How ‘the weird New Yorkers’ won over (and helped incorporate) one small Texas town
Habitable Spaces’ Full Moon dinners in Kingsbury are just the latest in a decade-plus of reimagining what rural community engagement might look like.
Under every full moon for the past two years, Kingsbury artists Shane and Alison Heinemeier have had their friends over for dinner.
And strangers, of course, but they don’t stay strangers for long.
The Heinemeiers are the homesteading founders of Habitable Spaces, a non-profit farm in Kingsbury that is as much a community gathering space as a living art gallery. Since February 2021, they have hosted dozens of these full moon dinners featuring ingredients that are as local as possible.
I attended one last fall and soon realized that these farm dinners are just the start of a community-building dream the Heinemeiers first had while living as artists in New York City in the early 2000s.
Shane grew up in San Antonio, about an hour away from his grandmother Mary Frances, still the town beauty who rode to school in Kingsbury on a bareback horse, according to town lore.
“They were pretty conservative,” Alison Heinemeier says of her husband’s elders. “Shane is this punk artist hippie, and they never quite understood what he was all about.”
That changed in 2011, when Mary Frances divided up the family land and gave Shane 28 acres of oaks and juniper that had no power, water, or permanent buildings. “We had always dreamed of starting some kind of art residency farm project, but we just didn’t know where,” Alison says.
They packed up and headed to the then-unincorporated town of Kingsbury, which is about 45 miles from San Antonio.
Within a decade, they would transform this little community into a town, literally.
“We lived in a tent for the first year and a half we were out here. No electricity or anything,” Alison explains.
Alison had always gardened in New York — once removing 11 loads of debris from a backyard in Brooklyn — but they didn’t know anything about growing food in Texas.
They enrolled in “YouTube University” to learn everything about growing food and making cheese and every other DIY project you could imagine, she says. They also started reaching out to other farmers and makers in the area.
“I’d been a gardener and not a farmer, and those were the years that I found out that the country communities are amazing. There are so many people with tons of skills and a willingness to help.”
Mary Frances lived long enough to see her grandson and his new wife secure food, shelter, and community for themselves in the middle of Guadalupe County.
Not long after her death in 2015, the community of Kingsbury voted to incorporate as a town in a vote of 66-2, an effort that Alison helped lead. (She’s currently the mayor pro tem and a city commissioner.)
“The tricky part was getting 200 signatures,” she says. “You can’t just go up and knock on doors in rural areas. We set up a booth on the corner in Kingsbury and flagged people down. It was amazing.”
(Fellow Kingsbury booster, Shirley Nolen, who owns several buildings downtown that are in varying states of renovation, is currently Kingsbury’s mayor. If you go to Kingsbury, make sure to stop by Nolen’s general store. She’s also working on a coffee shop and a dance hall.)
After the town’s incorporation, Alison and Shane officially launched the artist-in-residency program, which has hosted more than 80 artists from Denmark to Puerto Rico who work in every medium, from podcasting to performance art.
“Because we live in such a small town, our artist residency is a little different,” Alison says. “The artists that come here make an exchange with the people and the farmers here. They leave a piece of art here at the campus and, in exchange, get to experience what life is like in the country and gain knowledge from the people who live here.”
The locals, in exchange for sharing their knowledge and hospitality, benefit by having access to these free and low-cost art events and, ideally, the enrichment that comes from engaging with artists who have different perspectives.
Although food, community fun, and fair governance are integral to everyone’s wellness, at the heart of Habitable Spaces is in its name: Having a habitable space to call your own.
Over the past decade, the Heinemeiers and their visiting artists have built more than half a dozen cabins that you might call living sculptures, including a cozy yurt we stayed in after the September full moon dinner. They now offer them as short-term rental units, which are available via Hipcamp. (“We have a lot of snowbirds right now,” she says during a call a few weeks ago.)
Alison and Shane have already hosted one full moon dinner this year — the Full Wolf Moon on Jan. 6 — and are planning for another one on Feb. 5, which will mark the second anniversary of the dinner series. (Tickets cost $50 per person, which you can buy by making a PayPal donation on the website, habitablespaces.org. If you want to rent a cabin, send her an email: info@habitablespaces.org)
Alison had been making all of the meals until last summer, when San Antonio chef Halston Conella attended one of the dinners as a guest. He loved the experience and vision for the project so much that he now volunteers each month to oversee the dinner, leading a team of volunteer cooks that, in October, included my 15-year-old son, who is in the culinary program at his high school. (Another is my former neighbor, Justin Richardson, who teaches at the Escoffier culinary school in Austin.)
“The reason I keep it so cheap is that it’s for us, for farmers and makers and all the people who do this stuff,” she says.
Last year, she came up with the idea to create the “Full Moon Society,” a group of volunteers who come every month and help set up the tables, serve food and clean dishes. The week before, they’ll help with tasks like gathering pecans that will go into the meal and taking them to the pecan shellers’ place. “They get to be part of it, to meet the farmers and makers that we work with.”
People bring skills and resources to give, knowing that, as they give, they are also receiving.
Last year, they received a $20,000 award from the Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative to buy a commercial stove and a hot water heater for the sink, and on Saturday night, Habitable Spaces got a big boost from the Texas Food & Wine Alliance, a statewide organization, born in Austin, that has been giving grant money to food innovators for more than a decade.
The Heinemeiers received a $5,000 inclusion and diversity award, sponsored by HEB, to build a cooler that will allow them to expand the menu at the full moon dinners.
Grants like these — as well as ticket sales from the sold-out dinners — will allow Habitable Space to continue to evolve.
Alison is putting together a series of DIY kitchen classes on making cheese and herbal wines that she’ll teach later in the year. Conella is already reaching out to new guest chefs he’d like to bring to future full moon dinners.
There’s also the summer film festival to plan and the new artists-in-residence to welcome. Before you know it, it’ll be time for the Fall Harvest Festival again.
Alison says, this is exactly what they signed up for.
“To some people, we’re still ‘the weird New Yorkers,’ but for the most part, people get what we are trying to do.”
One of the fixtures of the Full Moon Society is Edie Casell, whom I first met through the Festival Beach Community Garden in East Austin.
More than a decade ago, when the Heinemeiers were just settling into Shane’s grandmother’s land, I was writing a story about Festival Beach Community Garden in East Austin, where Edie was one of the main volunteers.
I sent our photographer, Alberto Martinez, to shoot the gardens.
They fell in love.
A few years ago, they got married, and they now live in Seguin, where they have a flower farm called Florabuelas Flower Farm.
If you go to one of these full moon dinners and see beautiful flowers on each table, they are probably from Edie, who will probably also be in attendance.
Please say hello.
And don’t forget to stop by the bathroom before dark so you can see the most amazing mosaic, which was one of the pieces left behind by an artist-in-residence.
I think it’s the coolest bathroom in Texas.
Until next week,
Addie