When Creative Catalysts Unite...

Published on February 01, 2010 by Brad Edwards (Art Underground STL)

St. Louis is a very fractured city.  The more I test this descriptor, the more I find it to be true.  Our city has experienced decades of racial turmoil, urban flight, and geographic divides between City and County.  In a lot of ways, we are a “city of small towns,” with very culturally distinct neighborhoods.  But the boundaries separating these neighborhoods are often starkly drawn along racial and socio-economic lines.

This “fractured-ness” extends into the artist community.  Like any city, there is stiff competition for gallery and studio space, residencies, grants, and other opportunities.  But unlike many cities, this is an unhealthy competition. The President of the Kennedy Center (a nationally-recognized non-profit that assists struggling arts organizations) Michael Kaiser recently spoke in St. Louis.  He explained that the number one problem keeping the arts community in St. Louis from flourishing is that there are many great organizations doing incredible things to support the arts, and few if any of them are even talking to each other.  While many explicitly state that they have a holistic, city-wide vision for artistic renewal, they ignore their own rhetoric when it requires them to cooperatively work with other like-minded organizations.  Once opportunities are created, they are jealously guarded and protected.

Now for an important disclaimer: I am not an artist, I am a seminary student.  Formally, I am pursuing a Master’s degree in theology, but informally I love to study people, culture, faith, communities and the interactions between all of these.  To steal a term from IAM Founder Makoto Fujimura, I am a “creative catalyst.” I am an “art enabler,” seeking to support the engagement of our “world that is” and the creation of a “world that ought to be” by any means possible.  

I am passionate about the arts for many reasons, partly because I have many friends who are artists.  They valiantly and creatively wrestle with values, ideas and potential both fulfilled and unfulfilled.  If art is, as Fujimura posits, “society’s existential statement” and “answers the question of ‘why live’?” I cannot help but see how the work of my artist friends - those both inside and outside formal faith communities - empowers and challenges my own understanding of truth, reality and the world in which I live.  I am served by their passion to create, and my passion as a “creative catalyst” is to serve them.

So how does one serve the artists in St. Louis in such a way that addresses the unique needs that come with living and working in this city, with an eye on creating an environment in which all of humanity will flourish?

This is the question that Art Underground has been asking everyone we can get to listen to us.  One way we have sought to bring healing to this “fractured-ness” is by partnering with other like-minded creative catalysts. On January 27th this year, 14 church-based leaders of various initiatives to serve the local artist community convened to discuss what that partnership could look like.  Unified by a common foundation as creative catalysts, we discovered that virtually everyone who came that morning felt the same need to collaborate.  We saw the same fractured city, the same fractured community, the same need for collaboration to spark healing.  

Each organization represented had a unique niche, complete with corresponding strengths and weaknesses that could complement the other initiatives represented.  Non-profit leaders are now conspiring to connect artists with the manager of a grant-funded residency program.  A communications director is lending her expertise in the theatre community to help a gallery manager think creatively about how to bring performance into a space that has been, until now, a purely static display. An experienced entrepreneur offered advice on how to help artists see their work as a business and gain valuable professional development.  

While we certainly did not solve all the problems of the world (much less of St. Louis), it is our hope that this sparked the beginning of a conversation that will bear fruit in healing our fractured city.  All of us were excited about the potential to build a community that, rather than contributing to unhealthy competition, facilitates a spirit of grace and cooperation unified by the same desire to see all of St. Louis engulfed in a living, breathing vision of a  “world that ought to be.”

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Brad Edwards leads Art Underground (STL), an affiliate of International Arts Movement.