This site has been a low-budget affair from the beginning. The banners aren’t an attempt to get rich (each banner is $25 per month), but simply a way to help the site pay for itself and justify the continued time involvement on this project. I’d love to invest more in the site, hire someone who actually knows how to code and clean things up a bit, or hire someone to actually design the site and maybe a logo, but unless the site brings in some cash I can’t afford to do those things, much less continue to pour my own time into it.

So sponsorship (as well as donations) is one step forward to raise some funding for the site. If you know of anyone who might be interested in sponsoring the site, please pass this along.

We’ll continue to explore other funding avenues (grants are an option, though they’re fairly complicated since we’re not a nonprofit) and do what we can to keep this site going. Thanks for your support.

Just in time for the Republican National Convention, Start Seeing Art has produced a printable art map of downtown St. Paul, Minn. The 7-page PDF map features 85 sculptures and murals in the downtown area and includes a picture of each work.

This is the first in what we hope to be a series of printable maps. You can download the Downtown St. Paul Art Map today.

I wanted to share a few updates and reflections in light of this milestone:

• While a lot of the photos on this site are taken by yours truly (and admittedly they’re not the best), some of the better photos are taken by incredible photographers on Flickr who have been willing to let us use their work. So if you see a pic you like, click on it and let the photographer know.

• If you’re wondering how you can help this effort, one easy way is to help identify unknown art. There’s a category for unknown work and we’ll be adding a lot more to it as we start to exhaust some of the more easily identifiable work. If you see something you recognize or think you can shed some light on, feel free to post a comment sharing whatever you can.
• As you look at the map you’ll notice we’re pretty heavily slanted to St. Paul. The reason is two-fold: 1) I live here, so it’s easier to find and photograph artwork as I’m coming and going. 2) Minneapolis seems to have more resources identifying their art, so there’s a greater need to identify the work in St. Paul. This is a lot of the reason I’ve been slow to add work from the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.
• The site still isn’t very pretty, we know. At this point we’re still focused on content and we’ll worry about prettying things up later on (like when we have some budget to do it right).

So 100 works of art. Sweet. Here’s to a hundred more.

• We recently added an Archives page which enables you to access monthly and category archives. That will be useful as the list of artists in the sidebar becomes more and more unwieldy to the point that we have to take action.
• We also set up the homepage to map every piece of artwork we’ve charted so far. It does mean the map will take a little longer to load. We’re also running the latest three entries under the map, though we’re still tinkering with that (seems our archives page broke it–oops). If it isn’t obvious already, it should be clear that we’re focusing on content first. Then we can worry about the tech side and the finally the design (which seems so out of whack for an art site, doesn’t it?)
• And thanks to MNSpeak for pointing it out, Google’s Street View is now available for the Twin Cities. Just go to Google Maps and you can select ‘Street View’ along with ‘Map,’ ‘Hybrid’ or ‘satellite.’ And how does this relate to art? You can get a street level view of public art, like Amy Toscani’s “Muscle” in downtown St. Paul:

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