Sean Kelley’s art-world charm offensive goes on and on.

Pat McCormick and Barry Eisenhart’s Gatsby-like house towers over Interstate 35 near downtown. It’s the crown jewel of the modern homes dotting the West Side, an ideal location for a ritzy afterparty on the opening night of the Lyric Opera’s production of The Magic Flute.

Sean Kelley, standing outside the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts with his boyfriend, Jim Hubbell, had been invited.

“It’s just a few blocks,” he said. “Let’s walk and talk.”

Kelley, always animated when discussing the arts, was especially buoyant on this November evening. The Lyric’s presentation of Mozart’s work featured set design by Jun Kaneko, an Omaha ceramic artist whom Kelley had known for decades. And the Lyric’s new general director, Deborah Sandler, had met with Kelley ahead of the show, seeking his guidance on how to spread awareness in the local arts community about this and other Lyric productions. It amounted to a peripheral connection — good for free seats to the opera.

“Jun Kaneko is the real fucking deal,” Kelley said on the walk to the West Side. “Not a lot of artists could have handled that. The way he was able to translate his pattering and use of color, the way he used the stage as a form for his sensibilities …” He went on for another few minutes, peppering his critique with buzzy words: matrix, linear, geometric, angular, minimal, metamorphosis. “It made me think of Jun’s work in a new way,” he finally said.

Kelley is not an artist, not technically. He’s an art appreciator, an art critic, an art dealer, an art facilitator. Most recently, he has become a civic arts booster, having served as co-chairman for the Mayor’s Task Force for the Arts, which last year discussed ways to develop and market the city’s arts footprint. (The city’s 2014-15 budget proposal includes an extra $325,000 for arts programs as a result of the task force’s recommendations.)

But if we are all artists in our own ways, as Kelley believes, then Kelley’s true canvas might simply be the discussion of art: its potential, its meaning, its practitioners, its role in the culture. And he’s a virtuoso conversationalist, a jazzman of talk. Critical monologues often pour out of him in fully formed paragraphs, one word flowing musically into the next. At other moments, he takes a different kind of solo, falling silent midway through a soliloquy and aiming his blue eyes into some middle distance. Whether he’s pausing in deep contemplation or merely doing some mental scurrying to avoid a dead-end thought, though, he seems always to catch the beat when it comes back around.

The afterparty’s guests were an older-skewing mix of Lyric friends, society types and art-world denizens done up in semiformal attire and occasionally eccentric eyewear. Kelley, who is 55, was in his element.

On the rooftop terrace, he chatted with Sherry Leedy, a prominent gallerist. In the kitchen, he patted Kaneko on the back and called him the “man of the hour.” He walked through the house and gave its art collection — Kelley had advised McCormick and Eisenhart on some pieces — a verbal browsing. In front of a long, horizontal landscape painting by Keith Jacobshagen, Kelley said, “Pat had that one commissioned. Don’t you just love the division between sky and land? It’s this brilliant fusion of real and abstract.”

He descended the stairs to the ground floor, where Eisenhart, an aspiring sculptor, keeps a small studio. Kelley has been mentoring Eisenhart for the past two years. “If somebody comes to me and says, ‘I’m an artist and I want to learn,’ I’ll do anything for them,” Kelley said. “I don’t judge. I love seeing what a person is doing and talking to them about my perspective and what I see and understand about their work.

“A lot of what I do now is mentorship,” he continued. “I’m the vampire who, all you have to do is invite me in. You’ll get a conversation that is mature, precise, respectful and clear about what I see and who you are. I know how to get to that point. It’s painless, it’s fun, it’s honest, it’s sincere.

“Because what’s art?” he said. “It’s a conversation.”

Kelley has an origin story he likes to tell that involves being in second grade and catching his mother kissing a nun in a church basement.

“I knew I was gay from an early age, and I just remember thinking it was so cool when I saw that,” Kelley says. “My father was a drunk, a madman. By fourth grade, I was taking love notes every day to and from school between my mom and this nun. And today she’s still my mom’s partner. I tell people that Jesus is my stepfather.”

Kelley came to Kansas City from St. Louis in the late 1970s to play soccer at Rockhurst University and was quickly pulled in by the charms and, to him, mysteries of what he calls the “cultural corridor” of Kansas City: Rockhurst, the then–Missouri Repertory Theatre, the UMKC Conservatory, the Linda Hall Library, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Kansas City Art Institute. Soon he was working at an art-house theater at 47th Street and Troost, and at an adjacent punk club called the Downliner.

