Sweet! Mahomes, Kelce, other Kansas City Chiefs become works of art — made with Oreos

There’s something familiar hidden in the black-and-white portraits of Kansas City Chiefs players displayed in Gabe Uvario’s midtown tattoo shop. From a distance they look to be drawn with black ink or maybe charcoal. But up close you can see rows of small dark discs glued across the canvases and barely make out lettering on some.

O. R. E.

Oh!

Uvario glued, scraped, sliced, squished and otherwise manipulated hundreds of America’s iconic Oreo sandwich cookies to create portraits honoring the Chiefs’ Super Bowl season. He made cookie portraits of Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce together, of coach Andy Reid, and running back Isiah Pacheco

When he’s not using tattoo ink, Uvario prefers working with watercolor and acrylic paints. But there’s something about the high-contrast style of the Oreo art, the monochromatic starkness, that speaks to his soul. “I like to believe that’s in the Mexican blood. The black and gray. Just like the Chicano art,” said the 31-year-old Uvario, who grew up in Sedalia.

Simply put, the cookies become the “paint.” The crispy chocolate wafers fill in dark and shadowy areas; the creamy filling highlights lighter areas; a mixture of the two makes grays.

But that belies the complexity of making art from sandwich cookies. It is time-consuming — the Mahomes and Kelce piece took about 50 hours over five days — messy, tedious work requiring extraordinary patience, an eye for detail, a gas mask and a good broom.

Crumbs. Everywhere. But that’s just the way the you-know-what crumbles.

“It was definitely a journey. Every single one has been a journey,” said Uvario, who worked on the pieces at home. “We have cats. It is a mess. It is a mess. We’re talking chocolate, frosting, all over the floor.”

He joked that he was ready to try this new art form because he had “already done too many” drawings of his girlfriend, Reeka Garcia, a fellow artist and native of Guam he met on a dating app during the pandemic. They now work together at his Buena Vida studio above Woody’s KC on Broadway Boulevard.

Uvario drew inspiration from a California artist/barber, Roger is his name, who conjures art from unexpected materials — broken glass, Oreos. “I wanted to try some new stuff, just do as much as I can,” Uvario said. “And who doesn’t love Oreos? They’re just so delicious. And I just wanted to try it.”

“When they tell you don’t play with your food as a kid, you’re essentially just playing with food. That’s why I like it,” Garcia said.

After making three portraits, though, Uvario was ready to put the cookies away, until Garcia talked him into doing one more, which turned into the biggest of all, a collaboration to celebrate the Super Bowl.

This past week they began putting finishing touches on a portrait of Kelce, a man in motion with stadium lights shining bright in Oreo cream filling behind him.

“The good thing about Oreo art is it makes your home smell amazing. You don’t need candles, you don’t need (anything),” said Garcia. “You come in and … it smells amazing. I just like that warm welcome of that cookie smell.”

How to make cookie art

If you hear Spanish-language rap music blaring from his third-floor studio, Uvario is probably tattooing a client. He doesn’t enjoy chitchat. He thinks “working alone is kind of cool.” It’s one of the reasons he wanted his own shop where he can focus on one client at a time.

Some of them are Chiefs players who found him through word-of-mouth. Wide receiver Mecole Hardman is a client. So are tight end Jody Fortson, defensive tackle Khalen Saunders and linebacker Darius Harris, who got a tattoo on his chest to mark his first NFL sack this season.

They’ve seen the Oreo art of their coach and teammates. Uvario said they liked it, “and that means a lot to me. I just want to push the Chiefs with my art. Be proud of it.”

He recreated images he found online. Garcia chose the photo of Kelce for the “simpleness of it but still has a lot of details that are easy to read when recreated in cookie.

Uvario Photoshops the images, changes the lighting to make high-contrast areas pop.

They pull the image up on an iPad and put it on a stand next to the easel so they can refer to it as they work, like music conductors referencing the score.

Don’t ‘mess it up’

Uvario discovered what it took a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an “Oreometer” to determine: The white filling almost always sticks to one side of the cookie when you crack open an Oreo.

There’s no trick to opening it. Twist and pull apart. But it can get boring when you have to twist and pull apart several hundred at a time. Depending on the size of the canvas, a single portrait can use up three, four, five Oreo Family Packs — 48 cookies in each pack.

Uvario begins by gluing Oreos in horizontal rows onto a canvas or board, trimming pieces that hang over the edges with a knife. The bottom row goes down first and acts as a level to keep the rows above straight.

He can’t just stick them on the canvas and walk away. “You have to hold the Oreo down because the consistency of the glue won’t let it stick immediately,” he said. “So you have to wait eight seconds. If it has frosting you have to put your finger on the very corner to try to like … not mess it up.”

The white canvas shows through the gaps in the even rows of Oreos. He fills those in with cookies and Elmer’s glue that he mixes and mashes inside a plastic sandwich bag. The resulting goop feels like Play-Doh.

Various shades of black are created by using a sharp pottery tool to gently scrape, scrape, scrape away the black cookies. It helps to have an artist’s eye that appreciates color gradients. “And if you want a mid-tone I will get a little bit of frosting on my finger and just run it through,” said Garcia.

There was never a question that he use a different cookie. A Girl Scout Thin Mint, perhaps?

“When you think of an Oreo you’d think it would break easy,” he said. “But it’s actually pretty durable. That’s what keeps it together.”

How long it takes

The biggest challenge has been figuring out how to preserve the cookie art so it doesn’t spoil. Uvario thinks he’s found the solution, but it’s a tricky process. When he finished a portrait, he poured resin over it. Gas masks had to be worn.

Uvario jokes that he nearly shed tears when he poured resin over his first piece, the Mahomes-Kelce art, and the resin began to pool in puddles. “As an artist I’m freaking out,” he said. “’What do I do? i just spent five days on this piece.’”

He estimates he spent $800 to $900 on resin alone, figuring it out.

He doesn’t know yet how long the resin will preserve the pieces, if at all. And he hasn’t given much serious thought to how much he would sell them for. He gifted the Mahomes piece to a good friend.

That artist named Roger sells some of his Oreo art for about $5,000, Uvario said, “and they’re just something simple like the Andy Reid” piece.

But letting go will be hard if someone wants them. “I can keep them all because it does hurt getting rid of them because you put in so much time and effort,” he said.

When they finish the Kelce portrait, “we’re going to treat ourselves … with another glass of milk and Oreos. That’s how we celebrate.” said Garcia.

Which brings up the obvious question: Do they eat the cookies as they work?

“We definitely eat them, from time to time,” Uvario said. “I think Reeka does more than I do.”

“I originally am not a big sweets person,” she said. “But once he started the Oreos … I’d never dipped Oreos in milk. I tried it and I was like now I see why everyone loves Oreos in milk. I just like the sogginess of it and it just tastes awesome.”