These Tucson vending machines are serving art instead of snacks 🎨

You may have noticed Bun Bun Vending’s glowing cursive signs and artsy, pastel vending machines popping up around town at your favorite local breweries and after-work hangout spots, from Crooked Tooth Brewing to Tap & Bottle North and Tucson Hop Shop.

The art-wrapped exteriors featuring bunnies, flowers and desert flora are hard to miss, but it’s the items inside that are the real treat. Instead of junk food or soft drinks, Marcy Ellis and Teryn Thress, the creatives behind Bun Bun Vending, stock their machines with exciting mystery goods and products from local businesses.

“Teryn and I, we are the Bun Buns, and we work together to bring sweet little surprises and joy,” Ellis said. “Normally we stock all sorts of different product based items, from mystery tarot cards, which are some of our best sellers, to local artwork or local products, like local notebooks. We've even had dog biscuits, mystery jewelry, and mystery earrings.”

This summer though, their vending machines will be stocked with hundreds of pieces from 30 local artists as part of their “Smol Worx” vending art show. The idea, Ellis said, was to create what is essentially a gallery show inside their vending machines.

The “Smol Worx” show, which will run through July 25, is meant to celebrate the summer season in Tucson and give some extra business to local artists.

“Summer is hard in Tucson, so we really wanted to embrace the art of it all,” Thress said. “This seems sometimes to be slow for artists so we wanted to encourage them to hone in on their craft and get locals to support locals.”

For the vending art show, each of the 30 featured artists created 36 works of art reflecting the experience of Tucson summer, which will be split up between the three vending machines at Crooked Tooth Brewing, 228 E. 6th Street, Tap & Bottle North, 7254 N. Oracle Road, and Tucson Hop Shop, 3230 N. Dodge Blvd.

“We have a wide range of different types of artwork and styles,” Ellis said. “We have original paintings, some artists created prints on wood, we have a coloring book scene, some magnet sets, linocut, and a lot of art prints. There's some that are hand-crafted torn paper collages.”

Some of the featured artists include Jos Par, Linnie Damm, Melinda Kane, Nathalie Aall, Stephanie Daniels, Elana Bloom, Janny Taylor, among many others. Ellis will also have her own works in the vending show.

Artist and graphic designer Ian Crombie is one of the 30 artists exhibiting their work in the “Smol Worx” show. His linocut prints and murals are inspired by the Sonoran Desert, and his work uses simple forms, bold patterns and clean, structured designs.

“Most of my work is just a celebration of our space — the desert animals and landscapes — but the theme of the show was Tucson Summer,” Crombie said. “So the piece that you'll find in the vending machine is a javelina. It's a very stylized silhouette of a javelina, and maybe it's just so hot that you can see its bones, with a cartoonish skeleton inside.”

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Crombie said that being part of the exhibition was an opportunity not only to promote his artwork, but to connect with other artists in the Tucson community. He said Saturday night's opening of the vending art show was the busiest night he’s ever seen at Crooked Tooth Brewing.

“It was really cool to see such a supportive community all show up and look in the vending machine, and also just talk to each other, and share stories about being an artist,” Crombie said.

Mackenzie Robb, known for her vibrant, desert-themed designs, also contributed 36 of her magnets to the show.

“It's my first time participating in one of their vending machines,” Robb said. “I think it'll be cool, not only to see what everybody else does, but to see what being in a vending machine is like.”

“It’s a great way to support artists in an unconventional way,” she said. “So that's going to be really exciting.”

For Ellis and Thress, it was important to make the show accessible for everyone, and most of the pieces are priced between $10-20.

“Our highest priced item is an original hand-painted piece for $38,” Ellis said. “So you can really find all sorts of different prices. A lot of them are in the $12 range.”

So far, the response from both the artists and the public has been incredible, Ellis said.

“We have gotten some extraordinary, amazing responses,” she said. “It seems like all of the artists were so excited.”

And, there is much more fun to look forward to from BunBun Vending, according to Ellis.

“There will probably be some sort of party for a closing reception, and we'll probably do something in the middle — just a fun pop-up to keep the energy going,” she said. “In the fall, we'll do more back to school, and then we'll transition into the holiday time, so we'll have more vendor pop-ups, where we'll have more of our product-based businesses.”

Through the summer heat, Thress said Bun Bun Vending is here to bring treats and joy into everybody's lives.

“It's important to find the good within all the hard stuff, and sometimes summer can be hard and challenging and long,” Ellis said. “But you could be sweating on your couch and look up, and you're like, "oh, that little piece of art I got from that vending machine.’”