Read the full article by Hannah Ross at Sacramento News & Review
Demo Art & Books is unassuming. Set back between a cigar shop and Farmers Insurance on 16th Street in Sacramento, the clean, white warehouse space is minimally adorned with plywood bookshelves, a few benches and a box fan on high, fighting off the city’s typical summer swelter.
The multipurpose gallery is also a bookstore, music venue and event space for pop-ups like local tattoo artist expos and vintage clothing, and offers a generally experimental outpost and gathering space for an underserved sect of Sacramento’s creative community: young people of the multi-hyphenate creative sect.
Since cannonballing onto the grid on May 10, Demo Art & Books has become the un-air-conditioned place to be, in many parts due to the community surrounding the space’s conceptualizer Esther Wang. Wang, a tattoo artist, muralist, painter, skater, and now gallery operator, decided to launch Demo Spot — as it’s known on Instagram — earlier this year as a trial for herself, an opportunity to see what she could create for a community she knew existed in Sacramento but saw few physical spaces for beyond tattoo parlors and skate parks.