City of Dreams: Unveiled

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This is a Kun V studios original program. The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 jazz and more the University of Nevada Las Vegas or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education. Good

Unknown Speaker 0:15
morning, dreamers and creators, you're tuned into the City of Dreams unveiled your monthly deep dive into the pulsing heart of Las Vegas's art and entertainment scene. I'm your host, Jeff Lund, here to peel back the layers of creativity and inspiration that fuel our city's most innovative minds. You

Unknown Speaker 0:40
music. Good morning, listeners. I'm super excited to have a special guest here with us today. Robin. Slo Nina, hi everybody.

Unknown Speaker 0:48
How

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are you today? Robin,

Unknown Speaker 0:50
I'm doing great. I battled the heat on the way into the studio. When will it end? My goodness, this

Unknown Speaker 0:56
summer, heat is something else. She is the creative powerhouse behind skin city body painting, as well as a TV show that was on the Game Show Network called Skin wars, and you were a creator, producer and judge on that TV show, yes. Well, let's start. Let's start. Let's start from the beginning and move back. Where are you from? Originally,

Unknown Speaker 1:18
I grew up just outside of Chicago, and then when I was 19, I moved into the city to go to art school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And

Unknown Speaker 1:29
did you always have an interest in art, like you knew that was your your plan? Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 1:33
I mean, it's just something I've always done since I was a child, and nobody in my family was necessarily artistic, so I kind of came from outer space, but luckily, I had really supportive parents, and they did what they could to encourage me. And yeah, I was just one of those geeky kids that was always like in my bedroom, oil painting, you know, my whole teenage years, and sort of self taught at that point, and then really fine tuned my skills in college. Okay,

Unknown Speaker 2:05
and so you said oil painting. But what do you identify yourself as? What type of artist now? Well, one

Unknown Speaker 2:11
of the magical things about an awesome art school like SAIC in Chicago is that it sort of forces you to become multidisciplinary. Because my freshman year we're required to take everything. So I came in as a painter, but I had to take performance art, ceramics, glass blowing, paper making, I mean, you name it. We did it a film. You know, back in the day, we were filming on these chunky VHS cameras, if you can believe that. And so, yeah, I just did it all. And I realized that once you sort of find your voice as an artist, you really can translate your esthetic into any medium. And so I really had a lot of fun just exploring all sorts of different things. So now I would definitely firmly call myself a multi disciplinary artist, okay,

Unknown Speaker 3:01
talk about the Chicago art scene. So you graduated school, then what was your next step?

Unknown Speaker 3:08
Well, my next step was like, Oh my gosh, how do I pay back my student loans with an art degree, right? And so I would go back to the job board at my alma mater, and I saw a lot of requests for mural paintings, and it really seemed like there was a market there. So my partner, Eduardo, and I at the time, we started a mural painting company, and that was sort of how we paid the bills. But while we were doing that, we were doing a lot of our own artwork. We had a group of artists called Test Site, which blew up into Gosh, about 45 artists from the city and we would do back then, we didn't have the word interactive or immersive. Back then, we called it site specific, or site determined artwork, where you come into a space and you look around and you let the space speak to you about what you're going to create into it. So I did a lot of site specific installations. We did a art show inside of a pickled pig's feet factory. We did an art show inside of the Congress Theater, which was this decrepit, gorgeous, old theater that was falling apart and crumbling. And we had about 45 artists. That was our biggest show. I had an opera singer from the Lyric Opera in the lobby singing in this giant dress that I made her. And people were bouncing yoga balls around the space. And so we did a lot of really magical, what now would be called Interactive artwork in Chicago,

Unknown Speaker 4:38
or the immersive space, where exactly it's all around you at all times interesting. So did you make a name for yourself in Chicago? Yeah, definitely.

