Entrepreneur the Arts » Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com Innovating Through Artistry Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:54:54 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 The IAE Welcomes Norwegian Ensemble Free Theater Program to The US This Fall http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/29/the-iae-welcomes-norwegian-ensemble-free-theater-program-to-the-us-this-fall/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/29/the-iae-welcomes-norwegian-ensemble-free-theater-program-to-the-us-this-fall/#comments Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:07:03 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=12715 The Institute For Arts Entrepreneurship™ is proud to announce that they will be welcoming the Norway-based Ensemble Free Theater program for a visiting residency in the fall of 2010.  Led by artistic director Brendan McCall, the EFT will spend twelve weeks working with Chicago’s IAE and its founder, Lisa Canning, to offer courses in Directing, Play-writing, Movement and Composition.  Students from Norway will also be creating and developing original works to premiere on the Chicago stage at the Greenhouse Theater Center and Gorilla Tango Theatre.

“We’re thrilled to be able to accept the invitation of an organization on the forefront of arts education like the Institute For Arts Entrepreneurship,”  McCall said. “The opportunity to bring our students to the United States and experience a city full of culture like Chicago will be immense in their creative development and we’re excited to bring our own flavor to the community as well.”

The Ensemble Free Theater company is a new ensemble program that emphasizes the collectivizing of theater artists and the importance of true collaboration.  While the curriculum is primarily focused on theatrical works, EFT encourages interdisciplinary projects that include other media such as film, dance, photography and music.  This fits perfectly with the Institute For Arts Entrepreneurships interdisciplinary arts education curriculum and the belief that artists should be working together to create new paths towards making a sustainable living.

“Collaborating with the EFT was a no-brainer,” Canning said.  “Brendan McCall’s work is so relevant to the mission of the IAE.  We encourage provocative new works and creative career paths with a focus on interdisciplinary curriculum which the EFT provides.”

EFT classes will be conducted primarily at the Greenhouse Theatre Center and will be held Monday through Friday during the day for approximately 25 hours per week.  The total cost of tuition for the program is $4500.  Courses will be taught by McCall in conjunction with guest workshops from associates of the IAE, including Lisa Canning, David Cutler, Amanda Leigh Cobb, Aaron Landsman and Laura Lynn Macdonald.

“Greenhouse is excited to be collaborating with the IAE because we believe in the development of artists and the effect they can have in the community,” said Jennifer Kincaid, General Manager of the Greenhouse Theater Center.  “The Greenhouse Theater prides itself on encouraging artists on the rise and is excited to help premiere the new works of the Ensemble Free Theater program.”

For more information on this residency and all of the workshops and programs offered by the Institute For Arts Entrepreneurship, visit www.TheIAE.com.  More information about application and enrollment can be obtained by contacting Lisa@TheIAE.com or calling 773-756-2163.

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/29/the-iae-welcomes-norwegian-ensemble-free-theater-program-to-the-us-this-fall/feed/ 2 The Creativity Crisis http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/26/the-creativity-crisis/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/26/the-creativity-crisis/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:06:25 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=12704 The Creativity Crisis
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman July 10, 2010, Newsweek

For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it.

Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?” He recalls the psychologist being excited by his answers. In fact, the psychologist’s session notes indicate Schwarzrock rattled off 25 improvements, such as adding a removable ladder and springs to the wheels. That wasn’t the only time he impressed the scholars, who judged Schwarzrock to have “unusual visual perspective” and “an ability to synthesize diverse elements into meaningful products.”

The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests. There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).

In the 50 years since Schwarzrock and the others took their tests, scholars—first led by Torrance, now his colleague, Garnet Millar—have been tracking the children, recording every patent earned, every business founded, every research paper published, and every grant awarded. They tallied the books, dances, radio shows, art exhibitions, software programs, advertising campaigns, hardware innovations, music compositions, public policies (written or implemented), leadership positions, invited lectures, and buildings designed.

Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”  

The potential consequences are sweeping. The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.

It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority. In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.

To understand exactly what should be done requires first understanding the new story emerging from neuroscience. The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach.

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

Is this learnable? Well, think of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice. In the same way, there are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.

A fine example of this emerged in January of this year, with release of a study by University of Western Ontario neuroscientist Daniel Ansari and Harvard’s Aaron Berkowitz, who studies music cognition. They put Dartmouth music majors and nonmusicians in an fMRI scanner, giving participants a one-handed fiber-optic keyboard to play melodies on. Sometimes melodies were rehearsed; other times they were creatively improvised. During improvisation, the highly trained music majors used their brains in a way the nonmusicians could not: they deactivated their right-temporoparietal junction. Normally, the r-TPJ reads incoming stimuli, sorting the stream for relevance. By turning that off, the musicians blocked out all distraction. They hit an extra gear of concentration, allowing them to work with the notes and create music spontaneously.

Charles Limb of Johns Hopkins has found a similar pattern with jazz musicians, and Austrian researchers observed it with professional dancers visualizing an improvised dance. Ansari and Berkowitz now believe the same is true for orators, comedians, and athletes improvising in games.

The good news is that creativity training that aligns with the new science works surprisingly well. The University of Oklahoma, the University of Georgia, and Taiwan’s National Chengchi University each independently conducted a large-scale analysis of such programs. All three teams of scholars concluded that creativity training can have a strong effect. “Creativity can be taught,” says James C. Kaufman, professor at California State University, San Bernardino.

What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.

So what does this mean for America’s standards-obsessed schools? The key is in how kids work through the vast catalog of information. Consider the National Inventors Hall of Fame School, a new public middle school in Akron, Ohio. Mindful of Ohio’s curriculum requirements, the school’s teachers came up with a project for the fifth graders: figure out how to reduce the noise in the library. Its windows faced a public space and, even when closed, let through too much noise. The students had four weeks to design proposals.

Working in small teams, the fifth graders first engaged in what creativity theorist Donald Treffinger describes as fact-finding. How does sound travel through materials? What materials reduce noise the most? Then, problem-finding—anticipating all potential pitfalls so their designs are more likely to work. Next, idea-finding: generate as many ideas as possible. Drapes, plants, or large kites hung from the ceiling would all baffle sound. Or, instead of reducing the sound, maybe mask it by playing the sound of a gentle waterfall? A proposal for double-paned glass evolved into an idea to fill the space between panes with water. Next, solution-finding: which ideas were the most effective, cheapest, and aesthetically pleasing? Fiberglass absorbed sound the best but wouldn’t be safe. Would an aquarium with fish be easier than water-filled panes?

