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Where Arts And Creativity Have Been Part Of Long Term Solutions

October 26, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

I have recently started to become a little more vocal about one of my pet peeves about how the arts are viewed. It is no news to anyone that most career paths that involves pursuing a creative endeavor are dismissed out of hand in favor of a real job with real prospects.

I don’t have any illusions about arts careers being a difficult path to take. If anyone wants someone to help them combat fanciful notions people have about how they are different and will succeed where others have failed, I will be happy to help talk about the realities and the importance of the entrepreneurial mindset about which I spent all of last week writing.

What annoys me is that there is so little recognition by those who dismiss a creative career path that the group they dismiss are the first people called when a disaster strikes and there is a need to encourage people to donate to a relief effort. A couple weeks ago, This American Life had an ad agency suggest getting Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton to do a TV ad to help offset the negative associations people have with Volkswagen.

All this being said, I think it is only fair to acknowledge that there are a lot of people out there that recognize the power of the arts to address social problems and make a long term commitment to embracing arts and creativity as part of their solution.

Last week on CityLab, Brentin Mock pointed out that a reduction in violence in the Bronx and New Orleans 40+ years ago were a result of people competing through creativity rather than physical force.

The subtitle of the piece reads, “Hip-hop dialed down street violence in the Bronx. New Orleans’ Mardi Gras Indian gangs made peace through craft. Why is culture such an underrated civic tool?”

The article doesn’t really address the reasons behind why culture is an underrated civic tool. It focuses more on how a peace meeting in the Bronx helped give rise to hop-hop culture and a similar effort inspired fanatical devotion to outdoing other groups in Mardi Gras parades resulting in more fingers stabbed by sewing needles than people stabbed with knives.

Essentially the article points out that it is the problems, not the enduring solutions that end up getting money. Despite the success of these programs in keeping the peace, little funding is directed to improve the communities in which they originated.

Another article I came across earlier this month in FastCompany drew attention to an artist who shutdown a freeway in Akron, OH and served dinner down the middle of the road to 500 people in an effort to bring the people of the city together.

When the freeway was originally built, it divided neighborhoods. Now the road is used less frequently and plans are to tear it down. The dinner was an effort to mobilize people to influence what will replace the space left vacated by the freeway.

“They’re shutting it down to traffic next year and opening it up to development, but there’s no concrete idea of what it will be—if it will be a park or whatever,” says Franks. “So this seemed like a very unique opportunity to help people reimagine this space.”

As people ate, they talked about the future of the area. They also just got to know people they otherwise may have never met. Franks spent a year working with volunteers from each neighborhood to plan the event and to bring 10 people from each neighborhood. The plates at the meal, designed to go home with each guest, were printed with favorite recipes from neighbors.

Granted, not really a solution that has been used long term, but it does seek to take advantage of a change to ameliorate what has long been an impediment.

The meal was a kick off event for the project which will continue by giving people toolkits to help them plan similar meals in their own communities. And lest you be skeptical about whether that many people might do it, there is already a sense of growing community in the city. Akron is the site of the PorchRokr Festival where homeowners give over their porches and front yards to concerts.

Advocacy, General Musings, State of the Arts

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What Do We Mean When We Say Entrepreneur?

October 21, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

Final day of observations on last weekend’s Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education (SAEE) conference.

The Terms We Use Matter

Some of the best observations about teaching students entrepreneurship were made by Jeffrey Nytch from the University of Colorado-Boulder. There is a lot of conversation going on about how students need to be taught to be entrepreneurial with attendant ideas of what that means, but Nytch’s observations provide some grounding for that discussion.

He noted that what entrepreneurship is not, is pounding the pavement and marketing one self. Entrepreneurship is creating value and implementing solutions to meet needs, which by definition is not primarily focused on getting yourself employed, but serving others. Among the other characteristics he listed were recognizing opportunity, customer focus, flexibility/adaptability, risk assessment (taking calculated risks), resourcefulness and an ability at storytelling.

He also emphasized that teaching entrepreneurship has to focus on being strategic rather than providing prescriptive solutions like this is how to do marketing, this is how to apply for grants, this is how you get non-profit status etc.

When talking about teaching students to be entrepreneurs, it is probably important to be clear about what outcomes you are envisioning when you use that term. As a result of Nytch’s presentation, I have been careful to use phrases like “entrepreneurial mindset” and “teach students entrepreneurial skills” in previous posts in an attempt to delineate these activities from a engaging in a full entrepreneurial venture.

Mentoring Is Local and Global

There was another conversation about using mentoring to transition students to entrepreneurship. A good deal of the focus was on helping people after they graduated.

Something that came up often during the conference was that university career service offices have a hard time working with arts students because their career path is so nebulous. It is easy to direct students with business, education, science, teaching, pre-law and pre-med degrees because career progression is fairly well understood.

