Francesca Wilmott
St. Louis, Missouri
Francesca Wilmott co-founded Los Caminos, an apartment gallery on Cherokee Street in St. Louis, in October 2011. She formerly co-directed Concertina Gallery in Chicago and has additionally organized exhibitions for the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), the GOFFO Art Fair at Art Chicago, and the Charlotte Street Foundation (Kansas City). She contributes to Temporary Art Review and St. Louis Magazine and was guest blogger for the Art21 Blog. In 2010 Francesca completed a dual-masters degree in Modern Art History, Criticism, and Theory, and Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Francesca currently works as assistant registrar at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.
Presentation(s):
THE HINGE – Art Gallery. Thought Salon. Creative Turning Point.
Day 2 / Apr, 13 @ 4:15 pm
Lower Level : Room C
Recent decades have witnessed a spate of commercial and cultural growth throughout St. Louis city, but elisions persist, especially those that embrace the fine arts. Predominate concerns include where emergent artists can show their work and come into contact with viable patrons, as extant venues by and large do not exist at this time. To engage these questions and launch a dialogue about how the gallery space itself can bring artists, curators, patrons, and communities together, this panel includes a wide variety of arts-passionate professionals: Lauren Pressler, visual artist and curator; Francesca Wilmott, director of Los Caminos apartment gallery and assistant registrar at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; Eileen G’Sell, Mentor St. Louis activist, poet and lecturer at Washington University; Bryan Laughlin Jr., fine-art furniture dealer and antique restoration specialist; and Galen Gondolfi, proprietor of fort gondo.compound for the arts.
The panel will explore the relatively recent history of the apartment gallery as a space in St. Louis, the pros and cons of such developments, and the prospect of a new kind of gallery in the near future. How could such a space accommodate the emergent artist while bringing together diverse participants? How have upstart galleries already strengthened the region, and what can we learn from each other? How can this type of space serve both as cultural crossroad and nexus of distinguished artistic pursuits?
