WHY CREATE? in partnership with Ruby City

2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
| Location of Session: Festival Room
Adult Sessions

Start of Signing: 3:45 PM
| Signing Location: Adult Signing Tent

My Schedule

About the Event

Ruby City brings together writer and art critic Ben Luke (What is art for? Contemporary artists on their influences, inspirations and disciplines) and South Texas author Stephanie Elizondo Griest (Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life) for a conversation about contemporary art, creative practice, and storytelling. The panel will explore how artists and writers navigate inspiration, discipline, and personal experience in their work and how art can shape our understanding of culture, place, and identity.

About the Authors

Photo Credit: Alexander Devora

Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting writer from the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Her six books include Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough: My Life between the Borderlines; and All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands. She has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Believer, BBC, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Oxford American. Her work has won a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, an International Latino Book Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, and two Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards. Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she has performed as both a Moth storyteller and as a literary ambassador for the US State Department.

Stephanie joins the Book Festival to discuss her book Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life.

Photo Credit: David Clack

Ben Luke

Ben Luke is a writer and broadcaster based in London. He is a contributing editor of The Art Newspaper and presents its podcasts A brush with…, of which there are now more than 100 episodes, and The Week in Art, of which there are now more than 300 episodes. From 2009 to 2024 he was an art critic at the London Evening Standard. He is a regular guest on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. Ben has contributed to books on artists as diverse as Phyllida Barlow, Glenn Brown, Michael Craig-Martin, Mark Dion, Matthew Krishanu, George Shaw, and Jiro Takamatsu. He was selected in the Critics’ Critics section of Artforum’s Best of 2024 issue. His new book is What is art for? Contemporary artists on their influences, inspirations and disciplines.

Moderator

Elyse A. Gonzales

Elyse A. Gonzales is the director of the Linda Pace Foundation which operates Ruby City, a new contemporary art center in San Antonio, TX. She brings a deep commitment to artists and community and a steadfast belief in making art spaces welcoming and accessible to all.

In addition to administrative and financial responsibilities she also serves as Ruby City’s curator growing the Collection’s holdings and organizing exhibitions such as Amy Cutler: Past, Present, Progress; Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Los Brillantes; Unsettled Eye, a group show of photo-based works from the collection; and Irrationally Speaking: Collage and Assemblage from the Collection.

Prior to her appointment in 2020 she served as Acting Director and Assistant Director & Curator of Exhibitions of the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara (2008–2020) where she curated numerous exhibitions including Roberto Benavidez: Piñatas of Earthly Delights; Ja’Tovia Gary: A Care Ethic; The Schoolhouse and the Bus: Mobility, Pedagogy and Engagement; Two Projects by Pablo Helguera and Suzanne Lacy / Pilar Riaño-Alcalá; Catherine Opie Photographs Cliff May; and The Stumbling Present: Ruins in Contemporary Art.

She also initiated an Artist-in-Residence exhibition program, and commissioned artists such as Ann Diener, Eric Beltz, Fran Siegel, Zoe Strauss, and Bari Ziperstein to create new works in the Museum’s galleries. She held prior positions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (2001–2008) and the Williams College Museum of Art (2000–2001). She is a 2017 Fellow in the Center for Curatorial Leadership Program and received an MA from Williams College and a BA from the University of New Mexico.