you want to. The art gives everyone in the room a starting point.

For a neighborhood project, that may be one of Color Match’s strongest ideas. The finished installation matters, but so does the process of making it.

The first workshop, held Aug. 29 for single parents and children, has already taken place, and the work created during that session is part of the growing installation.

Information about the series is also available in Spanish, making the project more accessible to Spanish-speaking neighbors in East Austin.

Color Match is supported in part through the City of Austin’s Elevate cultural funding program. The City’s 2026 funding records list The Color Condition as receiving a $40,000 arts-group award.

Built where people can see it

Austin has plenty of art that asks people to walk into a gallery or museum to see it.

Color Match works in the other direction.

The community comes into the studio to help make the piece, but the finished work goes outside, onto a building facing the neighborhood.

That means plenty of people who never attend a workshop will still encounter it while driving, biking or walking down Chestnut Avenue.

And behind all of that color will be the work of people who gave up part of a Saturday to make something alongside their neighbors.

The final installation will be unveiled Nov. 7 at the Community Pig Roast & Installation Celebration.

Come hungry. And if you know somebody who’s new to the neighborhood, bring them along.