Unknown Speaker 4:45
I mean, I showed at galleries. I showed in the Museum of Modern Art. Back then, I was part of a radical marching band, and we were part of their summer solstice celebration. And, yeah, I mean, the opportunity. In Chicago are much bigger than they are in a city like Las Vegas. And so I definitely felt that I got integrated into the gallery scene. But I even worked at a really fancy gallery downtown for a couple years. But to be honest, I ended up getting a little turned off by the gallery scene. It just started to feel very precious, like the white box, you know, room with the white box pedestal. It's a very kind of rarefied environment to actually view art in. And that pushed me even further towards, like public art, immersive art. I really wanted to bring art to the streets, and we did performance pieces in shop windows. You know, kind of unexpected. You'd turn a corner and you'd find us doing these crazy performances all over the city. So, yeah, it really did push me more into that interactive realm. It sounds like you were a little ahead of your time. Definitely, people did not know what to make of it. They didn't know what to call it. You know, we did these massive productions, and it was hard to get press to come out. I think we had one reporter from the reader come out and just at the bar all night, and didn't even write about it. And so, you know, I feel like back then, it was definitely ahead of its time, because people would be wondering, you know, but how do I buy this? How do I purchase it? And, you know, you can't. So there really wasn't money in it either. It was really done for passion and for love and so, yeah, definitely people didn't know what to do with us back then. Now it's everywhere. But back then it was, it was very different. Yep,

Unknown Speaker 6:42
so you're thriving in Chicago. What made you decide to be like, Let's venture off to Las Vegas?

Unknown Speaker 6:50
Well, I grew up in Chicago. I mean, I grew up about, you know, a 45 minute drive from downtown. And my dad grew up in Chicago. My mom grew up in Chicago, my grandparents grew up in Chicago, and so every weekend we were down there, we were going to the Lincoln Park Zoo. We were, you know, when I was 13, my dad was sneaking me into jazz clubs and blues clubs, and I had such a long standing relationship with the city, I was so rooted there. And I just really wanted to travel. I wanted to see the rest of the world, and I got really tired of the weather, you know, I got tired of chipping ice off the windshield of my car and digging out a parking spot in the snow, and so I just really had the travel bug, pretty Bad. I had some serious wanderlust, so I ended up getting, like, an interesting job doing some willow weaving sculpture in England at this place called the earth center in Doncaster. And so that was my first trip overseas. And it was great because it paid well, and it really turned me on to this idea of artist residencies, where you can travel and make art and have a little place to crash. And so I got obsessed. I just tried for every arts residency I could, and I kind of like bopped around Europe with a backpack for a number of years, and then when I finally did make it back stateside, I bought a camper van, and I traveled around America for a few years, again, doing arts residencies and just traveling. So, yeah, it was the travel bug that got me out of Chicago.

Unknown Speaker 8:31
So you talked about art residencies for someone who might not be familiar with that, like, where in this day and age? Where would they go to find those.

Unknown Speaker 8:41
There is a great resource, if you just search like sometimes they call them like a ir or air, which just stands for artists and residencies. And you can find like.org websites that really do highlight them all and explain, you know, bullet points of this one has a stipend. This one doesn't, you know, some you have to pay. There's like, a little bit of rent. Some pay you so, you know, there's lots of different varieties, but there's hundreds all over the country, and even more, all over the world. And if you are a young artist, and you don't have a lot of responsibilities or obligations, or even if you're anywhere in your career, and you can carve out, you know, between two and six weeks to go on like an art vacation. I really recommend trying it out, because it's there's nothing like giving yourself that kind of time and space to just be with your own art making. And also, a lot of times meet other artists. I still keep in touch with artists that I met on residencies, and, you know, a lot of us are still close, because it's such an amazing, just powerhouse of an experience to really make art like in that concentrated environment.

Unknown Speaker 9:51
Yeah, I could see the bond that forms when you do if you've got an adventure spirit and you're open, you know, to meeting the new people and just the. Enter of it. Yeah, it's

Unknown Speaker 10:01
really fun. I recommend it to everybody. Should give it. Give it a try. If you're an artist, try an arts residency at some point in your career.