Then teams developed a plan of action. They built scale models and chose fabric samples. They realized they’d need to persuade a janitor to care for the plants and fish during vacation. Teams persuaded others to support them—sometimes so well, teams decided to combine projects. Finally, they presented designs to teachers, parents, and Jim West, inventor of the electric microphone.

Along the way, kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.

With as much as three fourths of each day spent in project-based learning, principal Buckner and her team actually work through required curricula, carefully figuring out how kids can learn it through the steps of Treffinger’s Creative Problem-Solving method and other creativity pedagogies. “The creative problem-solving program has the highest success in increasing children’s creativity,” observed William & Mary’s Kim.

The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer. When UGA’s Runco was driving through California one day with his family, his son asked why Sacramento was the state’s capital—why not San Francisco or Los Angeles? Runco turned the question back on him, encouraging him to come up with as many explanations as he could think of.

Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.

Having studied the childhoods of highly creative people for decades, Claremont Graduate University’s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and University of Northern Iowa’s Gary G. Gute found highly creative adults tended to grow up in families embodying opposites. Parents encouraged uniqueness, yet provided stability. They were highly responsive to kids’ needs, yet challenged kids to develop skills. This resulted in a sort of adaptability: in times of anxiousness, clear rules could reduce chaos—yet when kids were bored, they could seek change, too. In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished.

It’s also true that highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.

In early childhood, distinct types of free play are associated with high creativity. Preschoolers who spend more time in role-play (acting out characters) have higher measures of creativity: voicing someone else’s point of view helps develop their ability to analyze situations from different perspectives. When playing alone, highly creative first graders may act out strong negative emotions: they’ll be angry, hostile, anguished. The hypothesis is that play is a safe harbor to work through forbidden thoughts and emotions.

In middle childhood, kids sometimes create paracosms—fantasies of entire alternative worlds. Kids revisit their paracosms repeatedly, sometimes for months, and even create languages spoken there. This type of play peaks at age 9 or 10, and it’s a very strong sign of future creativity. A Michigan State University study of MacArthur “genius award” winners found a remarkably high rate of paracosm creation in their childhoods.

From fourth grade on, creativity no longer occurs in a vacuum; researching and studying become an integral part of coming up with useful solutions. But this transition isn’t easy. As school stuffs more complex information into their heads, kids get overloaded, and creativity suffers. When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates.

They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.

The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function. Some scholars go further, arguing that lack of creativity—not having loads of it—is the real risk factor. In his research, Runco asks college students, “Think of all the things that could interfere with graduating from college.” Then he instructs them to pick one of those items and to come up with as many solutions for that problem as possible. This is a classic divergent-convergent creativity challenge. A subset of respondents, like the proverbial Murphy, quickly list every imaginable way things can go wrong. But they demonstrate a complete lack of flexibility in finding creative solutions. It’s this inability to conceive of alternative approaches that leads to despair. Runco’s two questions predict suicide ideation—even when controlling for preexisting levels of depression and anxiety.

In Runco’s subsequent research, those who do better in both problem-finding and problem-solving have better relationships. They are more able to handle stress and overcome the bumps life throws in their way. A similar study of 1,500 middle schoolers found that those high in creative self-efficacy had more confidence about their future and ability to succeed. They were sure that their ability to come up with alternatives would aid them, no matter what problems would arise.

When he was 30 years old, Ted Schwarzrock was looking for an alternative. He was hardly on track to becoming the prototype of Torrance’s longitudinal study. He wasn’t artistic when young, and his family didn’t recognize his creativity or nurture it. The son of a dentist and a speech pathologist, he had been pushed into medical school, where he felt stifled and commonly had run-ins with professors and bosses. But eventually, he found a way to combine his creativity and medical expertise: inventing new medical technologies.

Today, Schwarzrock is independently wealthy—he founded and sold three medical-products companies and was a partner in three more. His innovations in health care have been wide ranging, from a portable respiratory oxygen device to skin-absorbing anti-inflammatories to insights into how bacteria become antibiotic-resistant. His latest project could bring down the cost of spine-surgery implants 50 percent. “As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”

Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/26/the-creativity-crisis/feed/ 1 Create. Innovate. Repeat. Thur July 15, 7-9pm, Chicago http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/13/create-innovate-repeat-thur-july-15-7-9pm-chicago/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/13/create-innovate-repeat-thur-july-15-7-9pm-chicago/#comments Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:32:33 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=12657 On the third Thursday of every month, the IAE hosts our own networking night specifically for artists and entrepreneurs called Create.Innovate.Repeat. The event takes place from 7-9 pm at the ING DIRECT Cafe Chicago and features guest presenters from both art and business backgrounds talking about current projects, organizations and ideas that you can get involved with right now.

Last month’s event was BUZZING with conversation. There was so much energy in the room there was plenty left to take home!  So come pick up some inspiration and connections.

You can snag a free RSVP to the event by checking out our Create. Innovate. Repeat page. This is a private event so you need to reserve a ticket to get in the door!

ING DIRECT Chicago: 21 E. Chestnut Street View a map.
Telephone: 312-981-1236

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/13/create-innovate-repeat-thur-july-15-7-9pm-chicago/feed/ 1 Hurry! Hope and Inspiration NOW 1/2 off! http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/07/hurry-hope-and-inspiration-now-12-off-just-a-few-damaged-items-left/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/07/hurry-hope-and-inspiration-now-12-off-just-a-few-damaged-items-left/#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 01:51:03 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=12580 For all of my life- first with my mother, and then by marrying my first husband who was just like my mother (some things are hard to get over until you decide it’s time to), on to the emotionally crazy artists I hired and tried to help in my first business- to many dysfunctional executives who sit high up in arts based organizations who I had to do business with– I have been confronted with the same problem OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN that I remain DETERMINED TO SOLVE.

HOPE AND INSPIRATION CAN’T BE SOLD FOR 1/2 OFF because we, as artists, can’t function at a high enough level to sell them for their full VALUE!

As artists WHAT WE SELL is hope, inspiration, peace and a chance to dream. THAT’S ALL. The painting, the vase, the clarinet, the play, the ballet, the scrumptious dinner– all of those experiences represent for our audience a renewal of who they are, and what they believe and why they SHOULD DARE  to DREAM and RISK TO BECOME MORE ALIVE!  If we  are NOT SHINING EXAMPLES and allow EVEN A DROP of  toxicity to enter our life, our artistic value is IMMEDIATELY downgraded to a sale item and eventually discarded with the past-their-sell-date items in the grocery store. As absurd as it sounds, what is hope and inspiration worth if they are now 1/2 off?

