McCombs Alumni Network News

From McCombs Today

After earning her MBA from McCombs in 1997, Rainey Knudson founded Glasstire, a non-profit online journal about the Texas visual arts scene. Not exactly the traditional MBA career path, but Knudson says her decision to follow her passions of art and writing is what has made her a successful entrepreneur.

McCombs Communications Director Dave Wenger spoke with Knudson about Glasstire’s new journalism model, social entrepreneurship and the sleeper arts scene in Texas. Here’s some of what Knudson had to say:

On gaining credibility:
“What we’re seeing strongly in the past 12 months is a real shift in how people regard websites in arts journalism, obviously across the board, and how people take far more seriously the idea that a great blogger can self edit. They don’t have to have an editor to be taken seriously. And websites are the critical hubs for how everybody gets information for everything, not just the arts. So we’ve seen a huge transition in how things are regarded.”

On the decision to operate as a non-profit:
“Very simply, within about six months of launching Glasstire it became painfully clear this was never going to be a profitable, for profit enterprise. I’d talked with some of the Houston foundations and they said it would be something they’d be interested in looking at if we got our 501(c)(3), which we did. So one of the things with arts journalism now is people are wondering if there is a for-profit model that will work for arts journalism. And there are a lot of for-profit models out there, magazines and a couple of websites, but people are still feeling their way with it.”

On the Texas art scene:
“The Texas art scene doesn’t enjoy the stature it really deserves, and it’s my mission to help get the word out about it and help bring it to a larger audience and help shine light on the artists who are working here.

There’s this sense that yes there are some of these institutions like the Menil Collection in Houston or the Dallas Museum of Art or other places in the Midwest or Southwest and yes they’re fine, and okay there might be a few artists, a handful of artists around who have real talent, and then they move to New York or LA and get serious. But really, that’s [Texas] not where the action is. And that’s just simply not the case.

There’s less of a microscope on what people are doing and there’s more freedom to get really innovative and that’s what’s exciting about the Texas art scene, and that’s why I chose early on to focus on it.”

On following your passion:
“I feel really proud that I have built this thing. Yes it’s a nonprofit, and that’s a totally different business model but it is a business and we do employ people and we’re keeping Texas artists who might not have other outlets or might not have had other outlets before Glasstire, we’re giving them an opportunity to stay in Texas. In our small nonprofit way we’re really trying to cultivate the art scene and the writing scene here. So that’s the thing I’m most proud of, I’ve created something that gives employment to people, and that is helping to celebrate something I am very passionate about which is aesthetics and the arts in my home state.

If you are excited about something and you feel like there’s a real need for it, you should go for it. Life is short.”

For the full interview transcript and mp3, visit Dave’s blog.