Unknown Speaker 10:08
Amazing. Okay, so you land in Vegas. Where? Like, where did you land here? Okay,

Unknown Speaker 10:14
so here I ended up passing through town. I wasn't gonna stay. And then I met somebody. I actually got set up on a blind date with my future husband, Jimmy slonina, who is a performer with Cirque du Soleil. At the time, he was in a Dragone production called La rev at the Wynn Casino. And yeah, we got set up on a blind date. We got along really well. And I was on my way to LA because I had a job lead, because a lot of times, you know, my mural painting would really come in handy, and that would be how it would make money from place to place. And, you know, coincidentally, he's like, oh, I need a mural in my kitchen. How about you stay for a few weeks and paint here? So, yeah, he sort of got me to stick around and

Unknown Speaker 11:03
what was the mural in the kitchen?

Unknown Speaker 11:06
It was really fun. He has really good taste. He had this really fun retro, like multicolor type of of house. And I did, like old kind of posters, you know, like food and drink posters for, you know, from the turn of the century and stuff like that, like painting all those kind of crazy, weird imagery on a big wall in his kitchen. Cool.

Unknown Speaker 11:29
I like that. Okay, so now you've landed in Vegas. You met him, Yes, and you decide that you're gonna stick around? Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 11:37
I mean, he really, you know, he's a great guy. He convinced me to stay, you know, we fell in love pretty quickly. I think within a year, we were engaged. And so, yeah, I kind of stuck around for him, but then, you know, I really wanted to look around and say, Okay, I'm an artist in this little dusty Boomtown, you know, like, what's the art scene here? Sure. And so the first thing that I did was find First Friday, which is a monthly festival that, just like it sounds it happens the first Friday of every month. And I went, and I met the organizer at that time. Her name was Cindy Funkhouser, and she ran this super fun kind of thrift store called the funk house. And that was that, and the arts factory were sort of like the two hubs of First Friday at that time. And I talked to Cindy, and I'm volunteered, I think I sold water or, you know, who knows what I did, set up barricades, you know, anything to just sort of meet people in the scene, and I also volunteered my time at this mini golf course that was sponsored by Todd von bastians, who made, he commissioned a bunch of artists to make little stops on a mini golf course in this empty warehouse. So that was super fun. And yeah, just through that, I was able to put up some of my paintings and meet the community, and it was really there, you know, where I got started as an artist here, yep.

Unknown Speaker 13:09
For somebody who might not know what First Friday is, give me a lowdown, yeah.

Unknown Speaker 13:14
So a lot of cities have some version of a First Friday Festival. It's usually wherever galleries and art studios are concentrated. They'll choose a day a month. A lot of times it is the first Friday. It's almost always a free event. You can go down, you can meet artists. A lot of times you wander in and out of artist studios. You see them working. You get to meet people. If there's galleries, you know, they're open the first Friday in Las Vegas. Has stages with live music. There's food trucks. You know, it's really grown into like a big celebration that usually about 10,000 visitors a month come down and roam the streets. And they close off some streets. They have a big parking lot where they have food trucks and music and, yeah, it's just a lot of fun. It's family friendly, it's free, it's it's, it's a good time, and it's a great way, if you're an artist, to network, especially in a city like Las Vegas, because we don't really have a lot of galleries. We do have the Barrick Museum at UNLV, but aside from that, we don't have a free standing art museum here. And so yet, oh, yes, I hope so. I

Unknown Speaker 14:22
think there's something coming in down by Symphony Park. I've

Unknown Speaker 14:24
been hearing that for a while. I sure hope it's finally true, because we need it here, you know? And I mean, I mean, the first time that I was at first Friday, I remember I was in this dusty parking lot. That's the space they gave me to set up. I set up a tent. I'm on a folding chair, and I'm just looking around at my paintings, like hanging on wires, on these metal grids, and thinking like I've shown in museums, like,

Unknown Speaker 14:50
This is so sad, and you're on the streets of Las Vegas downtown, and

