Arts-Based Community Development Convening
Transforming Post-Industrial Cities through Art and Innovation
April 12 through 14, 2012 - St. Louis

Ryan Mathews

Painter, Poet, Futurist

Panelist - 10:45 am, Wednesday, April 6th – UPSTARTS! Supporting Individual Creative Practitioners

Ryan Mathews’ life has taken him millions of miles from the then sleepy Monterey Peninsula in California where he was born as an army brat in 1951.

He has been, and remains, a painter, poet, online music critic, best-selling author, consultant, artistic and corporate performance artist, futurist, storyteller and cultural insurgent.  In the mid-1970s Mathews, and fellow poet Michael Dauter, founded a series of “open microphone” poetry sessions held in various bars in Detroit’s Cass Corridor, presaging today’s Poetry Slams.  Some of that work was anthologized in Save The Frescoes That Are Us: A Detroit Tribute to Jack Kerouac edited by M. L. Liebler with Frankie  “Edie” Kerouac-Parker, the Beat icon’s first wife whom Mathews sometimes read with before her death.

When not painting in his studio in the Russell Industrial Center Mathews pursues his “day job” as founder and CEO of Black Monk Consulting, a strategic business consultancy specializing in futuring, branding, internal and external corporate communications, marketing and understanding and mapping corporate cultural ecologies. He and his work have been profiled in a number of periodicals including Wired, which labeled him a philosopher of e-commerce and Red Herring. His opinions on a broad range of issues ranging from the future of Internet pornography to ethnic marketing have appeared on the pages of literally hundreds of newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, the Washington Post, Business Week, Chicago Tribune, the Detroit News, Detroit Free Press, Advertising Age, Fortune and American Demographics, which labeled him the “futurist to watch” in an article on individuals who have had the greatest impact on American demography over the past 25 years.

A veteran journalist, Mathews has written cover stories for Fast Company and other leading magazines and has been a frequent contributor to National Public Radio’s Marketplace on topics related to innovation.

He is the co-author (with Fred Crawford) of The Myth of Excellence: Why Great Companies Never Try To Be The Best at Everything (Crown Business), which debuted on the Wall Street Journal’s list of Best Selling Business Books. Myth was named to the bestseller lists of Business Week, Financial Times (German Edition) 1-800 CEOREAD and other business book tracking services. It was also a bestseller on Amazon.com. Amazon’s Business Editors selected it for their list of the twelve best business books released in 2001.

He is also the co-author (with Watts Wacker) of The Deviant’s Advantage: How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets (Crown Business), which received uniformly high reviews from The New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, the Miami Herald and Time magazine and which Robert Sutton, professor, Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Engineering School Center for Work, Technology and Organization, called, “…the best book ever written about how and why companies can benefit from fringe ideas and people…” In 2007 Ryan published his third book, What s Your Story?: Storytelling To Move Markets, Audiences, People and Brands which was short-listed in the Advertising/Marketing Category in the first annual 1-800-CEO-READ Best Business Book Awards. His books have been translated into several languages including German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Russian.

Mathews was also a contributor to the best selling, Business: The Ultimate Resource (Perseus) and The Change Champion’s Fieldguide: Strategies and Tools For Leading Change In Your Organization (Best Practice Publications).

A frequently requested international keynote speaker he received his BA from Hope College in philosophy and Inner Asian history and did his graduate work at the University of Detroit where he studied phenomenological ontology. He currently serves as Industry Strategist and Senior Futurist at SmartRevenue.com. He is a founding member of the board of the Russell Center for Creative Arts, the not-for-profit organization that operates the PAF.

Mathews is a Kentucky Colonel and his reputation and experience as a chili authority won him a seat on the International Chili Society’s board of directors.

In 2010 he made his movie debut as one of the principle narrators in Florent Tillon’s Détroit Ville Sauvage (Detroit Wild City) that the Detroit Free Press hailed as, “The Citizen Kane of urban decay porn.