Family is at the center of Parts & Labor, San Antonio’s newest art residency.
Located in Southtown, the nonprofit’s residency program is built around supporting artists who are caregivers.
“When we started Parts & Labor we were committed to serving artists that are caretakers, whether it’s artists with kids or artists with dependent parents or dependent partners,” said Meaghan Mitts on the latest episode of the “bigcitysmalltown” podcast.
She and co-founder Liz Stehl Kleberg joined host Robert Rivard on the podcast to discuss the origins of Parts & Labor and its role in San Antonio’s art community.
Mitts and Kleberg orginally became friends while working in the art scene in New York for many years. In 2020, the pandemic motivated Kleberg and her family to move to San Antonio to be closer for her husband’s family.
Kleberg said that she and her husband wanted to “find a space that we could make into a live/work space,” which they found in a studio home in Lavaca. When a bungalow next door became available, that sparked the idea of hosting artists and families — and bringing creative connections and friendships to San Antonio.
Kleberg invited Mitts — who had relocated to San Antonio in 2022 — to a cup of coffee. “[Meaghan is] incredible at the nuts and bolts of how these beautiful creative visions come to life and how to build supportive networks,” Kleberg said.
The conversation over that cup of coffee birthed the idea for Parts & Labor.
San Antonio is home to other arts residencies — Artpace San Antonio’s International Artist-in-Residence program, Contemporary at Blue Star’s Berlin residency, and The Casa Chuck Residency at Sala Diaz — and Kleberg and Mitts reached out to the art community in order to offer a unique experience and prevent redundancies.
What makes Parts & Labor stand out is its flexibility and focus on accommodation. The nonprofit invites artists from outside of San Antonio to stay for two weeks up to six or eight months, working with artists’ schedules around their spouses, children or dependent parents and helping with necessities such as securing childcare.
Artists are asked to interact with the community by providing public programming, such as workshops, artist talks or local school visits.
“We feel like that’s one of the really distinctive things about the San Antonio arts community is that it’s so hospitable, accepting, warm and gracious,” Mitts said. “And it would be a shame for our artists to come here and not have lots of points of exposure to that.”
From now until July, Parts & Labor is lined up to host eight artists, which is busier than they expected. During the last half of 2025, Kleberg and Mitts are eager to host Los Angeles-based artists and their families who have been affected by the California wildfires.
Such opportunities help the duo to refine the residency program for the benefit of the artists and the art community in San Antonio.
Listen the to full episode of the “bigcitysmalltown” podcast below.
Disclosure: Robert Rivard is the co-founder of the San Antonio Report.