Unknown Speaker 14:55
yet, you know, within five minutes, I was like, Get over yourself. You're starting all over. Again, you know, this is, this is a new space. And I think just as I was thinking that out of nowhere, this, this city TV crew appears with who would end up becoming one of my best friends, Stephen Harlock is there, just as a project that he sort of spearheaded on his own, since he was a producer at the the city TV station, he decided to go down and interview artists. So the way that we met was him saying, Hey, can I interview you for this piece that I'm doing for the city channel. So I think that's something you know, especially after my experience in Chicago, where there's so much art, there's so any given night, there's just competing events and performances and theater and art shows and dance and, you know, everything you can think of that it's really hard to get the attention of the public, of the press. You have to fight in a pretty, you know, an ocean of of events, whereas here it really is like the small pond where you can be a big fish. And, you know, getting that little story, which you can still find on YouTube. I think me, as you know, a baby artist here in Vegas. And you know, within that first couple years too, Ernest Hemings, who does test market here, which is a brilliant theater experiment that he has been doing forever. Here he had a Samuel Beckett festival in a warehouse that is now art square, but back then it was a spider filled dusty old warehouse, and we did this huge festival, and we were on the cover of The Art section of the Las Vegas review journal. So I had never really seen that kind of support in bigger cities. And you know, the press here is just really supportive and wonderful. And I realized that there are advantages to actually being an artist in a smaller community.

Unknown Speaker 16:54
Yep, I think there's a lot of value in that. So people don't need to go to New York or LA or Chicago or Miami, like you can get seen and known in this in this market as well. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 17:05
and How satisfying is it to be where you're actually needed, right? You know, those other big cities don't need me. I just had, like, a wonderful experience where I lived in Berlin for a year a few years back, right before covid, because Jimmy was cast in a performance there at the friedrichstadt polast, which is like an old theater in Germany. And they do big sort of Cirque, almost like rickets, like type shows. And so we lived in in Berlin for a year, and man, the opportunities I got to paint a whole hotel room for the weinmeister Hotel, and people were wandering in for gallery week, I had a huge show in this beautiful gallery space adjacent to the NHow hotel. You know, I got to show at Lucky gallery with this amazing curator, Natalie Corelli. And you know that all happened within a year, but when I came back, you know, I really felt like Berlin doesn't need me. They have so much art, they have so many opportunities. They have so much amazing things going on and coming back to Vegas, like I felt like I was missed, and that, you know, there's, there's a way that you can have an impact here, like bringing water to the desert, you know, kind of vibe when you're bringing artwork to a city like this that really wants it and needs it and doesn't have it.

Unknown Speaker 18:24
It's a big, small town. Over and over and over again. The more people I talk to, it's the same story of, like, community, yeah, it really feels like a small community. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 18:33
I don't know, like, how many other cities where the tourists outnumber the locals, to the extent that Vegas does. I think it's like, at any given time, like 1/16 of the people actually in the city live here, and the other are tourists. I think we've got like a million people living here, and you know, we have 30, 40,000 visitors, or 30 40 million visitors a year. And so, yeah, it's a crazy proportion where we have all of the benefits of having these big cities and big productions and big casino shows and, you know, a lot of fun of like, world class chefs and all those kinds of things that we have here. But when you look at the amount of people that actually live here, it's, it's a lot smaller. So we all kind of know each other and support each other

Unknown Speaker 19:21
for sure. Okay, let's talk about your TV show. Creator, producer, Judge. How does someone create a TV show that actually gets on the air?