What kind of assurance can we give our paying customer as to the authenticity of the hope they are buying if WE OURSELVES ARE NOT LIVING EXAMPLES OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HOPEFUL AND INSPIRED ENOUGH IN OUR OWN LIVES?  We need to be emotionally happy, creatively flowing and financially flourishing to truly shine and be ABLE to make the difference our gifts were meant, on this earth, to make.

Yes, I sadly and with great heartache refused to play in an orchestra and sit next to isms, anger and “affairs”. I did not think that was how to create the beauty and joy I knew hope and inspiration required.  I also refused to stay married to a man who was more interested in sabotaging our relationship, or stay close to my adopted pothead brother who has succumb to numbness instead of creating sculptures out of computer parts; which he as a teenager loved once to do.

I guess, despite being an orphan and having literally no family besides my husband and 2 four legged kids, I am happy I have lived to learn from and rise above these hard experiences; because they continue to shape who I am AS AN ARTIST and WHO I HAVE YET to become.

What about you? Do you have hope and inspiration on sale in your life? Is there something you need to do TO BE the brightest light in the room? Don’t be afraid of standing out in the crowd. Make the difference you seek and that YOU, uniquely, SEE needs to be made. What is it you see that frightens you, disgusts you, makes you cry or burns you up with anger inside? What is it you need to help others do or be or change or create?

This, my friends, is WHAT WE, AS ARTISTS were put on this earth to do…. And guess what? It SELLS AT FULL PRICE!!! NO 1/2 off sale EVER required. Your customers will line right up and pay you well and joyfully for every drop of inspiration you give them. But they only want 100% OF PURE, AUTHENTIC GENUINE YOU. Nothing short will do.

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/07/hurry-hope-and-inspiration-now-12-off-just-a-few-damaged-items-left/feed/ 1 What Are You Willing to Risk for True Creative Independence? http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/03/discover-your-independence/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/03/discover-your-independence/#comments Sat, 03 Jul 2010 19:00:03 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=12525

In honor of achieving independence as artists, I began a string of short creative stories about life in The Blue Bike Shop during the Fourth of July holiday back in 2007.

I was writing my book at the time, Build A Blue Bike, and thought building your own  blue bike would be a lot easier to learn how to do if I shared stories about The Blue Bike shop and Miya LeBleu; the bike shop owner.

This story was also the inspiration for the ETA logo.

Do Not Enter

Posted by Lisa Canning in The Blue Bike Shop Stories on July 5th, 2007 | one response

“Do Not Enter,” cautions the sign on the red door. John stood there looking at it, wondering what to do. The guy at the bike bar told him that the first red door was the fastest way out of The Blue Bike Shop, but surely he must have been mistaken. As John looked down the hall, there were nothing BUT red doors, with the same white sign, with the same “Do Not Enter” boldly lettered red on each.

“What a strange place,” thought John. ” Nothin’ but blue bikes and red doors…”

The Blue Bike Shop was a brand new shop in downtown Nowhere. It was filled with blue bikes in every configuration imaginable: trikes, unicycles, bicycles built-for-two, mountain bikes, racing bikes and blue peddlers for the leisurely traveler.

The Blue Bike Shop had quickly become a hot spot in Nowhere. After all, The Blue Bike Shop served lunch and drinks at the Bike Bar. It was a great excuse for John to check out all the blue bikes, and dream.

John had grown up in Nowhere and had never been outside its city limits. John lived down Rural Route 7, a long dirt road, which eventually, if you stayed on it long enough, would take you out of town.

Today was the day John was going to begin that ride. Impulsively, after lunch at the Bike Bar, John decided that he was ready. With every dollar he had saved in his pocket, from his job at Solo Staffing Services, he was going to buy that blue Schwinn he had his eye on.

When he handed the money over, the cash in his hand quickly became the bike in his dream. As a celebratory gesture, the clerk who sold him the blue bike stepped behind the bar and handed him a shot of Don Julio. With John’s throat on fire and his heart pounding with excitement, he asked his server, “Tell me, what’s the fastest way out of town.”

The clerk smiled and said, “Go down the hall, and take the first red door you see. It’s the fastest way.”

Several minutes had passed as John stood in front of the red door with his new shiny blue Schwinn, reflecting on the clerks last words.

“Why in the world, would this guy have told me to go through this red door if it was not the right door?” John thought.

John had never walked through a door that said “Do Not Enter” in his life. He also had never spent his entire life’s savings on a blue bike. John looked down the hall at the other red doors and again the “Do Not Enter” signs, and then he reached for the knob to his own.

“What the hell. All my life, people have been telling me ‘Do Not Enter’ this, or do that, or try this, because it is too hard, too risky, too much work or too… something. It’s time I try to go somewhere.”

When John opened the door, this is what he saw.

DISCOVER HOW TO OPEN YOUR OWN RED DO NOT ENTER DOOR TO YOUR INDEPENDENCE: WRITE DOWN THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS.

What red door with Do Not Enter written on it is stopping you from continuing to develop your artistic vision? What road blocks do you need to tear down in your mind? What about yourself do you need to accept, learn about or change to deepen your creative work?

What investment do you need to make to create a sustainable independent creative life? Write down everything you need to do in no particular order.

Who do you need to stop listening to and how will you do it? Write down every person who’s words and actions stand in your way of making true artistic, emotional and financial progress.

Where will you put your trust and who will help you in earnest to move your creative life emotionally and financially forward? True independence cannot be reached alone. It takes a village of support to make really impact FILLED life changes. Write down your plan to help you accomplish this for a minimum of 2 years. Write from your stream of conscious and don’t stop until you can’t think of anything more to write.

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/03/discover-your-independence/feed/ 1 Discover Your WHY? Workshop with Lisa Canning Thursday, July 8th 7-9pm, Chicago http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/01/discover-your-why-workshop-with-lisa-canning-thursday-july-8th-7-9pm-chicago/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/01/discover-your-why-workshop-with-lisa-canning-thursday-july-8th-7-9pm-chicago/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:06:13 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=12502

WHY do you do what you do?

Do your patrons know? Do you know?

Is your Why deeply embedded in your marketing materials, your website, the way you speak about who you are and your work?

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy WHY you do it“ says Lisa Canning.

28 year veteran arts entrepreneur Lisa Canning, has lots of happy clients, as well as has made a six figure living for more than 20 years as an arts entrepreneur by focusing on the answers to her own WHY and effectively communicating it to her audience.

Come to this innovative workshop and bring your marketing materials, your elevator speech or your product and share your story with Lisa Canning.  Lisa will help you learn how to deepen your WHY; allowing it, like a magnet, to draw more of your paying audience to you and your creative work.

Come interact with other aspiring arts entrepreneurs and (re)discover your WHY.


