It’s June, but Eric Holowacz’s family is cold.
He misses them. They are on the other side of the planet.
Here, in the Capital City, it’s the week before the summer solstice. Holowacz (pronounced “Hollow-oz”) is getting used to the humidity and getting lost, on occasion, as he learns the streets of Baton Rouge.
The native South Carolinian, who has spent much of the past 10 years abroad, enjoys finding his way home. He is glad to be back in the South.
He waits for his wife, Maureen Hickey, a seasoned neonatal intensive care nurse, and three daughters, Eva, 12, Mila, 10, and Anaďs, 8, before he can really settle in.
They stayed behind to pack for the move away from Mildura, Australia, a temperate, flat region in the southeastern part of that faraway continent that sits on the banks of the Murray River. Bayou-like billabongs and lakes surround it.
Holowacz may be waiting for his family, but the brand-new Arts Council CEO has plenty to keep him busy.
Along with learning about the various events the Arts Council already organizes, he’s working on new ideas. He’s planning virtual sculptures that appear only when viewed through a smart phone, old cigarette machines that dispense five-dollar original works of art instead of smokes, and CDs filled with local and regional music to be given to every newborn baby—a symbol of the rich culture they are born into.
He’s also shepherding several ambitious projects kicked off by his predecessor, Derek Gordon, who passed away last fall.
Sunday in the Park, River City Jazz Masters and the Debbie Allen Dance Residency are all brainchildren of Gordon’s that continue to benefit Baton Rouge.
“There was no manual waiting for me,” Holowacz says. “But I’m not about reading a manual. I’m more about following my intuition and briefings from staff. Then I can dig into the files.”
We are sitting at Highland Coffees. Nearby, writers compose verses, gamers stoop over a shared chess match and evening light hits paintings and photographs on the walls.
This place suits Holowacz, who dabbles in poetry and photography. His Instagram feed is loaded with eye-catching images of his artistic adventures.
Tonight, he is eager to talk about new technology and how it can be applied to the arts.
He lifts his spectacles to sit on top of his head so he can fix my eyes with an intense gaze as he enthusiastically and lyrically shares idea after idea after idea.
His presence is contagious. He wears a gregarious grin and laughs frequently. He has the wide-eyed verve and energetic interest of a 6-year-old.
For the past 20 years, he’s been working in the arts throughout the southeastern United States as well as overseas, but there’s nothing pretentious about him.
He’s the guy you have over to your house to drink beer and watch football—until the conversation turns to opera, poetry or the latest smart phone application, and then he can riff on those topics, too.
“My neurons fire all the time in the direction of a creative response,” he says.
The Arts Council’s mission is to improve the quality of life through the arts. Under this umbrella, the local organization raises funds, distributes grant money and facilitates some of the city’s biggest cultural events, including FestForAll every April. Many of the area’s art exhibits, folklife studies, music festivals, literary events and galleries draw from its $428,000 of grant funds. In recent years, the council has been growing, and more growth is on the horizon.
In his final months, Gordon worked on a two-year, $300,000 grant from the Kresge Foundation to study how the arts might become a growth engine for the dilapidated Old South Baton Rouge neighborhood.
It will be up to Holowacz now to steer that project and forge the alliances he’ll need to make it a success. He’s already coming up with his own strategy.
As a newcomer, he won’t be the insider that Gordon, a Baton Rouge native, was. He plans to give the locals creative control and put his energy into getting to know influential insiders. If anything, Holowacz seems invigorated, not intimidated, by the process of fitting in and making things happen here that are truly new.
“He has great things in store for us,” says Jason Andreasen at the Baton Rouge Gallery.
During his first week at work, Holowacz met with Andreasen about the idea of putting in a refurbished, decorated cigarette machine that would house miniature works of art for sale at the tiny price of about $5.
The concept is part of a worldwide movement hosted online at Artomat.org.
“It’s a project that has some big names behind it,” Andreasen says. “Big-name museums will have one. So it sounds like this really kooky, offbeat kind of thing, and that’s exactly what it is. But it’s also exactly why some of the more respected arts institutions have it. It’s an interesting, populist take on the museum and art-buying experience.”
The Art-o-mat program is slated to roll out at Baton Rouge Gallery and on the LSU campus this fall. It will put Baton Rouge artists into a worldwide network that includes locations in major cities throughout the United States and provides patrons with accessible, affordable art.
Holwacz is fired up about the potential for installing augmented reality sculptures: smart phone applications that place a work of art, virtually, in a particular location when it’s viewed through a smart phone using a browser called Layar.