Unknown Speaker 19:31
I think it's definitely comparable to winning the lottery. It's really difficult. It took me about seven years to make the show. So you had this idea, yes, and originally it was what they call an OCU series, which is like occupational series, so almost like one of the, like a tattoo show, where they focus on, like a tattoo shop. There we had Travel Channel filming in my company studio, skin city, and the show was called Skin city, and we went through a few Permian. Tations. We shot lots of episodes. It got bumped around from different networks, and then finally, it didn't happen. And that's when Michael Levitt production stepped in and said, Hey, how about we change it into a competition show? And at that point, I had had a couple years of cameras following me around. I had a newborn baby, you know, I'm like, getting filmed breastfeeding. And at that point I was like, oh, yeah, maybe some privacy would be good, you know, let's focus on the competition and have, like, a bunch of body painters compete with each other, as opposed to, like, following me and my staff around in our work environment. And so, yeah, I was on board. So it moved from Vegas to LA and, you know, we got RuPaul on board, which was just such a score. We got Rebecca Romaine on board, who has this organic relationship to body paint, because she was the first supermodel body painted in Sports Illustrated magazine. And she also, of course, famously, is Mystique, which at that point was like a nine hour makeup process, or something crazy like that, where she would actually want to film for 24 hours, because she just didn't want to go through the whole process of getting, you know, made up again, sure. So she had a really organic connection to the art form, and she was an amazing hostess. And then we had Craig Tracy, another powerhouse body painter from New Orleans, who was our CO judge. So Rebecca was the hostess, and then me, Rue and Craig were the judges.

Unknown Speaker 21:25
Okay? And how many episodes in we had

Unknown Speaker 21:29
three seasons. We did really well. It was definitely a huge success. We were top five streaming on Netflix. We got nominated for a Critic's Choice Award. It was really fun, amazing. And one thing I'll say is just the power of persistence that I think I had 46 no's total before the Game Show Network finally said yes. And so,

Unknown Speaker 21:56
and when they said yes, did you think it was real? Or were you like, let's see if this actually makes it on air. It was

Unknown Speaker 22:02
one of those things where, yes, I I was waiting for it to finally happen, but I always had faith that it would right. I don't think I could have lasted the seven years of pushing for it if I wasn't somehow sure that this was in my destiny to have this TV show. Yep. And so I was, I was pretty persistent. But, yeah, I mean, definitely ups and downs. You know, of course there was some lots of drama. And, you know, the television industry is a strange one. Yeah, it's definitely not necessarily, has, like, the integrity and the honesty of something like my, my art career, so you have to navigate a lot of strange energy when you're when you're in that, that world. So yeah, it wasn't without some heartache and ups and downs, but overall, when we finally got it made, it was just an amazing, positive experience. It was the right team, it was the right people. The contestants and I are all still really close. I just had a couple huge body paint jobs for a YouTuber called Mr. Beast, and because they were flying us all in to his headquarters, it didn't really matter. I didn't have to bring a crew from Vegas. I could bring it from anywhere. So we sort of treated it as a skin wars reunion, and I flew in the contestants from all over the country, and we all saw each other for the first time in years, and we did this really fun series of jobs. And yeah, it was great. So we're all very close still from the show.

Unknown Speaker 23:32
So I can check out the or anybody can check out the episode. I

Unknown Speaker 23:35
think that it was on Netflix for a while. I think it's currently on Hulu, but you'd have to check that out

Unknown Speaker 23:40
perfect. Let's talk about your studio, your gallery downtown.

Unknown Speaker 23:44
Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 23:44
when did you, when did you start that, and why we

Unknown Speaker 23:48
just celebrated our one year anniversary. So I am super excited that we made it one year. And, yeah, it's, it's downtown on Fremont Street in sort of the Fremont East area. We have some great neighbors in Ferguson's, which is a really fun old motel that got converted into art studios and little boutique shops. And then on the other side, we've got Container Park, which is another just super fun little shopping area and park that's all made out of shipping containers. And so, yeah. So basically, we're in a great location. It's a nice big space. There's room to have a gallery. There's a room for me to do some big work, some sculptural work. I did a selfie wall for Katy Perry's New Year's Eve party made out of toys donated by goodwill. So I'm able to do much bigger projects, because I finally have space for it. And we have a party the second Saturday of every single month. It's a free, family friendly event, and two to 6pm every second Saturday, we have an opening where we have all the artists that are part of the collective. They put up new work. We do different projects. We do group shows. We do collaborate. Operations. So, yeah, that's, that's the arts salonina art space is what it's called, all right? And

Unknown Speaker 25:06
how many artists you have right now? We

Unknown Speaker 25:08
have five. We have had eight. I think we have a couple more joining. It's very fluid. You know, as far as who's part of the collective, you know, they, they come and go with different opportunities. One of our amazing artist, Gina bobina. She got a free studio space through the first Friday foundation, so she jumped over to that for six months, and then hopefully she's going to come back next month. So yeah, it's always changing. It's always exciting, something new and different,

Unknown Speaker 25:33
and that's who you are. You're constantly creating new opportunities for yourself. So what's going to be next?