In much the same way, it can be difficult for career services to provide support to entrepreneurs because by definition they seek to walk the road less traveled.

Among the suggestions that were made, most of them by a recent graduate, was using social media to create connections between entrepreneur programs across the country. One could easily find their ideal team members living elsewhere and you don’t necessarily all have to be located in the same geographic area to be productive.

Along the same lines was a suggestion for providing some basic support and access to graduates of partner programs. A person may graduate in one place but move elsewhere to start their venture so it would be good to be able to tap into the list of local mentors another program had identified. (Imagine how great it would be to be recognized for bolstering the local economy by “stealing” graduates of other programs from those communities thanks to your mentor and incubator network.)

It was also suggested that students be invited to the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education (SAEE) conferences so they can share their experiences with the assembled educators. Especially in terms of what aspects of their training did and did not prove valuable to avoid reinventing the wheel or replicating the same mistakes as someone else.

Miscellaneous Thoughts And Resources

Michael Bills who directs the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Ohio State University said they were only offering entrepreneurship as a minor at the undergraduate level because they felt that entrepreneurship is a graduate level pursuit. (I should note this is a university wide program out of their business school rather specific to an arts entrepreneurship program.)

This is based on the concept of the T shaped skills. Briefly, the vertical bar of the T represents the depth of your skills, the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines. Their thought is that you develop your depth as an undergrad and then really focus on your ability to collaborate as a graduate.

I have heard similar philosophies about fine arts disciplines and know there are some universities that won’t teach arts administration as an undergraduate major based on the same concept.

DePauw University recently created a site called 21CM.org (21st Century Musician) as a resource and place for conversations among musicians about developing an entrepreneurial mindset. It is intentionally devoid of any mention of DePauw other than the copyright notice at the bottom of the page. The About section makes no mention of the school and the conference presenters pointed out the site doesn’t bear DePauw’s colors.

The school took the same approach in establishing a public music space for “courageous music making” in their hometown of Greencastle, IN. The space isn’t branded with DePauw’s name or colors (it actually appears to use the 21CM.org colors) though the website uses DePauw’s domain.

In both cases, the goal is for the community of participants to take ownership of the respective resources.

That is generally the extent of my notes from the conference that fit into the general theme of these three posts. It will be interesting to see how SAEE grows as an organization and how the whole concept of artist as entrepreneur (and how best to teach those skills) evolves over time.

Even as there is a need to introduce this type of instruction in undergraduate/graduate/conservatory training, there is also the obvious unmet need to train people who have passed that stage, may have some career experience and wish to acquire additional skills or engage in a venture of their own.

Advocacy, Art(ist) Education, Arts Facilities, Business Models, Info You Can Use, New Initiatives, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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The Question That Is Going To Take Awhile To Answer

October 20, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

As promised yesterday, today I am going to continue discussing my observations from attending the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education (SAEE) conference this weekend.

I think it bears pointing out that the organization and its efforts are very new. This is only the second conference they have held. There are a lot of questions to answer and to date there hasn’t been a lot of opportunity to do research and have these conversations.

I preface my observations with this because the one question I really wanted to see discussed was how to carve out time in an arts training program to teach students entrepreneurial skills. With few exceptions, it seemed like most of the courses in this area were being offered as an option rather than part of the core part of the training. Unfortunately, due to time constraints this question never came up as a main topic.

The conversation during closing plenary which I thought would be the most opportune forum to discuss this issue was tightly controlled and focused heavily on questions of research. (Again, I know there are a lot of questions still to be asked, and I didn’t expect a definitive answer. This is the danger when you get too many academics in the same room! 😉 )

One person who did indirectly address the subject was Emily Ondracek-Peterson from Metropolitan State University in Denver. She presented the results of a survey conducted with conservatory graduates asking what parts of their training had prepared them well for pursuing a career and which areas they felt their conservatory preparation had fallen short.

The pool she drew from for her interviews and surveys were string players from five top tier music conservatories that had graduated since 1995 so other people’s experiences may vary.

She covered a lot of ground so my notes are probably lacking regarding some of her results. To summarize, she essentially found the focus was on preparing students to perform at a high level in orchestras and as soloists. There wasn’t a lot of instruction on how to teach or establish a studio even though nearly every music conservatory graduate ends up teaching to some degree, regardless of whether they get a place in an orchestra or not.

Respondents were dissatisfied with the lack of training in other genres, improvisation and collaboration with musicians of other genres or artists of other disciplines. Respondents also found that they spent a lot of time in the support work related to performing – contracting, doing taxes, accounting, self-promotion, etc., but that the necessity of gaining these skills was rarely discussed during training.

As she spoke about conservatories training first tier musicians, I wondered if there was any benefit to teaching students to be second tier musicians in order to make room for training in career management skills. They would have a high level of excellence, but would be prepared in other areas. My suspicion is that conservatories would say that sort of approaching is okay for other schools, but would be a waste of their time and the time of their highly talented students.

I am surely not the first to have this thought. People who have attended a conservatory for music, dance, theater or visual arts can better attest whether some of the instruction they receive is better dropped in favor of different type of training. Regardless of how much instruction you receive in school, there are always going to be skills you will need to acquire and grow after graduation.

The question is, what do divert focus from during your formal training that you may need to make up for after graduation? Some students may prefer to be prepared to manage their career so that they have a better idea of how to support their pursuit of technical training after graduation.

Given the level of competition in their field, how will they have to adjust their ambitions as a result of this decision?

I had more to say on this subject than I expected so one more post on a variety of shorter thoughts tomorrow. It will tie back to this entry because the answer to how a graduate might adjust their ambitions might be found in entrepreneurial pursuits.

I do want to note before I finish today that despite reading so often how music schools are doing a disservice to their students by not preparing them with career management skills, it seemed like the discipline most highly represented at the SAEE conference was music. There wasn’t anyone from the very top tier music conservatories at the conference that I saw, but it did seem that people from the music field are beginning to take some action to address these concerns.

Art(ist) Education, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Teaching Arts Students Entrepreneurial Skills, It Has Begun

October 19, 2015

by:

Joe Patti

This weekend I attended the annual conference of the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship in Education (SAEE) at Ohio State University. Even though my university doesn’t have arts entrepreneurship or management classes, I wanted to attend because there has been a lot of conversation recently on the topic of training artists to have a more entrepreneurial mindset.

I took many notes on the sessions I attended. I expect there will be at least two posts this week covering what I learned.

What made one of the greatest impressions on me was learning about the Arts Entrepreneurship program at Millikin University. The heart of their program is a series of student run ventures in music publishing, a visual arts gallery, a theater space, a printing press, a publishing house, a printmaking studio and a radio station.

There is actually another venture not listed on their website that just started to get going in the last couple weeks.

You might expect this many student run ventures at large universities with established programs like Ohio State and Southern Methodist University. The fact that Millikin has so many with an enrollment of about 2100 says something about what can be accomplished with the buy-in of faculty and administration.

Given there is a greater expectation that universities better prepare students with practical career skills in their fields of study, Millikin may end up being a good model for smaller schools seeking to meet those expectations. Which is not to say there aren’t other great programs out there. OSU seems to be on a very promising track–but they have a lot of resources which isn’t the case everywhere.

If this sounds intriguing, you may want to attend the SAEE conference next October because it will be hosted by Millikin University.

The faculty which advise the courses/ventures that run the theater space, retail art gallery and poetry printing press were at the conference. One of the common threads that ran through discussions of their respective endeavors was that they allow the students to fail quickly and often–and the students are held accountable for the results and to each other.

Currently, the theater venture, Pipe Dreams Studio Theatre is running into some revenue problems due to decisions they made about how they were going to handle ticket sales. Even though the first production appears as if it may lose money, the instructor Sarah Theis, says the venture usually ends up comfortably in the black.

Which is good because they apparently don’t get bailed out by the school. The course is repeatable and the requirement to be on the management team is to take the course for three semesters. This tends to engender some accountability since the decisions made earlier impact what resources a student has to work with when they end up on the management team.

Julienne Shields, who supervises the downtown retail art space, Blue Connection, spoke of the panic and conflict that inevitably occurs during the initial stages. She turns these occurrences into learning opportunities.

I am not sure what the mix of majors in the other student run ventures are, but the art retail space is a mix of arts students and business students, both of whom express misgivings about why they need to take the class at all. Both groups basically embody their respective stereotypes. Just having them learn to understand and work with each other almost justifies the reason for the class by itself.

Shields said the arts students will get inspired and want to start working at midnight while the business students are more aligned with the 9 to 5 schedule. The business students will happily grab the numbers the arts students are struggling with and help make sense of them, but they won’t understand the story behind the numbers.

While the arts students are initially happy to have the numbers taken out of their hands, because the class structure forces the students to ultimately be accountable to one another, they can’t avoid dealing with the numbers forever. In the end, the business students have a better understanding of the story behind the numbers and the arts students can see how the financial elements align with the story of the art.

Since all these endeavors are essentially group projects, the biggest challenge for the instructors is to create a grading rubric that accurately evaluates whether everyone is pulling their own weight. There was some brief discussion of this and from what I derived, the focus really is on the success of the group rather than parsing precise degrees of credit and blame. After all, in real life if the company fails, it doesn’t matter who only gave 60% effort, everyone is out of a job.

Tomorrow I intend to cover the challenges faced by art entrepreneurship programs that conference attendees identified. One of the biggest being that the effort is really just in the infancy stage.

Art(ist) Education, State of the Arts, Terms and Ideas, Working In The Arts

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