Walk into Creative Culture in Westport and you’ll be struck not by color’s abundance, but its absence. Just a simple, long room of wood, drywall, some metal, and clean beige pottery lining perimeter shelves.
This is the same place that, in a few minutes’ time, will let you splatter a canvas—and the walls, and the floor, and your friends—with a rainbow of paint in any manner you can think of. Then stuff you with a milkshake a foot tall.
“You go in a lot of these studios, and they have examples of things everywhere. I don’t like doing that because I want people to be creative,” says owner Dell Upp. She motions toward a shelf near the front. There was a peace sign there, she says, but she had her team take it down.
“We have a lot of customers, they come here because they’re not necessarily big creatives that know how to do it at home. But we want them to use their imagination, don’t just duplicate something we created.”
Upp opened Creative Culture in early 2020, and she’s since opened three more: one in Leawood, one in Omaha, Nebraska, and another in Portland, Oregon. All locations provide a “raw palette” for pottery painting, craft making, and even woodworking, but only the Westport and Portland locations offer Creative Culture’s wackiest attraction: Splatter Studios.
Splatter Away
If you make a reservation, a friendly employee will take you past the pottery, past the solitary painters and the fans blowing on their finished projects. There’s a little nook around the corner, and that’s where you’ll put on a hazmat suit.
The door to the Splatter Studio might be cracked. The room inside stands out like neon in an alleyway—there’s the color.
“It starts out as this beautiful white room, and then one person comes in, and you’re like, ‘There it goes.’”
When you walk in, color surrounds you. The walls and floor are thick with it. The previous splatterers wrote messages over messages from splatterers before them. It looks like a graffiti artist got ambushed with a paintball gun.
You (and at least one buddy) get two hours. You get a canvas each, all the paint you could ask for, and more gadgets than you’ll ever use. Bring your imagination.
You’ll likely start simple. Maybe you’ll drop your painting on the shelf on the wall and flick paint at it like you imagine the greats did to get into the Kemper Museum. Then you drizzle it down the top—ooh, fancy. Creating something so vibrant feels good.
Thirty minutes in, and you’ll be trying weird stuff. There’s boxes full of gizmos, including plastic dryer balls that look like blown-up viruses. You grab one and cover it with paint, lean your painting against the wall, and bowl the gizmo at it. Then you set the canvas flat and bowl it across it. Next, you roll across it with a shopping cart wheel. The artwork isn’t the measure of your creativity anymore—it’s all the ways you can think to make it.
Soon you throw a little plastic cup of paint at your friend—they’re your canvas now. Then you focus on the walls, then the floor. Maybe you make a move in the multi-artist tic-tac-toe game on the floor.
“It’s just an opportunity to laugh and have fun and act like a kid, and not have any rules or restrictions, really—you’re just in a room to make a mess,” says Upp. “And then everyone leaves with a cool piece of art.”
A word to the wise: If you want to paint something pretty in a Splatter Studio, stop before you think you’re done. It’s easy to wind up with a mystery hue of nothing. If looks don’t matter to you, keep going.
Eat Nostalgia
If you choose, you can leave with another piece of art in your belly. Every Creative Culture serves up mason-jar milkshakes topped with marshmallows, cookies, even cupcakes.
“The goal of our milkshakes aren’t to be these, like, super gourmet, fancy milkshakes,” says Upp. “They’re just supposed to be over the top, tacky, nostalgic—like, they have Rice Krispies Treats and Twinkies and, like, things that you ate as a kid that were such a treat, but you don’t necessarily go into the store and necessarily buy them as an adult.”
The milkshakes use ice cream from local dairies, Upp says, but otherwise, they’re full of snacks you ate as a kid. You know how they’re going to taste because they’ve “tasted the same for 20 years.”
“You don’t forget it because they’re like these over the top, a million calories, horrible for you, you know, but it’s a treat. It’s something you do once or twice a year.”
Creative Culture is open Tuesday through Sunday. You can book a Splatter Studio at Creative Culture online or by phone. Reservation sizes range from two artists ($100 total) to 12 ($550 total). Pop in to the Westport or Leawood studios for pottery painting and other projects anytime.