A Year in Review: Re-visiting SXSW 2017

State Of The Art

As we approach the end of the year, SOTA host, Andrew Herman, reflects on his favorite episodes from the podcast's first year in production. In this episode, we revisit our very first panel, originally recorded live from the podcast stage at SXSW on March 15, 2018. Our panelists included Erica Gangsei, head of Interpretive Media @SFMoma, Nahema Mehta, Co-Founder and CEO of Absolut Art, and (now, current SOTA host) Andrew Herman, founder of French Girls & MiniCanvas. Our panelists got on like three peas in a pod and tackled some of the major questions we try to answer here at State of the Art. Like, how has technology democratized the art world? Has has the maturation of the art ecosystem changed the experience of buying art? And what's more important, sexy work, or un-sexy work?

-About Erica Gangsei-

Erica Gangsei, is Manager of Interpretive Media in the Education department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She researches, writes and co-produces educational multimedia materials such as audio tours, artist video interviews, podcasts, kiosk-based and online interactive features, and onsite educational spaces. Most recently, she curated ArtGameLab, an exhibition at SFMOMA of crowd-sourced game prototypes. Her professional research interests include crowd-sourced and assignment-based artwork, alternate reality games, institutional critique, and avant-garde culture as an engine of broader social and political change. She is also a sculptor, performer, conceptual artist and stop-motion animator, and have exhibited widely in the Bay Area and nationally. She is active in the Bay Area independent art community and recently concluded a term as co-President of Board of Directors of the Lab, an interdisciplinary experimental non-profit art space in San Francisco’s Mission district. I studied Philosophy and Fine Arts at Amherst College and Sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute.

-About Nahema Mehta-

As cofounder and CEO of Absolut Art, Nahema spends every day bridging the gap between artists creating and people collecting by refining art buying through patented design. As a philanthropist, she work with passionate humans to empower over 100,000 young girls through education and healthcare.

She's lived and worked across 4 continents and benefited from an interdisciplinary career path, having worked for Chief Justice Roberts, Merrill Lynch, and Sotheby’s before founding and exiting her own startup, Art Remba.

She shares learnings along the way at conferences like Fast Company's 2017 Most Creative Minds and Innovate46 at the NASDAQ.

-About Andrew Herman-

Andrew Herman is co-founder of the mobile app French Girls. Now located in San Francisco, Andrew was a mechanical engineer by training from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He grew up an avid guitar enthusiast and closet art fan. In 2014, he launched Easyl, a marketplace for original art which then transpired into French girls, an app that enables users to discover and create digital art inspired by photos from the community. He is now responsible for technical oversight of the app.

Find Andrew on Twitter and Instagram.