When: Thursday July 8th @ 7:00 pm

Where: Art Gallery, Flourish Studios 3020 N Lincoln Avenue, Chicago

What:   7-9pm workshop and networking

Tickets: $10.00 at the door or FREE if you are a participating artist in the Flourish Artisan Program. SEATING IS LIMITED. PLEASE RESERVE YOUR SEAT HERE.

The Flourish Artisan Program is a new initiative that offers visual artists low-cost space rental on Flourish’s high-end retail floor and provides them a brick and mortar home as they build their arts business. Participants in the program receive exclusive access to resources and training, such as the co-sponsored speaker series which continues monthly.

As co-sponsors of the event, the Institute For Arts Entrepreneurship” continues to spread awareness on the issues and possibilities surrounding arts entrepreneurship in Chicago.  Applications are also currently available for their two-year program starting in January 2011.

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/07/01/discover-your-why-workshop-with-lisa-canning-thursday-july-8th-7-9pm-chicago/feed/ 1 Buddha Boy Knows Why, Do You? http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/28/budda-boy-knows-why-do-you/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/28/budda-boy-knows-why-do-you/#comments Tue, 29 Jun 2010 03:54:53 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=12368 All  last weekend we lit a candle next to our little statue named Buddha Boy in honor of my mother. We bought Buddha Boy at an AMAZING art gallery called Volcano Garden Arts very near Volcano National Park in Kona, Hawaii on our vacation last November.

This joy-filled art gallery was BRIMMING FULL with little spinning rudders and all aglow with life and vibrant creativity. My mother would have been proud.

Their little cafe, Cafe Ono, served scrumptiously HEALTHY fare.  Chuck and I ate lunch there. Their food was amazingly hip in its clean organic healthy simplicity.

The grounds dripped with GREEN vibrancy and the awesomeness of it all couldn’t help but pull on your heart strings; especially when  you heard  their mascot, Earnest the goat,  “baah!” He was a heart felt touch.

.

I found these pictures this past weekend as we sat around with a house full of  lit candles to honor my mom and her joy and life filled moments. That’s what we hope for most while we are here on earth, isn’t it? Happiness and Joy and TRULY MAGICAL MOMENTS?

Are you doing all you can to protect and develop your creative vision to ensure yours will come, or never go away?

When we come to find both peace AND prosperity with WHY we really are here on this earth and WHO we really are meant to serve  through our music, our paintings, our films, our writing, our creativity– our salvation and freedom to FULLY BE ALIVE and HAPPY is secured.

My mom never found hers. She fought tooth and nail through her life with herself and everyone around her instead because she never could. What a sad way to live with her powerful creative force that was once as vibrant and green and pure and rudder-filled as Volcano Garden Arts.

Our creativity and its highest purpose and best use needs to be discovered. We owe it to ourselves to know WHY we do what we do- what truly is driving us- and WHO we are suppose to deliver our magic and hope filled journey to…

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/28/budda-boy-knows-why-do-you/feed/ 2 The Miracles of Ground Zero http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/26/the-miracles-of-ground-zero/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/26/the-miracles-of-ground-zero/#comments Sat, 26 Jun 2010 23:44:58 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=12159 We buried my mom on Friday. I played a piece called Shiva in her honor at her graveside. I am amazed I could even read my music because the sun was shining so brightly. It was a blindingly bright, nothin’ but blue sky, perfect day to honor my mom. We now think officially my mom passed away a week ago Sunday-the day that I purchased Joy at the Old Town Art Fair.

Mom's mass was held at this beautiful church.

Since her passing I have been gifted with a string of  JOY-FILLED miracles. There is no other explanation for WHY my life has ALL OF A SUDDEN lite up like a giant birthday cake with stunning sparklers and firecrackers going off. Maybe mom’s birthday card after all has arrived and her soul has been saved.  Let me explain.

For starters a university who I will not for awhile be able to name,  has stepped forward and is ready to explore how they can become The IAE’s  academic accreditation partner. Breathtaking all by itself and THE VERY NEXT THING we MOST need right now.

A general manager from a mid level theater but 7 blocks down the street from where the IAE will open, emailed me the other day and offered to donate rehearsal space to the school.  While  Flourish Studio’s is an IDEAL classroom setting, it is NOT an artistic noise producing one. We have been pondering how we would solve this problem close to our location and then this magically appears.

Next came a wonderful opportunity for me personally to present a workshop at the 2nd annual P.A.V.E. conference at ASU. I have always wanted to meet Ben Cameron from the Doris Duke foundation and now I will finally be able to! I am so honored to participate.

Last Thursday I had lunch with the chief editor of an established AND up-and-coming Chicago based magazine. She asked if she could help me edit my revised book proposal to repackage the book I wrote 3 years ago that did not sell; Build a Blue Bike. She wants to help because she believes my book needs to be published by a big publisher and wants to do what she can to help me finally get it sold.

Incredibly, as we were returning to her parking lot, and I was about to pull into the first open parking stall to drop her off, there was a Blue SCHWINN Bike chained to the fence.   I have a 1960′s Blue SCHWINN Bike I bought for my book still in boxes in my garage, and a whole presentation I created around the material in the book that involves taking it apart and putting it back together. There is also a blue bike that roles in on my flash intro to LisaCanning.com. It too is a Blue SCHWINN. I intentionally wanted a Schwinn because the bike I rode as a child was a blue Schwinn. I even had an exchange with the marketing people at Schwinn to gain access to their image files so that I could use their brand of bike to promote my book, when it was published.

According to my new publisher friend, there has never been a bike before chained to the fence in the lot; nor have they EVER seen this bike before. ( For those of you who don’t know-Build a Blue Bike was picked up almost three years ago by NY literary agent Susan Schulman and never sold; Susan has represented Richard Florida and Julia Cameron.)

In hind site I now realize what Build a Blue Bike was missing- a hook. And dear reader, my mother, through her death, has given me the hook my book NEEDS –the stories I am now FREE to share about our dirty little family secrets.  My mothers creativity in life and through her death is simply otherworldly; breathtaking. As spectacular as all my mom could be.

This week has TRULY offered me DEEP and PROFOUND blessings. The passing of my mother, and my tormented relationship with her clearly, finally, undeniably has ended through her physical death. I TRULY feel a profound peace and gratitude for this to have happened to me. I feel 20 pounds lighter and free. I can FINALLY TELL MY STORIES ABOUT HER TO HELP TRANSFORM so many artists creativity into something valu-ABLE; NOT rudderless!

And yes, while it made me sad that so few people loved my mother enough to say their goodbyes at her funeral other than my husband, my ex-husband, my brother, the mother of my best friend when I was 10, four of my friends and two of my mothers;  I have to tell you that all of this last week has offered me NOTHING short of divinely sent miracles.

You see, when you PLAN to clear your life of the debris that is IN YOUR WAY to lead the LIFE YOU WERE MEANT  to live– it’s not total destruction and annihilation you find at YOUR ground zero- but instead the source of true miracles that will define you for the rest of time. And trust me you will know when you have arrived at your Ground Zero and when your transformation has begun.

Although I do have to tell you that I felt as though the heavens above were playing a little joke with me on Thursday afternoon when I went to pick up my mothers remains at the funeral directors office.

When I arrived at the building, I walked down the hall the wrong way.  Quickly I realized that not only was the building being dug up all around it- just like ground zero- but that indeed the funeral directors office was inside DePaul University’s Rosemont Campus and was next to be torn down. I successfully helped build a program at DePaul but it was never the arts entrepreneurship program I had hoped it would be.  Symbolically, the school I had taught at for 10 years was being dug up and replaced by a casino.  My school FOR NEW LEARNING IN THE ARTS will NEVER BE REPLACED BY A CASINO! 

So here I am picking up my mothers remains at my true ground zero. All that preceded this moment was meant to help me grow but not meant to be permanent. All that is unfolding before me NOW IS my true and undeniable destiny. THIS IS one of the hardest lessons to learn, really; how to truly change our destiny through the choices we make and the emotional shifts we must learn.

Are you ready to learn?  Are you ready to find your rudder? Won’t you please apply to the IAE, or help us promote the IAE to others you know, or add our button badge link to your website?

Isn’t it time for ALL ARTISTS to learn how to make THEIR VERY OWN MIRACLES happen at a SPECTACULAR ground zero of their  VERY OWN?

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/26/the-miracles-of-ground-zero/feed/ 5 Emotionally Intelligent Artists: The New Rules http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/24/emotionally-intelligence-artists/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/24/emotionally-intelligence-artists/#comments Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:26:36 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=12128

Ever wonder why Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, our white gazelle’s who define entrepreneurial success, never finished college? Is what made them hugely successful creating their own kind of lifestyle simply all based on their ability to out smart everyone or write THE BEST business plan? How did their creativity fit into all of this and what can we learn from how effectively they used it?

Artists, after all, have GREAT ideas all the time. An idea a minute it seems- many spectacular.  And yet all the studies show most cannot even make a modest living most of the time.  And while this article below demonstrates that we increasingly are going to now see programs popping up to teach artists how to write a business plan, or teach them the business skills they need through an 8 to 12 week one day a week program, I believe, most may be wasting their time.  It’s NOT  book smarts OR a well crafted business plan that is FIRST IN LINE to turn our situation around. Sure, its on the list. Don’t get me wrong. It’s in the IAE’s curriculum for sure. But what is REALLY REQUIRED to do the job, is repairing the WAY WE EMOTIONALLY THINK about who we are and what we do that WILL FINALLY MAKE THE DIFFERENCE. And this is NOT an 8 week course! IT IS AT A MINIMUM an interdisciplinary 2 YEAR PLAN.

Thanks to what I have learned from observing highly emotionally intelligent people to help myself, and then some who were not- like my mother- I have learned very well where the differences lie; as well as how to help others deepen their own.

Entrepreneurial intelligence does not rest on what you know. You can know very little. It rests on learning HOW and WHEN to discover WHAT you need to know; and then knowing HOW TO MANAGE the context of what you have learned to achieve your result. All very subtle and it requires close, regular, personal contact to uncover. What will make artists entrepreneurs is building emotional intelligence. I am opening The IAE to build VIBRANT STRONG ENTREPRENEURIAL Emotionally Intelligence Artists. Please help me find the right artists who want to join our first class to SHOW THE WORLD how we TRULY CAN redefine our own lives in positive, healthy and life changing ways. No More Starving Artists. Let’s Change History.

If you doubt a word I am saying, just read the last line of this article. Mr. Barman’s comment says it all…

Creative Types Learning to Be Business Minded By KATE TAYLOR
Published: June 18, 2010 in the New York Times

Paul Barman thinks his is a great idea for a business: personalized, hip-hop versions of the traditional Jewish wedding contract, known as the ketubah, that he writes and sings.

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

He calls them Audioketubah and, at $1,500, they come in the form of handwritten scrolls and CDs, perfect gifts for a couple who cannot stomach another set of stemware.

Juan Hinojosa makes collages from found materials like Metrocards and food wrappers, and clothing tags that he filches from high-end stores. He often brings an attractive female friend along to distract the staff while he snips off the labels, though he said he has never actually taken anything of value.

On five Saturdays this month and next, Mr. Barman, Mr. Hinojosa and 54 other artists are attending a class paid for by the City of New York that is intended to help them turn their creative works into money.

“Does everyone have Excel?,” Peter Cobb, a lawyer and administrator at the New York Foundation for the Arts, which runs the program, asked the class last Saturday. “For next week, your assignment is to make a list of all your expenses for 2009.”

The sighs and complaints that followed were proof of the challenging task Mr. Cobb and his colleagues have taken on: trying to teach people who like to color outside the lines about drawing up business plans, budgeting and making a sales pitch.

The city’s cultural sector “attracts very, very creative people who have incredible ideas, but they don’t always know how to turn their ideas into financial sustainable entities,” said Seth W. Pinsky, president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. His agency is spending $50,000 on this program and a similar one being run by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, with Creative Capital.

It is harder than it used to be to live as an artist in New York City, given the cost of housing, studios and rehearsal space, and the Bloomberg administration does not want artists to leave the city. Culture is a magnet for tourism and a major reason why people in other professions (and often higher tax brackets) want to live here. Ergo, two city-financed courses devised to help artists help themselves.

“It’s kind of the teach-a-person-to-fish school of cultural support,” Mr. Pinsky said.

The group attending the five-week program includes painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, creative writers, actors, directors, dancers, singers, musicians — and some who defied categorization, like Ryan Murdock. He said his work encompassed filmmaking, radio documentary and photography, as well as organizing events that brought together “silent films, live music and homemade pies.” He said he had recently quit his job in public television, and hoped to arrive at “a business structure that will allow me to do everything I want to do, because I’m too curious to pin myself down.”

Along with group sessions covering subjects like intellectual property and Internet marketing, each artist has a 20-minute meeting with a New York Foundation for the Arts staff member or an outside adviser to review his or her business plan. At the end of the course, the students can apply for subsidized studio or rehearsal space at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, courtesy of Chashama, an organization that transforms vacant properties into art spaces.

“Artists are not taught to plan,” said Jackie Battenfield, a painter and the author of “The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love.” Too often, she said, they’re “going in circles, and that’s very demoralizing.”

