Article by Hannah Olson

Photos by Arianna Skoog 

There are places you visit because you know exactly what you are going to find there. A restaurant serves dinner. A gallery shows art. A concert venue has music. Kirks' Grocery has never been particularly interested in staying inside those lines. 

Walk into the old brick building on Minnesota Avenue, and you might find paintings on the walls and a touring punk band setting up in the back. You might hear poetry, comedy, experimental noise, or classical guitar. You could sit down for a three-course dinner beside someone you've never met, watch a child make art alongside adults, or stumble into an idea so strange its creator wasn't sure where else to take it. 

"If there's something they really like doing that's less profitable or more weird or more just truly who they are, this is where they bring it," says co-owner Mary Serbe. "We can't wait to show it to everybody." For more than eight years, Kirks' has been making room for those things, and for the people who bring them. 

A Place That Became a Community 

Shane de Leon grew up in Billings but left at 17, spending nearly three decades away making art, playing in bands, and touring before eventually returning home. Mary came to Billings to lead the education department at the Yellowstone Art Museum. An artist and educator herself, she met Shane while they both worked there. Then they found the building at 2920 Minnesota Avenue. 

Shane initially considered living there before recognizing something else: a gallery, music venue, and home for creative work that didn't always have an obvious place in Billings. Kirks' Grocery opened in September 2018, with Mary eventually taking the lead on exhibitions while Shane focused heavily on music and performances. But Kirks' was never meant to be solely their creation. 

"Anybody can show up with whatever skill or talent they have and if they want to try to fit that into what we do here, I'm really open to that," Shane says. Today, a first-time musician can perform, a poet can find a microphone, an artist can exhibit something strange, and an unexpected idea can become an event. 

"We love it when people bring things to us and say, 'This is what I want to do and I'm ready to do it,'" Mary says. 

Come As You Are 

That openness extends beyond the people making the art. "Come on in," Mary says. "It's not for these people or that people or just for this or just for that. It's for everybody." You don't even have to make anything. Browse an exhibition, sit with friends during open art, or come for dinner. 

On the second Friday of each month, chef Ashley Woodward and the Kitchen Party crew serve a three-course, pay-what-you-can meal. Everyone gets the same menu. Those who can afford more often pay more. Those who can't, don't. People who might otherwise never share a table find themselves sitting beside one another. It is difficult to imagine a better embodiment of Kirks' philosophy: For the Common Good. 

Community there also forms quietly. Shane says Kirks' attracts "solitary loner people." Someone comes alone. Someone else does too. Eventually they talk. Later, he sees them return together. "People can just kind of create their own friends and stuff," he says. Some of those connections have become entire lives. People who met at Kirks' have gotten married and had children. Kids grow up there, too, learning their ideas deserve the same respect as anyone else's. 

"Kids here, kids are artists like adults with the same respect," Mary says. Even those who are gone remain part of the place. "People that we've lost, I think they just sort of always have a home here," she says. 

Exactly Where It Belongs 

There is something fitting about all of this happening inside a building that was gathering people long before Shane and Mary arrived. The name isn't an invention. The building was once home to an actual Kirks' Grocery. Mary remembers Eloise Kirk, then in her 90s, visiting during Kirks' early years and sharing stories from when she worked there as a teenager. People gathered there then. They gather there now. 

And Kirks' isn't on Minnesota Avenue simply because the space was available. "Kirks' truly exists because of the economics of Minnesota Avenue," Shane says. "We're a complete product of being on this corner." 

The comparatively affordable location helped Kirks' survive its fragile early years. It has also allowed Shane and Mary to challenge assumptions about the South Side. Mary says their neighbors have embraced them and look out for the space. Kirks' returns that care in simple ways, including keeping bottled water available for anyone who needs it. Sometimes building community really is that uncomplicated: notice the person in front of you and give them what you can. 

Making Room for the Weird Stuff 

But keeping Kirks' alive is anything but simple. It operates as a for-profit business by design, allowing Shane and Mary to respond directly to their community without some of the restrictions Mary experienced in nonprofit work. "We pay attention," she says. 

The tradeoff is that experimentation isn't always profitable. Recurring memberships help Kirks' pay a touring band even when only a handful of people attend, and give artists a larger portion of gallery sales. "That money goes out to the artists," Mary says. "It goes out to the community." 

As Kirks' grew into a business with employees and salaries, Shane realized many of the free creative opportunities people once loved had quietly disappeared. So, they brought them back: open art-making, free jams, instruments for people who simply want to play. Nothing to buy. Just room. 

Scratch Beneath the Surface 

For Mary, Kirks' reveals something larger about Billings. "With Billings you have to just scratch beneath the surface a little bit and then there's all the art and all the creativity," she says. She has watched visual artists, musicians, poets, craftspeople, chefs, and creative organizations become increasingly connected rather than viewing one another as competitors. "You just become interwoven; you make each other stronger." 

Kirks' may be one of the easiest places in Billings to see those threads cross. It is a gallery and performance venue, kitchen and gathering place, bookstore and record shop. It welcomes established artists and people trying something publicly for the first time. Perhaps the easiest way to explain Kirks' Grocery is to stop trying to define what it is and pay attention to what it does. 

For generations, this old building on Minnesota Avenue has been called a grocery. In a way, it still is. It just feeds people differently now: with art and music, food and conversation, weird ideas and first attempts, a glass of water, a place at the table, and a room where you can arrive alone and perhaps leave knowing someone you didn't know before. 

Most of all, Kirks' feeds the idea that a healthy community needs places where we don't all have to look, think, create, or live the same way to belong to one another. Bring the strange painting. Play the first show. Sit beside the stranger. Bring the kids. Come for dinner. Come just to look around. There is room for you here. 

Originally printed in the November 2026 issue of Simply Local Magazine

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