“William Burroughs would come read at punk and new-wave shows I helped produce at an old VFW hall at 31st and Main,” he says. “I remember meeting Taylor Mead, of Warhol’s Factory. I was around a lot of volatile cultural action. It was very exciting.”

Kelley found that visual art interested him most. He started spending a lot of time at the Nelson and befriending artists at KCAI. “I had no art education whatsoever, and I was perplexed by why certain objects had value and certain ones didn’t,” he says. “It was like learning a new language. But I put myself in positions where I went to a lot of lectures and picked it up.”

“I met Sean when I was an undergraduate at the Art Institute,” says Nick Cave, a KCAI alumnus who now works in Chicago. “He was always up to something, always out there doing things, using the city as a creative palette — kind of a hustler type of guy. He lives and breathes the cultural climate, and he was someone I found it very easy to come together with and brainstorm ideas on a project. And we continue to have that relationship today.”

Kelley spent time with such artists as Ken Ferguson and Victor Babu, who were in the process of turning KCAI’s ceramics program into one of the country’s most respected. He worked at Morgan Gallery under Myra Morgan — “a venerable diva gallerist at the time,” Kelley says, who “did a lot of pop artists.” At Morgan, he adds, “I met a lot of artists who were just starting their careers. I was able to watch the professional navigation and negotiation of the art world that was going on through them.”

He curated the walls at a Plaza-area restaurant called Venue and, in 1989, opened his own gallery in the Uptown Theater building, which had fallen into disrepair. Kelley stayed there until 1995 and made regular pilgrimages to New York, where he fell in with a coterie of artists that included Alice Aycock, Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim.

“Being in New York, I was meeting so many great artists and thinkers. Those neighborhoods are so dense and full of them,” Kelley says. “Chuck Close, Roberta Smith — the mean-bitch art critic for The New York Times, who grew up in Lawrence, Kansas. I’d go to Dean & DeLuca, one of whose founders came from Kansas City. A very ‘tight world’ type of thing.”

The riff goes on: “And it was all about self-identity, and I just loved that. Nothing else in life but art allows that it’s-all-about-me mentality — the idea that this object, this work, is about me but it’s meant for you. It’s like, ‘I’m trying to get you to understand how fucked up my life is, how beautiful my life is — the successes, the failures, the loves, everything.’ And that’s what I learned in New York. That, and it exposed me to a really dark subterranean subculture for the first time — clubs like the Anvil and the Mine Shaft. You go in, and it’s a legitimately scary abandoned warehouse, and there’s people fucking right out in the open, people pulling chains out of each other’s asses. I’m this Catholic boy from the Midwest standing there staring like, ‘What the fuck is going on in here?’ “

In mid-January, Kelley was circling a parking lot north of the Nelson. It was an unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon — weather that meant a crowd. There was nowhere to park. He pulled his Jetta into the driveway of a large stone house.

“This was my first apartment in Kansas City,” he said. “I lived on the third floor.” He put the car in park. “What the hell,” he said. “Nobody’s living here right now anyway.”

He crossed 45th Street and looked back for a wider view of his old place. “That one right there,” Kelley said, pointing at the house next door, “that’s where Margaret Silva used to live. That’s how I met Margaret.”

In 1993, Kelley’s boyfriend at the time, Greg Cabrera, died of AIDS. Kelley had grown less enamored of the gallery business — “You’re often in the awkward position of whoring out artists you love to these johns who don’t care about the work and are just trying to get the best deal they can squeeze out of you” — and decided it was the right time for a big change: a move to New York.

“At the time, Alice and Vito and Dennis and I would have conversations, and they’d ask me what I wanted to do,” Kelley said. “And I would tell them about how I would drive around Kansas City and have daydreams about being in a position where I could do what I really loved, which was to support artists and help them show their work and give them curatorial and financial support and be a part of their evolutionary process and allow them to mature as artists.”

He went on: “I specifically remember saying that I wished I could find a person, a woman who didn’t want to have sex with me, that had more money than she knew what to do with, that would let me financially divert her money toward supporting artists through helping them with new bodies of work or one seminal work. And then, not long before I was set to move — I’d already sublet an apartment and everything — Margaret stopped by one day and said, ‘I don’t want you to go to New York.’ And she handed over an envelope with a $50,000 check in it. Then she put $1.5 million into a gallery space downtown and said, basically, ‘Do whatever you want.’ I just couldn’t believe it. My wish had come true! And that’s what became Grand Arts.”