This is the first time the city has financed such a program, though others, like one at the Bronx Museum called Artists in the Marketplace, have long strived to help artists manage their careers.

Most of the artists in the class had some kind of day job. Many teach. Mr. Barman, who has released several albums, does freelance journalism and teaches hip-hop to high school students.

Mr. Hinojosa works as an assistant to a more established artist, Shinique Smith. He has also sold his own works for as much as $2,000, and thinks that he’ll eventually be able to make a living from his art. One benefit to art made from found materials, he points out: “The supplies are free.”

Eric Wright, a lanky puppeteer, is one of a few students who already have a successful business. With two partners, he runs The Puppet Kitchen in the East Village, which has built puppets for the Disney Channel, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, the Public Theater and the noted puppeteer Basil Twist.

They have more work than they can do themselves and want to expand, but, being artists, Mr. Wright said, they need help with the financial side of things. “Most business development courses are for restaurant managers” and people in other traditional businesses, he said, so he was thrilled to find one geared to artists. “People think that art and business are at odds,” he said, but “you can create great art and have it also be a business.”

Mr. Pinsky said the city plans to follow up to see how many participants succeed in implementing their business plans.

Mr. Barman said that when it comes to his Audioketubahs, he is motivated by much more than just profit.

“It’s the most positive, fun, exciting, deep and funny thing I’ve ever been involved in,” he said of writing the songs, for which he often interviews the bride and groom at length, over drinks. “Every single one I do makes everyone so happy.”

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/24/emotionally-intelligence-artists/feed/ 2 How To Make Your Creativity Explode: Create Your Own Strategic Implode http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/22/how-to-make-your-creativity-explode-create-your-own-strategic-implode/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/22/how-to-make-your-creativity-explode-create-your-own-strategic-implode/#comments Tue, 22 Jun 2010 21:54:22 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=12069 It was no accident I stopped speaking to my mom four years ago almost to the day of my birthday- June 11th. One more fight didn’t “bring me there” nor were harsh words splattered between us, like the tomato sauce in my mothers cookbooks.  All I had to do was stop calling her. Very plain. Quiet. Simple. Brilliantly undramatic and really a creative solution I thought.

It’s design was brilliant simple because my mom NEVER called me. She never wanted to chat or find out what was up with me. There were no lunches, no get your hair done together days. A shopping experience perhaps here and there to dress me up pretty and for her to find another $500.00+ purse or four new pairs of sparkling high heels. I remember my mom trying on a pant suit once that was $2500.00 and she asked me if I thought she would wear it.  No the hope of A REAL relationship with my mother, had long ago gone.

Even when I was little I knew something was wrong..

It’s all been sorted, sifted, cried over, and ladled with a heavy cream sauce of guilt LONG before now. No, indeed it was finally over.  Finally, I managed to button it down four years ago almost to the day– nice and tight for a LONG winters sleep, my relationship with my mom.

And this week I  finally I get to bury her. What remains of her is now figuratively and literally dust.   This week feels like an all time record life high actually.  It feels like the EXTREME opposite of loss,  which for me is foreign and in itself quite shocking. So shocking all I can seem to do is sit “shiva” and realize the destruction phase is over and the transformation phase has launched.

How could I not feel this way if you think about it? The ONLY WAY my my highest purpose and best use could ever be present during my time on this earth was to find a way to remain sane and hopeful of what the possibilities in life WERE for me.

I had strategically come to know that  if I really wanted my creativity to grow to the point that I was TRULY ABLE to MAKE the difference I believe I was put on his earth to make, I had to orchestrate a strategic plan to out root and destroy all toxicity in my life once and for all. And that certainly had to begin with my mother.

Frankly, I am really proud of how well and carefully I did it and how masterfully I have come through it. I have learned so much from  life with mom and used it so wisely to rise well above it. And yet, the harshest part of it all for me is that my mom hated me THAT MUCH more for finding ways to replace her and HEAL the pain she caused. The better I got at doing it the more creative and clever her infliction of pain became.

And I decided long ago to use her pain and dysfunction to free me. I learned how to be down right creative, entrepreneurial, artistic and PEACE FILLED ( eventually) in how I learned  to respond to her actions, no matter how horrible, or low the blow.  I am so proud of who I am, REALLY, and how strong I am and how well I see INTO MYSELF and others. My mother- she TRULY has blessed me. But trust me, NOT in the ways I ever thought or imagined a mother could or should.

Yes my mom is dead. The mass and funeral are on Friday. 10 am at John Continious Catholic Church 825 N Carpenter, Chicago and 1pm graveside at Evergreen Cemetery, 3401 W. 87th Street, Evergreen Park, IL 60805. phone: 708-422-9051. Section: Fairmont / Lot 46 / Part 6 / Grave 26. My mother will be buried next to my father and I pray she is NOW FINALLY overcome with joy and peace.

For most of us the grieving process starts at death. But not for me.  It started in earnest when I was 13.

My parents threw a Christmas Party every year at our house for family and friends.  Like so many times before, my mother had knocked herself out. Her buffet table was tantalizing, the flower arrangements so fragrant and full they competed for attention from room to room. And then there was my mother dressed to the 9’s embarrassing the hell out of me in front of my Uncle Marvin. “Lisa Alexandra Argiris are you even HERE and FULLY PRESENT and LISTENING? You just live in a world ALL your own, don’t you now?”

My mother was, as usual, making an ass out of herself. Dressed in Chanel, dripping in diamonds and slurring her barb wired bitter words at me was a routine occurrence. And yet, she was right. It was hard for me to want to listen to her anymore because of the way she treated me.

But for some reason before I could lower my self-esteem a little more and utter some form of cordial attempt at a reply, I heard a voice. A clear and convincing voice that said to me.” Lisa, your mother is crazy. She will never be able to be your mother. Run, Lisa from her. Run!”

I had never heard a voice like this before. After all, who does at 13?   Time stopped.

It was the heat of the blood flowing into my cheeks and the sensation of them turning bright red that snapped me back into place. But this time, the embarrassment rising inside of me was NOT to utter some cordial attempt at a reply, but to simply let my mothers words hang lifeless like a dead man swinging from a rope. It was right then the first part of my mother died to me as my self-esteem rose.

Indeed it took me over 28 years, 6.5 months and a few days,  to FINALLY TRULY accept my mother’s figurative death to me. It happened almost four years ago and almost to the day of my birthday, BY CHOICE. This day WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT FIRST of a number of significant emotional shifts I would make for MY CREATIVE LIFE to FINALLY evolve and FLOW.

Like I said there was no drama. I did stop calling and I sent this letter:

“Dear Mom,

I love you with all my heart and soul. And yet, you are at war with the world and with anyone who loves you, especially with me. If you ever are willing to take even the smallest part of responsibility for your actions, and ever want to try and really be my mom, I will come back to your side in the flash of a moment. But short of that– PLEASE know I LOVE YOU and will be THERE FOR YOU IN YOUR GREATEST TIME OF NEED, but until that time, our relationship is over..”

And that is how I began my strategic creative-for-life sustainability plan.  I rooted out ALL the dysfunction out of my life. EVERY SINGLE DROP. Just the same way eating egg whites and oatmeal, chicken and salad is CLEAN eating, I out rooted  the dysfunction in my life that was depriving me of having life’s special sauce.   And it was the damndest thing- about 6 months after I really let all of the dysfunction freely flow away from me,  my thoughts began to change. My energy began to flow.  And the real creative person I  always WANTED to BECOME  FINALLY SHOWED HER FACE and has begun to rock and roll.

Through my music and writing and artistry I am creating a  new recipe, a new kind of  artistic  hope and value filled stew of possibilities.

Dear creative friends, our time to shine in life is here. It’s ARRIVED. It’s RIGHT NOW. Our broken world is literally and figuratively gushing from the bottom of the ocean and needs our creative gifts TRULY LIKE NEVER BEFORE.   Our glory days helping to SAVE THE WORLD ARE  RIGHT in front of us.

BUT NOT until we learn how to become the wonderful human beings we have mostly fooled ourselves into believing we are. We need to be WONDERFUL so we can work together, play together and CREATE VALUE together. We deserve to shine! Our gifts are great!

Please won’t you spread our good news and help me to open my school. This is what God put me on this earth to do. It has never been so clear or real. God bless you Lea. I would not know how to do this work if you had NOT been my mother….

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/22/how-to-make-your-creativity-explode-create-your-own-strategic-implode/feed/ 5 Our Dirty Little Family Secret http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/19/our-dirty-little-family-secret-2/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/19/our-dirty-little-family-secret-2/#comments Sat, 19 Jun 2010 13:19:10 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=12026 As I walked out of Lifetime Fitness yesterday morning I felt depressed by the results of my metabolic basal rate test. “1400 calories is all I get to eat if I want to lose weight?   No wonder my life long battle with my weight can never be won. I have mom to thank I guess. She taught me to love food.” And then the phone rang.

“Ms. Canning?  This is Chris, manager of Malibu East, where your mother lives. Someone is concerned they have not heard from her in several days. Do we have your permission to enter her apartment and do a wellness check?”

December 26, 2005. A picture of me, my brother, mom and Scooby. This was the last time I saw my mom...

As the words “yes, but of course” blurted out of me, I knew immediately what had happened. My mom was dead.  My mother and I had a horrible relationship. It had been 4 years, almost to the day, since we have spoken.  But I knew something seriously had to be wrong when the birthday card- her only form of communication with me- did not arrive on my birthday- June 11th. As exasperating as it was to deal with my mom, she made this one and only communication clear, as the cards were never late. But this year no card arrived.

You may think me cruel or heartless or it unimaginable that a mother daughter relationship could implode. Trust me I did. But it was not for a lack of trying on my part.

And yet, my mother’s idea of a relationship was filled with dysfunction, threats, self-sabotage, hostility, addictions and pain filled memories and embarrassment. There was little that was consistent or positive about our relationship. And yet I learned so much about my own creativity through my mom.

My mother was an amazing cook.  She LOVED to cook and the fancier and more complicated the recipe the better.  She loved a challenge and as a Polish woman who grew up eating animal innards from the south side of Chicago, who married a well to do Greek man, she quickly learned how to embed high style Mediterranean cooking into our family nightly meals. She learned how to make mousaka, tiropita, spanakopita and every other amazing Greek dish from scratch and her presentation was breathtaking.  My mother also made the best beef wellington, stuffed Cornish game hens and a killer scalloped potatoes dish I wish I had the recipe for.  And on my birthday, for years, my mom made me a home made banana cream pie- my favorite. I have NEVER had one since that was anywhere close to as good as the one my mom use to make for me. Indeed,  the whole back wall of our kitchen was full of recipe books that my mom studied for hours while I devoured Baermann scale books. Her cookbooks were literally falling apart, stained, ladled with butter and sauce drippings and full of her love of the art. So really, it’s no wonder I struggle with my weight. My mother taught me all the joys of eating deliciously prepared food.

But this wasn’t my mother’s only creative gift. She also had a green hand- she was blessed with more than a green thumb. My mom could revive, nurture and grow any kind of plant. She had an assortment of orchids that bloomed so vibrantly they did not even look real.  I, to this day, have killed every one I have ever had. She was also a masterful artistic flower arranger. She made fresh cut flowers look like art in a vase. My mother could take any bunch of flowers and entirely change how they looked simply through her choice of vase and how she positioned and grouped them together. It was amazing to watch her fluidly and effortlessly assemble a stunning arrangement every time as if anyone could do it. I wish I could.

My mother was an amazing seamstress. She made all my clothes when I was little and I remember every one ‘oohing and ‘ahing over how cute I always looked. She also fashioned herself a furrier. While it might not be fashionable now, I grew up with the smell of garbage cans of mink pelts and a rack in the basement of home made designer quality fur coats my mother made for herself.

But my mother, unfortunately, for all her innate creative talents, was an insecure person. Despite a number of years as (almost) a professional model, she had NOTHING to BE  insecure about- at least not from her looks.  But my moms creativity was never validated in a way that empowered her life forward.  Like so many artists, her creativity as fulfilling as it was, was rudderless. As a result, slowly, her self-esteem plummeted and the “isms” crept into her life.   Of course, this further stifled her creativity and drew her deeper into the dark side of life instead of into her highest purpose and best self.

My mother became an alcoholic. She used to mix her liquor of choice with Diet Dr Pepper and hide it in the turn style in the kitchen next to the nutmeg. She would sip it as she cooked until she was so drunk so would collapse at the dinner table as my father, brother and I enjoyed her scrumptious meal. The contrast between the food we were eating and my mothers appearance were shocking. It was so sad to see her this way.

And yet how many creative types who have lost their self esteem do you know like my mother? It manifests itself in different ways but I bet a lot.

All the stories of betrayal I hear from other creative individuals who work on projects that arrive DOA. What about all of the prima donna’s-  the”high priestess’s” in our field?  The temper tantrums on stage in rehearsal from conductors, actors, soloists.  The knowledge of who’s sleeping with whom and the question we ask ourselves” is that how they got this gig”?  The low self esteem, the anger that ensues, the addictions, the sadness, and often the sense of entrapment that comes when we hear the voice in our head that says, ” my art is the only thing I want to do and that I am good at. Yet I can’t make the difference (or a living) I seek doing this.”  And then, the ensuing self- sabotage that follows. All this is enough to be a worthy comparison to life with my mother.