Unknown Speaker 25:40
Well, gosh, yeah. I mean, definitely

Unknown Speaker 25:44
share, yeah, and I'm sure there's some top secret stuff that's going on,

Unknown Speaker 25:47
yeah, for sure. Well, you know, I think creating opportunities for myself, but also hopefully creating opportunities for for others, because I just really believe that, you know, rising water raises all ships, and I'm always trying to figure out what I can do to help the local community and the emerging artists here, and I just helped broker a deal where one of the retail gift shops at the airport is has a bunch of local artists. One of the projects I was able to do with meow Wolf, which was very exciting, was partner with gallery to go and have two vending machines inside of area 15, right at the meow wolf box office that sells local art by 45 different artists. So that's like regular, recurring monthly income for them.

Unknown Speaker 26:33
So literally, you go to a vending machine and it's just got all their art in there.

Unknown Speaker 26:37
Instead of candy bars and chips, you can buy original art, and it's all priced between five and $25 and that's just such a fun way to sort of introduce people to the joy of art collecting. For a lot of times, that's people's first original art purchase was at the vending machine. And I think it kind of takes the edge off and makes it a little less intimidating to imagine yourself going to an art gallery or an art party, because now you have a little piece of original art and you only need to spend $5 Yeah, exactly. So for kids, it's a lot of time their first time ever buying art and so, yeah, things like that. I just love spreading the love here in Vegas, that's

Unknown Speaker 27:16
amazing. I feel you're a very integrated community member in the arts and culture scene. So that's, that's one of the reasons I wanted you on the show, because you do have your pulse on the heartbeat of what this community is doing. Do you feel it's changed over the last, you know, 1015, years, and where do you hope it goes?

Unknown Speaker 27:37
Definitely, we had a big influx of people moving here during covid. We had a huge swath of people coming from Los Angeles, for instance. And, yeah, I just love that, because there's all these new artists in town, like we're have, we have a group show up right now at salonina art space. And I would say a third of the artists, I didn't even know them, which I kind of pride myself on knowing everybody in town. Yes, in, you know, one of the hats that I wear in the community is I'm the artist liaison for meow wolf here in town. And so part of that job description is to really know the artists and be able to pick the right artists for the job. You know, like we were able to do a beautiful, big mural at a skate park here in Las Vegas, and so finding the right mural painter that could work with the community, youth in the in that neighborhood, and pull off a big, bright, beautiful mural at the skate park. You know, that's kind of part of my job. Is just like knowing all the artists in town and being very Switzerland, you know, like being friends with everybody. I think that's really important, not having any drama with any communities, and, yeah, just really being here to help curate opportunities.

Unknown Speaker 28:48
You're sort of a matchmaker in the art community, you know, finding projects and matching them up with the right artists. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 28:54
definitely, because, you know, there's, there's too much for me to do, and I'm not right for everything. And so that's why, you know, I it is so satisfying and so fun to be able to, like, help other artists find their voice and give them opportunities as well. That's

Unknown Speaker 29:10
amazing. Robin, thank you for being on the show today.

Unknown Speaker 29:14
Yeah, absolutely my pleasure. I

Unknown Speaker 29:16
think it's amazing your TV show. You're such a multidisciplinary you know, from the TV to everything across the the industry, so you're an awesome community member to have in this community. So thank you. Thank

Unknown Speaker 29:28
you.

Unknown Speaker 29:29
Please join me. I'm Jeff Lund on the next episode of City of Dreams unveiled and remember support your local artists is crucial. They enrich our community and bring color to our lives in ways nothing else can until next time, keep embracing and supporting your local artists.

Unknown Speaker 29:44
Thank you, Robin. Thank you. Bye. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai