A dish of deviled eggs sits on a table on Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024, at the Darthaus in Columbia, Mo. Each attendee was asked to bring a shareable food for everyone to enjoy.
This eclectic art club provides community, creativity and camaraderie
It all began over buttermilk pancakes at Ernie’s Cafe.
Arjuna Raghu, member of Columbia sibling band Drona, expert event organizer and player of many instruments; Luca Giordano, creator of short films and trumpet instrumentalist; and Evan Johnson, graphic designer and social media manager combine to create the perfect trifecta of creativity and expression.
Raghu, Giordano and Johnson, along with other like-minded friends, founded Dart Club: a “group of people, creating and sharing opportunities for arts engagement,” according to their Instagram.
The group has hosted many successful events: zine-making workshops, T-shirt screen printing nights, Halloween basement raves and their final event of the year: Danksgiving.
Dart Club founding member Luca Giordano plays the trumpet during “Danksgiving” on Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024, at the Darthaus in Columbia, Mo. Dart Club members performed covers of several songs, including “Yesterday” by the Beatles, for attendees.
I arrived at the East Campus apartment hosting Dankgiving at approximately 8:15 p.m. — fashionably late, yet respectably early — on a crisp, 40-degree evening. The invitation read: “Dress a little bit fancy.”
At the beginning of the night, I set my Walmart pies (a pecan and a pumpkin) in the crowded kitchen, then sat at a fold-out table with some familiar faces. I half-expected a Charlie Brown-esque Thanksgiving feast to commence, complete with popcorn and buttered toast.
My immediate question when I sat down to interview the team was an obvious one: where did the name “Dart Club” come from?
“We thought of Dart Club because it seems like something that’s kind of aspirational, like you’re throwing something to hit a goal,” Raghu said. “But also, if you boil it down, it’s just ‘Da Art Club.’”
Along with throwing art-centric parties and events, Dart Club’s social media presence aims to support local creatives. Their online style is extremely playful, with doodle-like graphics, usually including a dart frog. But the group also produces “weekly roundup” videos letting followers know what’s going on in the community that week.
Whether it’s a basement punk show, film screening or jazz concert, Dart Club is promoting it to support artists in Columbia. Dart Club fills the need for a place where creative-minded people can gather to meet each other, to learn and to teach.
“Just having a community is really important to me,” Johnson said. “It’s such a big school, it’s a big town. There’s so many cool people, but it’s all scattered.”
While the members are largely University of Missouri students, the club is separate from the university, allowing more liberties when planning events.
“When you’re tied to a large organization, like school, a college, you have to operate within their boundaries,” Raghu said. You can sometimes run into things that you don’t agree with morally or structurally, and having a space that’s completely outside of those things, there’s nothing really like holding people back from expressing their ideas.”.
In a way, Dart Club isn’t the first club of its kind in Columbia.
“In high school, I started a club called SICCJAMS. It’s actually a really long acronym. It’s ‘Students In the Columbia Community Joining in Arts and Music Solidarity,’” said Raghu, a Columbia native. “So, this was kind of just an extension of that.”
Former SICCJAMS member, Dart-er and Raghu’s girlfriend, Amelia Velázquez has seen the club’s evolution in all its stages.
“It went from wanting to express ourselves creatively to making friends and making it more of an inclusive environment while doing these creative projects,” Velázquez said.
Amelia Velàzquez, a founding member of Dart Club, takes photos at “Danksgiving” with her digital camera on Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024, at the Darthaus in Columbia, Mo. “I think [Dart Club] fills that gap [for] people who don’t know what club to join,” Velàzquez said. “We make these more niche events to teach people how to do things.”
After Raghu met Johnson and Giordano at MU, they decided they needed to meet at Ernie’s to discuss their ideas.
After going through dozens of scrapped name ideas — the Esoteric Boy Club , The Cove, Knoughta Cult, Nauticult and the Super Elite Legal Organization Of United Trappers — Dart Club was born, and the rest is history.
Dart Club actually began not as a ‘club’ per se, but as a blog.
“[On] March 5, we launched the blog,” said Giordano, who overwhelmingly had the most posts out of all contributors this year. “[It] was somewhere where I could just put all the stuff that I wanted to show that I didn’t know where I should. I put all my short films on there, I put whatever was on my mind.”
Diving into the blog, I found a hilarious combination of flash fiction pieces, photography and graphic design, as well as comedic posts like the Sept. 1 announcement titled “LUCA TESTS POSITIVE FOR CORONAVIRUS.”
After a few jazz covers, including a rendition of The Beatles’ “Yesterday” by the “Dart Club Quartet,” I was delighted by the next thing on the night’s agenda: the 2024 quarterly report.
Also deemed “State of the Dart,” attendees paused their conversations for a presentation of what exactly Dart Club is, a blog audit and a hilarious finale launching “DartCoin,” a cryptocurrency — I couldn’t tell how much of it was genuine but belly-laughed alongside other Dart-ers anyhow.
I found the way the club functioned very beautiful; In many ways, Dart Club is a direct democracy. If a member wants to bring their knowledge or skill to an event, they are more than welcome to do so.
“I want it to be wholesome. I want people to come in and feel like, oh, like, I can just talk to anyone here. Or, like, the people running it are friendly. And I want people to leave [feeling] like they’re a part of something,” said Johnson. “These are just like, my people. Every time I’m with these guys, it’s just like, there’s no place I would rather go. It’s just my family.”
As a first-time Dart-er, I felt more than embraced at Danksgiving. When I left, I was halfway out the door when everyone unexpectedly yelled “goodbye!” at me. I drove home through the brick streets of East Campus feeling “warmdarted.”
You can bet I’ll be in attendance at whatever Dart Club does next.
To stay in the loop, you can follow @Dartclub.como on Instagram or visit their blog at dartclubcomo.blogspot.com.
Edited by Alyssa Royston | aroyston@themaneater.com
Copy edited by Emma Harper and Natalie Kientzy | nkientzy@themaneater.com
Edited by Annie Goodykoontz | agoodykoontz@themaneater.com