Silva, who did not respond to requests to comment for this article, is an heiress to the Hallmark fortune, the granddaughter of Hallmark founder Joyce C. Hall. Starting in 1995, she and Kelley, as co-directors, began shaping Grand Arts into what became a nationally recognized gallery and studio space. It imported major artists to Kansas City and provided them with the freedom and money to produce original works. It gave Cave, Aycock, Isaac Julien, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Roxy Paine and others exposure to Kansas City and, in turn, gave the local art community access to big-name artists.

“It was a way to bring the art world to Kansas City,” Kelley said. “When artists came here to live and work and play and build with Grand Arts, I would take them on studio visits, I would arrange lectures. It was a great opportunity to meet these people as they were evolving as artists. And if you’re an aspiring artist in Kansas City, and you meet somebody in town for Grand Arts, all of a sudden you’re connected to them somehow. That’s how you get better as an artist, by seeing other great artists and then going back to the studio and pushing yourself to be better.”

Sherry Leedy agrees. “Grand Arts was a tremendous contribution to both the community here and the artists they worked with,” she says. “It was a totally unique and special enterprise.”

“It was an unusually generous amount of money that allowed me to freely experiment and create work in a really beautiful environment,” Aycock says.

Kelley’s tenure at Grand Arts lasted eight years. Ask art folks in town to talk on the record about what led to his departure, and most react as though you’ve suggested they cannonball into an empty swimming pool. Neither Silva nor Stacy Switzer (who replaced Kelley as artistic director) would comment, but the picture that emerges from other sources is not one of a graceful exit. Silva and Kelley’s working relationship became complicated by their close personal relationship. Kelley said he turned to a variety of substances to cope with the stress of that relationship.

“One day she would come into Grand Arts and blame me for everything wrong in her life, and the next day she’d be happy and excited about what we were doing,” Kelley said. “Grand Arts was just a job for her, a way for her to feel good about herself. She didn’t know the artists. She didn’t care about the artists. I was working 24/7 with the artists. And don’t get me wrong — I was loving it. I was as happy as I’ve ever been. But eventually, I couldn’t take her cruelty anymore. Then she told everybody in town that I was addicted to coke or addicted to meth, which I wasn’t. But I was self-medicating because there was this mean woman in my life who suddenly got bored of me and turned on me.”

Kelley left Grand Arts, which is closing this year, in 2003. He doesn’t think much of the way the organization has been run since then. “A lot of inaccessible, esoteric nonsense,” he said.

He resurfaced in 2010 to help David and Ron Dumay convert the old City Ice Building, at 21st Street and Campbell, into an arts hub: a gallery with retail space and studios. The Dumays bankrolled renovations, and Kelley and sculptor-designer Dale Frommelt designed the gallery.

But that, too, ended in acrimony. Kelley blames a leaky roof for his ultimate falling-out with the Dumays and City Ice Arts (which is still in operation, with a gallery, studios, Howard’s Organic Fare and Vegetable Patch, and La Cucaracha Press).

“Water was leaking into the gallery during a Garry Noland show,” Kelley said. “Then I let Art Institute seniors show their work there, and there was more leaking and damage to the objects. And it wasn’t just a trickle. I told Dave [Dumay], ‘I can’t program here unless I feel comfortable that I can protect the artists.’ And he said he’d already done all he could. So I left. Basically, I didn’t feel they were respecting the artists there. It was an incredibly disappointing experience.”

David Dumay recalls the City Ice collaboration differently.

“Look, Sean is a funny guy, very likable. He understands art. He’s a great talker,” Dumay says. “But following through on a project is a different thing than talking. Our goal is to partner with artists and small businesses, abate their rent for six months or a year while they get on their feet, and create a community over here. We gave Sean a gallery to build a business, we gave him plenty of time to develop it, and he didn’t follow through on it. Then he’s running around bad-mouthing me to the other tenants. We were trying to get something meaningful done, and Sean was just hanging out, causing trouble, getting on Facebook and making paper airplanes.”

There are at least three explanations for Kelley’s appointment as co-chairman of the Mayor’s Task Force for the Arts. One is that, with more than 30 years of experience working with artists in Kansas City, he was simply well-qualified for the job.

Mike Burke, the point man on the task force (and Sly James’ opponent in the 2011 mayoral election), says, “His contribution was immense. His enthusiasm alone was a huge help. But he also has a wealth of knowledge about the KC arts scene. He knew who we should be reaching out to. We all relied on him for a huge amount of direction throughout the process.”