As he discusses these virtual sculptures that might be placed cheaply throughout Baton Rouge, his speech quickens, and then he just has to show you one on his very own phone, as soon as he’s done scrolling through pictures of Jacaranda trees and his daughters.
In his last gig as Arts & Culture Manager at the Mildura Rural City Council, he engineered the placement of one of these not-really-there sculptures (unless you are looking through this browser on your phone) in front of one of the area’s historic buildings.
On his phone, it looks like a giant, oddly shaped, multi-faceted UFO, with prisms that hold impressions of old photographs.
Holowacz imagines a downtown Baton Rouge filled with these kinds of interactive experiences. He even wants to transform our local library cards into discount card devices that will encourage users to experience the area’s culture in different ways.
“The arts aren’t always about buying a ticket,” Holowacz says.
He sees art as an asset that can actually surround us, beyond the concert hall or gallery.
This fresh approach will take Baton Rouge in new directions that might challenge stodgy supporters who have always thought the arts were about buying tickets and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with other patrons.
He wants to win them over. His biggest assets? Good old Southern charm and zero fear of strangers. Holowacz is a quick study when it comes to cultural cues. Example: He rapidly stopped calling mudbugs “crayfish” with a single, quiet prompt from this reporter.
Holowacz grew up in South Carolina suburbia, where he played a slew of sports. He was raised Catholic, but he left its traditions behind by the time he got to the University of South Carolina.
“Did that make your mom mad?” I ask.
“Aw, no,” he says with a chuckle. “She was fine.”
At college he studied art history and English literature. Among his favorite classes was one with the bucolic, abrasive poet James Dickey, who often belched during class.
“He was not afraid of the afternoon drink,” Holowacz explains.
Dickey taught his students to express their hearts. But he also demanded that they have the discipline it takes to learn how to write poems in strict forms—Haiku, couplets and sonnets, for instance.
That resonated with Holowacz.
“I know I’m not a career poet,” Holowacz says now. “But in my heart, I am a poet.”
With a little coaxing, he shares examples of his work. It is both classical, drawing on influences such as Pablo Neruda, and contemporary—a little bit like Baton Rouge.
One of Holowacz’s favorite poets is Thomas Merton. Reading the work of the Trappist writer led Holowacz to explore meditation and silence. He fell so deeply into this process that he was moved to live for a month in quiet, as a Trappist monk, in the cloisters of Mepkin Abbey, a plantation-turned-monastery outside of Charleston.
The loudest sound there most days was the buzzing of bees or the flipping of fish from the waters nearby.
“They had a library, and they had all of these great books,” he says. “I was up at 3 a.m., chanting psalms.”
After that experiment, Holowacz took to the road—in America and Europe—with a band called Toenut.
“They wanted me to tour with them and be their manager.” Then he adds with assurance: “They weren’t out-of-control rock ‘n’ roll. They were mild-mannered.”
From the cloisters to a rock band?
Why not? Holowacz adores the intersections between art and technology.
He also enjoys making very ancient things spanking new and building a sense of creative place.
Back in Charleston, he was hired by the Spoleto Festival USA in 1992 as operations manager. That became the prelude to his career as a leader in the arts and led to a role as executive director of the Arts Council at Beaufort County.
After Sept. 11, 2001, he and his family relocated halfway around the world to run arts programs and services for the city of Wellington, New Zealand at a time when hobbits were roaming the landscape for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.
In 2007, Holowacz was hired as founding executive director of The Studios of Key West, before he returned to Australia to work as producer and general director of the Cairns Festival and then on to leading the Mildura Rural City Council.
It’s a complex resumé that seems to boil down to Holowacz’s being an immensely prepared and colorfully unique fit for Baton Rouge. Now all he has to do is become a local.
There was a brief break in the interviewing process when Holowacz wandered through the Wearing of the Green St. Patrick’s Day Parade—all by himself. He shot photographs, walked through smoke from portable grills and puckering girls with red lipstick, and wondering what it might be like to live in this unique place and facilitate its artistry.
If he doesn’t think a city is poised for creative greatness, he certainly doesn’t move there, he says. Each day, he is visiting the city’s prime spots and making them his own, getting on a first-name basis not only with well-known artists and those who are on the brink, but also with the counter-moppers at storied restaurants such as Poor Boy Lloyd’s, picking their brains, popping off with ideas and open to all.
“I want this place to develop into the next great arts environment,” he says.
And he means it.
