St. Louis Arts Chamber of Commerce

About the St. Louis Arts Chamber of Commerce

The St. Louis Arts Chamber of Commerce is a Missouri-based 501(c)3 non-profit founded in 2018. Our mission is to strengthen and enrich the community by creatively blending arts, culture, and economic development. We blend arts and economics for a vibrant community through two programs: Creative Placemaking and Exhibitions/Performances.  

From the National Endowment for the Arts: "Creative placemaking integrates arts, culture, and design activities into efforts that strengthen communities. Creative placemaking requires partnership across sectors, deeply engages the community, involves artists, designers and culture bearers, and helps to advance local economic, physical, and/or social change, ultimately laying the groundwork for systems change. This definition is intentionally open and broad because creative placemaking draws on all artistic disciplines, and can be deployed as a strategy to address a wide range of community issues or challenges from public health to safety, economic development to housing." Our Creative Placemaking program addresses resident concerns in underserved communities including crime and vacancy, traffic safety, environmental justice and health concerns related to the environment and cultural identity. For example, we cleaned up a dangerous alley along the Hodiamont Tracks so a student mentee could create a 270' mural on the retaining wall and resident volunteers could create a native garden along the Greenway on the Tracks north of Delmar to address crime, pedestrian and cyclist safety, water issues and mosquitos affecting health of residents and included resident input into the design of the mural expressing their cultural identity. Extending along the Tracks and continuing to address these priorities, we installed 10 Little Free Libraries as part of the Read in Color program to bring books by and about African Americans to this primarily African American community. In addition, we converted 6 vacant lots to art parks in Lewis Place and Vandeventer including art that expresses the cultural perspectives of the residents including peace poles and a life size sculpture of an African American family. We have expanded our creative placemaking to include Gravois Jefferson neighborhoods with an EPA opportunity and to include Downtown area installation of some of the recommendations in the Design Downtown Plan. 

Our exhibitions and performances program includes work in the neighborhoods above but also work for marginalized voices. We have commissioned an installation at Grand and Lindell on St. Louis University property to commemorate the entrance to Mill Creek Valley. We are working with a local sculptor to create a memorial to Archer Alexander as part of the National Park Service's Underground Railroad: Road to Freedom project. With our National Endowment for the Arts Big Read Grant we addressed issues with the community of individuals with disabilities by creating book discussion groups around the book Sitting Pretty by Rebekah Taussig, an art exhibition with Artists First, an oral history project for voices of individuals with disabilities and collaborated with the Art Museum to have tours that discuss artists and their disabilities. Previous installations included #Mask Up StL, the Silent Skies Mural at the Zoo addressing endangered birds, and the #Mask Up STL project which masked up figurative sculptures in 35 communities from the Runner in Kiener Plaza to the Cardinals and Blues all the way out to the Frisbee Dog in Wildwood.