Can Art Save Main Street? Some Small Towns Are Staking Their Futures On It

Can Art Save Main Street? Some Small Towns Are Staking Their Futures On It

Noah Scalin, a multimedia artist living in Richmond, Virginia, had never heard of the South Carolina town of Lake City before looking online for arts festivals where he could show and sell his work. What caught his eye about ArtFields, at the time an eight-day town-wide visual arts festival in Lake City, was the best-in-show grand prize of $50,000. “I thought, ‘wow, that’s better than most other shows I enter,'” and he promptly submitted a stick…