Arts Alive!: Daniel Wood, Bay Area Street Collective

Today’s guest on the Arts Alive! podcast is Daniel Wood, who’s made a career out of supporting the arts, first in his native England, and since 2017 in the United States.

Wood is one of a handful of experts on St. Petersburg’s 100-plus murals; his Star Trolley tours – covering 10 years of the SHINE Festival as well as other, independent artwork – are hot downtown tickets.

His latest venture, Bay Area Street Collective, backfills a longtime void in the city’s visual art community. It’s a show-and-sale website for signed prints of various locally-made art, all together in one place.

“It was really born out of frustration at the lack of a central portal to share artists’ work,” Wood says.

The idea, boiled down, is this: To let the Collective artists focus on the creative process, while someone else handles marketing and sales.

“Specifically street art, because that’s my forte,” he adds. “That’s what my visa was, into the States.”

A passionate and tireless advocate who swears he has zero artistic talent, Wood fell in love with St. Petersburg upon his arrival in 2022. The city’s friendly, collaborative artists and organizations spoke to something deep within him. It just felt like home.

Along with his trolley mural tours (the other guides are longtime SHINE director Jenee Priebe and artist Laura “Miss Crit” Spencer), Wood can be spotted at art fairs, and out during the monthly Second Saturday ArtWalk, representing the Bay Area Street Collective.

Coming to Bayboro Brewing July 20: The Live Paint Sessions, a live “art battle” during which four Collective artists will go head to head (or brush to brush, as it were). There’ll be a live DJ, a raffle, a judge vote and a crowd vote. Find tickets here.

Click on the arrow to listen to the conversation.