Critical Conversations-Art and Money in St. Louis-12/1/15
Critical Conversations- Art and Money was amazing! Thanks to panelists Roseann Weiss, Travis Sheridan, Mk Stallings, and James McAnally – to our fearless moderator Sarah Hermes Griesbach, to Jon Valley of KDHX engineering the audio, and most of all, to all of you who came out to listen, speak your truth, and engage in the conversation. If you haven’t already, make sure you check out All the Art’s winter issue on Art and Money in St. Louis. Thanks to all who came out and spoke their truth, asked questions,and engaged.
The unprecedented growth of St. Louis’s visual art sector deserves a moment of reflection. How does local art production and art reception reflect the state of our economy? How do our artists and art venues impact our local economies? Are there best practices tactics that a loosely unified visual art community can and should employ in order to improve the health of our region? What about questions of social economics? Our questions and yours (join the conversation @CriticalMassSTL) will be posed to our panel.
Moderator/Facilitator
Sarah Griesbach
Photo: Sarah Hermes Griesbach (right) along with Amy Reidel, the creative editor and co-founder of All the Art.
Sarah Hermes Griesbach is the executive editor and cofounder of All the Art, the new visual art quarterly of St. Louis. She and Amy Reidel founded the non-profit magazine with an ever growing team of volunteers. Their goal is to draw in all neighborhoods and populations by sharing the work and vision of a diversity of artists through a diversity of writers and photographers. Their mission is to celebrate St. Louis by recording exhibitions, art events and local art practices that invigorate our communities and that report on the condition of our region.
Panelists
Roseann Weiss
Roseann Weiss has over 25 years of experience in arts leadership in nonprofit arts institutions, community organizations, and gallery settings. She is the Director of the Artist and Community Initiatives Department at the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis (RAC). In this position, she guides the Community Arts Training (CAT) Institute – an innovative, cross-sector program centered on the belief that art can amplify the voices of communities, be a key factor in regenerating neighborhoods and be a powerful agent for social change. She leads RAC’s artists’ support programs, grants, and fellowships as well as creative community initiatives.
MK Stallings
MK Stallings is the founder of UrbArts , a nonprofit whose mission is to create platforms and platform creatives for youth and community development. MK is also a poet, columnist for the WestWord.com, and co-host of Literature for the Halibut on KDHXtra. Twitter & Instagram: @mk_stallings
Travis Sheridan
Travis Sheridan is a born hustler. His background includes everything from military service and bank management to stand-up comedy and start-up consulting. Travis is driven, no matter his job title, to inspire hustling – also known as innovative thinking. He does this because innovation is the best path to healing. And there has never been a greater need for healing and innovative thinking than right now.Travis moved to St. Louis from California when he saw a region ripe for innovation. He is currently the executive director of Venture Café – St. Louis, a place where serendipitous collisions happen between brilliant minds and entrepreneurial energy.
He is also the creator of Boozestorming – an interactive problem-solving session that combines brains, bottles and buddies. It’s all about drinking outside the box, and there are now half a dozen Boozestroming chapters throughout the country. Travis is the co-host of Nothing Impossible, a weekly radio show on Newsradio 1120 KMOX and often speaks and writes about innovation, economic development and community design. While living in California, he was named 40 Under 40 by Business Street and received the Outstanding Citizen commendation by the Fresno/Madera Police Chiefs’ Association. Since moving to St. Louis in 2012, Travis was named as one of the Top 100 People to Know in Business by Small Business Monthly (which he affectionately calls the 100 Under 100). Travis serves on the board of the Old North Restoration Group, the Missouri Venture Forum, and the Prosper Institute. Additionally he is an advisor to the Balsa Foundation.
Travis is desperately proud of his wife, Gina. An author and public librarian, Gina is the source of much of Travis’ creativity. Lovers and consumers of local culture, Travis and Gina fill their home in Old North St. Louis with as much art and love as possible.
James McAnally
James McAnally is an artist, curator and critic whose work seeks to create a space of expanded authorship and exchange, considering the hyphens and hybrids between these terms. He is the founder, Co-Director, and Curator of The Luminary, an incubator for new ideas in the arts based in St. Louis, MO. McAnally also serves as the executive editor and co-founder of Temporary Art Review, a leading international platform for contemporary art criticism that focuses on artist-run and alternative spaces, and is a founding member of Common Field, a new national network of independent art spaces and organizers.
McAnally has presented exhibitions, talks and lectures at venues such as the Walker Art Center, Queens Museum, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (with Ballroom Marfa), Cannonball, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Carnegie Mellon University, (e)merge art fair, Washington University in St. Louis, Moore College of Art and Design and University of Missouri – Columbia, and has served as a Visual Arts panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts.
In his artistic practice, he works as US English, a collaborative that explores collective identity, spatial politics, and forms of protest through a diverse collection of text, sound, objects and interventions. His work in its various forms has been discussed widely through such publications as the Washington Post, Al Jazeera, USA Today, Art in America, Chicago Tribune, Hyperallergic, Art Papers, ArtFCity, Artnet, and Frieze.
Critical Mass for the Visual Arts 