Top 10 Lessons I Learned From Austinites While on the Culture Beat

1) If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It – Double Down

Soaring rents, declining alcohol sales, an uncertain economy – Austin weirdness saw its fair share of challenges in 2025. Amid some anguish (RIP Skylark Lounge, Outer Heaven, Sunny’s Backyard), three long-loved establishments cemented their outposts. Room Service stewardess LuCretia Sisk passed the North Loop torch of Austin’s oldest vintage store to Prototype Vintage co-founder Audrie San Miguel. Metal bar the Lost Well landed in its dream home on Airport after a year of wandering. And Antone’s signed a 50-year lease and announced plans to add a museum to its two-story Downtown locale.

“We’re not the kids anymore,” said Antone’s co-owner Will Bridges. “We’re the experts, and we shouldn’t shy away from creating the framework and the mechanisms we need to make sure this stuff gets the support it needs so it’s going from surviving to thriving.”

2) Black Artists Rock

We already knew this one, but efforts by Scott Strickland and DAWA made sure we couldn’t forget it. Strickland’s second-annual Black Artists Rock songwriter series showcased rock-inspired musicians, filling a gap he noticed in performance opportunities for artists like himself. 

“It’s important that they receive their accolades because it helps them in terms of booking and helps them in terms of being able to pay a band,” Strickland told me. “I see Black Artists Rock as one of the economic drivers that’s missing from the city of Austin and – from a wide-lens perspective, I think it’s missing from music in general.”

Meanwhile, Jonathan “Chaka” Mahone’s DAWA celebrated six years of providing support and opportunities to BIPOC thinkers and creatives, handing out over half a million dollars to those who give back to their communities.

3) Never Throw Out That Record

There is a “tremendous amount” of Texas music that is “endangered of being lost and/or forgotten,” said Jonathon Kimbrell, the one-man team conserving old vinyl through the Texas Jukebox Project.

His archive could look like UCLA’s Frontera Collection, where singer-songwriter Estani Frizzell found recordings of her grandmother’s Sixties and Seventies conjunto. Her finds fueled 2025’s Tú De Mí Te Acordarás, an homage-paying album. “I’m always saying now: just go look,” Estani said. “If your uncle, grandfather, great-uncle, mom, or grandmother played music and you know [that] they recorded, just maybe, they might be there.” 

4) It’s Never Too Late for Recognition

Mandy Rowden was surprised that no one had thought to gather and celebrate the women songwriters of Texas. As the Girl Guitar founder began to piece together the Texas Women Songwriters Festival, that surprise gave way to pride and a collective joy as the festival blossomed, welcoming writers aged 17 to 75, including Tish Hinojosa, Kimmie Rhodes, and Sara Hickman, to Lockhart. 

5) Remain in Light (and Craftmanship)

In Jamal Hussain’s Georgetown studio, I was entranced by his patient integration of technology and nature. At Ivester Contemporary, a ventilator bag made tears catch in my throat as I watched Steve Parker’s Funeral for a Tree breathe and sing. All across the gallery floor at Women & Their Work’s design showcase “Form Works,” I contemplated sitting on and sipping from heirloom-quality art objects. In a year filled with unpredictable innovations and chaotic ideals, these deliberately crafted pieces served as welcome reminders to breathe and surround oneself with beauty when all else feels out of reach. 

6) Spinning Yarn Ties Us Together

All the world may be a stage, but it’s not much of an audience. At Austin’s varied storytelling events, both can be true. Crowds gather across the city to attentively hear true tales told by their friends, their neighbors, and complete strangers, drawn to the proverbial campfire as humans always have been.

“It’s really about sharing experiences with others and not isolating,” said Meredith Johnson, poet, comedian, and onetime Hyde Park Storytelling performer. “Storytelling is crucial to culture and understanding how we relate to ourselves and others and I’m so grateful to have been given the experience of doing that.”

7) Tall Tales (Sometimes) Tell Truths

The plot of an engaging story is invariably concerned with a question: Should I stay or should I go? How do I find space for myself in a crowded world? These are just some of the immutable ponderings posited in debut works by Austin authors this year. In Carrie R. Moore’s short story collection Make Your Way Home, Black characters living across the South navigate interpersonal decisions. Dwelling, a novel by Emily Hunt Kivel, follows a young professional from New York to Texas in search of stable housing and community. Awash in our own answer-seeking, traveling along someone else’s map offers a new angle.

8) The Internet Can Still Be Fun

Getting trampled by an endless barrage of advertiser content and AI slop, it’s hard to remember what was once charming and exciting about the internet. Welcome to My Homepage, Museum of Human Achievement’s bespoke web page, is a welcome reprieve. The program’s founder, Rachel Stuckey, summed up the residency’s ethos with a question: “How can I make more reminders to myself that [the internet] is also a space for creativity and play and for magical encounters to happen?”

9) The Dive Bar Is Home

If Raf Miastkowski has said it once, he’s said it a million times: “A dive is a shabby and unpretentious bar that serves cheap drinks without a cocktail menu.” The Texas Dive Bar Encyclopedia author introduced me to his personal favorite local dive, the Cloak Room; unwittingly helped me establish a bucket list of Austin dives; and reminded me what’s so great about kickin’ back over a couple brews – which we, here at the Culture desk, can and did wax poetic about for a whole cover story in October.

10) Round It Out

For my first Chronicle cover story, I spent joyously cluttered hours with some of Austin’s preeminent yardists, including the King of Junk himself, Vince Hannemann. The steward creator of the Cathedral of Junk left me with this lesson that, like good yard art, creeps up in unexpected places: “You can’t have too many round things. When in doubt, more round things.”