If you’ve ever worked in a restaurant (or have friends who work in restaurants, or even if you’ve ever eaten at a restaurant) you won’t be surprised to learn that a lot of “artistic types” end up in food service. You may find them getting creative with the cooking or the serving or the dishwashing, but they are always there.

Ian’s Pizza is no exception; we end up with artists of all kinds in all levels of our organization. So given our leanings, is it any wonder that we’ve turned one big wall at our new location on State Street into a gallery? For real. In a somewhat uncreative – yet entirely truthful – moment, we named our gallery, “The Wall at Ian’s Pizza on State,” and every six months a UW art student will be awarded a solo show, the bragging rights to winning, “The Second Best Art Award Ever” (more zippy naming on our part, ahem…) and a nice little $500 scholarship.

Our very first winner, Helen Hawley, has been hard at work on her piece, and got a nice write-up in the local paper as well. (http://host.madison.com/entertainment/arts_and_theatre/visual/a-different-kind-of-audience-for-artwork/article_324a26a0-ac23-11e1-844d-001a4bcf887a.html).

This is not the first time we’ve employed our artist friends; if you’ve seen the bathrooms at our E. North Street Milwaukee location or noticed the custom illustrated posters around every Ian’s you know what we’re talking about. We love our artists – both behind the counter and not!

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