George Scheer, Founder of Elsewhere and Executive Director at Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans 46:08
As a young writer, George Scheer visited Greensboro, NC, with fellow writer Stephanie Sherman and rediscovered his grandmother’s thrift store, founded in 1939, shuttered in 1997, and overflowing with surplus material culture. The result of that trip is a living museum called Elsewhere that’s had hundreds of residents, interventions, performances, and community meals. George speaks with The Remix about local vs. regional vs. national reach; how Elsewhere residents continually transform a 60-year archive into artwork (nothing leaves and nothing is sold); how he went about physically creating space in the store and his community; how an artist resident helped educate him on how to run a nonprofit; Elsewhere’s funding trajectory; succession; and how he sees institutions as instruments of change. The conversation covers the nuts and bolts of starting and growing a nonprofit to the point of sustainability. We end the conversation with George’s next stop of New Orleans and how a health scare has him thinking long-term about how environment impacts patient agency and recovery. What are Elsewhere’s ties to the Guggenheim? Did George work for Obama? Listen to find out.
George Scheer is an artist-founder, director, and cultural policy advocate who fosters creative communities at the intersection of aesthetics and social change. George is the Director of the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and co-founder of Elsewhere, an experimental museum and artist residency. As a cultural critic, George writes about arts, cultural policy, urbanization, and place. Other projects include Kulturpark, a public investigation of an abandoned amusement park in East Berlin, and South Elm Projects, a curated series of public art commissions. George holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Political Communications, MA in Critical Theory and Visual Culture from Duke University, and a PhD in Communication and Performance Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