“He showed up for everything,” says Porter Arneill, director and public art administrator for the city of Kansas City, Missouri. “Whenever there was an event or meeting, Sean would be there helping facilitate conversations and taking things to a deeper level.”

Another explanation is that Kelley went to college with the mayor, and the two reconnected during the latter’s campaign. (Kelley later worked on James’ transition team after the election.)

“Working with Sly the last few years has really brought me out of the fog I was in that started toward the end of my time at Grand Arts,” Kelley says. “It’s reminded me what I’m good at: talking to people and making connections with people in the service of art.”

And there’s reason No. 3: Kelley is an exceptionally charming individual who can talk his way into anything.

But Kelley is no cheerleader for the local arts establishment, and he has a critic’s instinct for identifying weakness. He sees a lot of areas for improvement in Kansas City, and he’s not shy about broadcasting those opinions.

On the Nelson: “When you put a bad painting by a local artist like Shea Gordon in the contemporary room next to an Agnes Martin painting, it indicates a lack of responsible behavior on the part of the professional community here. They’re just nowhere near the same league.”

On KC’s gallery scene: “There are good galleries here, but I don’t know of one that strives to help artists export work or ideas into the larger visual-art environment.”

On local collectors: “We have only one great collector in town: Jerry Nerman.”

On the Charlotte Street Foundation: “I think a lot of artists in town have a short-term goal of getting a grant from Charlotte Street. That’s fine, but it won’t get you anywhere outside of Kansas City — nobody over there is connected to the larger art world. It’s a good part of the local ecosystem but it’s totally isolated, and when artists are isolated, they don’t grow.”

On art publication Outpost Journal‘s KC issue: “Horrible.”

“What Kansas City needs, to quote Jack Nicholson in Batman, is an enema,” Kelley says. “The conversation about art here is generally one of naïve isolation and timid acceptance because people are afraid to criticize the big names in town. That’s not how you become a major arts city. If you want to be considered a respectable destination by the larger art world, you have to have institutions in place that aren’t just promoting artists but also challenging them, honestly critiquing them.”

But is it realistic or useful to compare Kansas City with New York as a milieu for artists?

“I think that, in a lot of ways, Sean is more interested in the blue-chip art market — artists who went to the right schools, have the connections, showed at the right New York galleries, and whose work is sold as a portfolio item,” says one local arts administrator. “Which is fine. And it’s fine for him to want that for local artists. But there’s a lot happening outside that rarefied air that he doesn’t seem as interested in.”

Still, because Kelley has access to artists who have that national reputation (Cave, Aycock, Paine), and because pretty much everybody agrees that his work at Grand Arts was significant, he remains a valuable ally for emerging artists. And because about 75 percent of his income comes from the buying and selling of roughly 600 pieces of art he owns, he has plenty of time to visit studios and talk shop.

“He’s very available to young artists,” says Calder Kamin, an artist and career adviser at KCAI. “I always stress the importance of networking to artists, and he’s definitely offered that to both me and a lot of students here.”

“He has a knack for bringing to the forefront ideas that make the piece more real, more about yourself,” Eisenhart says. “He’ll look at one of my objects and be like, ‘eh.’ Then he’ll ask questions about why I did this or why I did that. And it makes you question why you make what you make and it makes you aware of how others interpret your work, and I think both of those things are important for artists to consider.”

Kelley’s cocktail of analytical knack and sheer force of personality is potent enough that, if he has made enemies, he seems unfazed by that thought. He’s comfortable wherever he goes — and he goes everywhere.

At Haw Contemporary one recent Saturday afternoon to browse new works by Del Harrow and Corey Antis, Kelley chatted up every person in the building, including Bill Haw Jr., the owner, and Paul Smith, an up-and-coming local artist. Later, at the Bill Brady gallery, he raved about the space to the gallery manager and correctly guessed the price of a Steinman and Tear piece ($3,000). Kelley smiled wide. Everybody smiled back.

Driving out of the West Bottoms, he spoke of Brady’s pedigree — “He has a certain mythology about him of showing a lot of Next Great Artists” — but questioned the price tag of the show’s centerpiece, a 15-foot Douglas-fir lean-to sculpture by Virginia Overton.

“I mean, it’s impressive, it’s imposing, it casts those cool shadows on the wall, but $44,000?” he said. “Is that justified? I don’t know about that. It’s a conversation worth having.”