First, the name: when Alexa Floresta opened the doors in 2019 to her delightful and delight-filled apparel and merchandise shop at 19 North Front Street in New Paltz, the hand-painted shop sign with Crust and Magic hand-written on it intrigued people. Did “Crust” indicate it as a new pizza parlor?
Alexa explained to Yokel during a recent visit that the name combines two aspects of her art, that her work includes both the happy vibrancy of rainbows and also her trademark down-to-earth characters with unshaved legs and sometimes dour expressions and dark colors. Her crusty characters are in a perpetual search for the magic of bright colors, and Crust and Magic is their home.
Crust and Magic offers Alexa’s colorful and fun art on every sort of garment, from vests, t-shirts, jackets, crop tops, to swimwear, dresses, and hoodies, plus housewares like mugs and drinking glasses and towels and candleholders. Most of these garments and objects are unique works of art themselves, as Alexa has hand painted them herself. They are wearable sculptures. Many of her works are now so popular that they are produced in larger quantities, but everything reflects Alexa’s aesthetic sensibility of a world full of colorful yet emotionally realistic fun: Crust and Magic.
The shop’s location on North Front Street reflects Alexa’s aesthetic, as well. Through one entrance you find what appears at first glance to be a typical apparel shop, but one full of color, both from the fabrics on offer and Alexa’s designs on each garment. The other entrance is through a porchway covered in flowers with fake grass underfoot, a ’70s suburban back deck re-imagined for 2023.
Here, Alexa and her Crust and Magic shop host gatherings and entertainment, as Alexa embraces another means of creative expression: the creation of a community, a salon. This growing community is a big part of what keeps Alexa inspired. “I want everyone to meet each other,” she told Yokel. Crust and Magic’s back porch feels like a memory of New Paltz that many express nostalgia about in conversations, a New Paltz of many different groups who find common ground, usually in music. Communities of friendships that started here and continue decades later. Crust and Magic offers a welcome new chapter in that history.
To build a business and build a community around it is a vital creative act, and they go hand-in-hand with Alexa’s community of characters in her wearable art. Crust and Magic opened its doors before the pandemic, survived as both an online store and brick-and-mortar location through that period, and is thriving because of a New Paltz that experienced all that together. Alexa expanded Crust and Magic recently to take over the full space that she had shared earlier.
A Long Islander by birth, Alexa came to SUNY New Paltz to study and create art and she is building a life here. She started out as a photographer but found that her studies in that field led her to discover what truly spoke to her: she wanted to bring her own drawings and paintings to life. For the last decade-plus, she’s followed that vision to where she is now. Her paintings could easily be on gallery walls—and will be—but the fronts and backs of upstate New Yorkers serve as her gallery.
Yokel asked her two questions about her vision for Crust and Magic. We posited that there was a risk inherent to opening a shop years ago, that Alexa could quite easily have started to sell her clothing and merchandise through one of the other stores in New Paltz. She explained that it always felt like an opportunity rather than a risk because she had operated Crust and Magic as a pop-up retail experience in locations from Manhattan to upstate New York, learned about what works and does not work, and wanted to build what she has here.
And we asked about the future for Crust and Magic. While she can envision Crust and Magic shops expanded into different locations across the country, New Paltz is home.
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Mark’s website: http://thegadabouttown.com/