Spooning Out Funding for the Arts

For the cost of a bowl of soup, St. Louis residents become art patrons

18 May 2010

Funding for the arts has been hit hard by the economic downturn. So many local groups have turned to small-scale private donors.

Patrons like Amelia Collete Jones and Maggie Ginestra, partners and art lovers, who wanted to help put money into the hands of local artists.

Sloup

They started with about 25 people and a pot of soup on a rainy Sunday evening. Attendees milled around a downtown bookshop holding hot bowls of carrot leek soup and talking about which art project they planned to vote for.

VOA - D. WeinbergSloup attendees enjoy a soup dinner before casting a vote for the proposed art project of their choice.

It was the first night of Sloup, a now-monthly soup dinner where everyone gets a meal for just $10. Diners also receive a packet containing proposals from various artists. At the end of the evening, they cast their vote, and the project with the most votes gets all the proceeds from the dinner.

"I don't really see it as a competitive sort of thing," said Jordan Hicks, one of the artists who submitted a proposal at the inaugural dinner. "It's just a fun night to get together."

For his project, Hicks collaborated with a couple of photographers and an art historian to create a set of postcards about urban decay and population decline in St. Louis. If awarded the Sloup grant, he planned to print dozens of sets of the cards and leave them around the city in public places. But the important thing, he said, wasn't the money. It was about sharing his project with the community.