Yes, indeed, dysfunction and “isms” are our dirty little “family secret” as artists that we try and hide from our audience, our supporters and even sometimes, ourselves. Not everyone in “our family” is like this, but it seems the arts as a whole are vulnerable in this regard. Isn’t it time we truly rallied together and finally ONCE AND FOR ALL decided to BE the DIFFERENCE we seek? Isn’t it time to fight the good fight in EARNEST and learn the skills we need to do so?   If my mother had, I am sure she would have lead a totally different life. Our beauty and our glory as artists will come from being ABLE to make a difference in life. Not by burning bridges and blowing up our own lives simply because we don’t know how to BE the DIFFERENCE we seek.

It was because of my mothers creativity, and how it became stifled and then became dramatic and outrageous behavior, that I truly came to believe that creativity can take us anywhere in life we want to go, as long as you have a CREATIVE-FOR-LIFE sustainability plan. I saw how alive and vibrant my mother once was with it, and how she became without it.  And I have noticed throughout my life as a result of this experience how easy it is for our creativity, just like my mothers, to die too without the support and rudder it needs; do you REALLY WANT to starve your soul from your creativity PRODUCTIVELY flowing while you are alive?

And yesterday, as I set the phone down and realized my mother was truly gone from this planet we call earth, I realized how much she had taught me about the value of my creativity and what to do and what not to do with it. I realized that as much as I had discredited her as the parent that taught me everything to not do in life, it was because of her that I was opening a school.

My idealistic values about art would protect me, and do to this day, because through my mother I learned that living a creative life can be our freedom and our salvation if we build it the rudder it needs- a creative-for-life sustainability plan- to take us ANYWHERE in life we want to go.

In honor of my mother, and in honor of your highest purpose and best creative self, I am asking you to join me.

Apply NOW to the IAE .  If you believe in you and want to make a positive difference on this earth through the arts and are not sure how to, our two year program will help you bring to life your own creative-life-sustaining plan.

Attend Boost Camp. If your not sure your rudder is still attached or you have an idea how to build one, please enroll. Scholarships are available.

Support Our Work. I am asking you to support our cause by buying a button or tee shirt and spreading our mission of hope and change for artists to come.

Spread Our Word. I am asking you to believe that life CAN be DIFFERENT and that your circumstances are changeable no matter how hard and challenging they are. Spread our good news and believe we can create a life we love and that empowers us and those around us in positive and life sustaining ways.

We are looking for strong individuals with good character and clear determination to overcome their fear and life obstacles. Please, won’t you join us. No More Starving Artists. No More Dirty Little Family Secrets. Let us BECOME the DIFFERENCE we seek to be ABLE to MAKE the DIFFERENCE we WERE put on this earth to make.

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/19/our-dirty-little-family-secret-2/feed/ 21 Coleman Foundation Supports Boost Camp http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/16/coleman-foundation-supports-boost-camp/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/16/coleman-foundation-supports-boost-camp/#comments Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:08:28 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=11841 Does Your Creativity Need an Economic Boost?

We just found out the Coleman Foundation will be providing us with some financial support for this years Boost Camp from July 26th through August 6th.  As a result, we now will be notifying those of you who have applied about your scholarship requests AND we have room for just a few more applicants who also may receive a partial scholarship. Our final application deadline is July 1st. Apply now to participate and be eligible for a scholarship.

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/16/coleman-foundation-supports-boost-camp/feed/ 1 Trouble and Joy at The Old Town Art Fair http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/13/trouble-and-joy-at-the-old-town-art-fair/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/13/trouble-and-joy-at-the-old-town-art-fair/#comments Mon, 14 Jun 2010 01:09:05 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=11789 Early this morning my husband and I drove downtown from the lake to be one of the first through the gate to attend the Old Town Art Fair. I love this fair because they often have many new artists exhibiting each year, and the fair is in one of my favorite parts of Chicago.  We spent the better half of the day wandering around from booth to booth. Much to my surprise, out of maybe 70 booths we poked around in, and perhaps 40 that we actually spent significant time in, only 2 artists took the time to come and speak to us.  ONLY 2!!!! Simply shocking. How can you sell something as personal as your art and not even try to make a connection with your potential audience? Many of the artists were reading books, or talking to their booth mate instead of their potential clients. They were right there and not investing in their audience at all…

While the artists featured in the 2010 Old Town Art Fair are chosen by an independent jury of professional artists, gallery owners and museum curators, who looks at their professionalism and how they interact with the public?  I think the answer is no one because it’s art right? It should sell itself, right?  I can also tell you there were far too many booths that offered no artist statement, or ONLY offered a hand written statement on a scrap of paper that was pinned to their booth… I kid you not.  Even worse many had no story about them or their artwork woven into their display. There was no “Why” to latch on to… And the really sick part was that the majority of the art at the fair was indeed pretty good. But yet, no one was inside these faceless art filled booths could tell their potential customers a compelling story about why they do what they do. NO wonder everyone walked right by them and instead mobbed those that could.

Out of the roughly 20 artists Chuck and I were seriously interest in, less than 1/2 of them had functioning websites. The common excuse was it was being updated or had only been down for a short period of time for some reason or another. In fact, one artist proudly told me she had been featured in “the” ceramic magazine and had 6 galleries representing her and did not need a website because all anyone ever did was go and look at “the pretty pictures”. This particular artist even won a prize at this years fair which was juried for the first time.  Her work indeed was good but clearly she does not care to be connected to her audience or know who they really are- I found this, and her attitude, totally scary. I know another visual artists just like her who has had a great deal of success selling the same way- until the bottom fell out on the economy and now she has no idea who her clients are because she directly sells to so few of them…And what about trusting your brand to a gallery? While they may represent your work do you really want to leave your image and “brand” up to them? Yikes.  How do you build Why? with no direct connection to your tribe?  No wonder there are SO MANY STARVING ARTISTS!!

But what is THE MOST troubling about this experience today is this is a well established, higher end fair. Most of the art is at least a couple of hundred dollars and a significant portion of it falls in the $2000 to $8000 range.  It costs $500 to $575 for a 10X12 and is considered 37th out of 200 best art fairs around the country.

Our newest addition: JOY

But, my husband and I went to enjoy our day and indeed we did. My 46th birthday was yesterday and in celebration we bought “Joy” from clay sculpture artist Steven Olszewski from Pinckney, MI. (734.878.6439  clayart@cac.net)  When I entered Steve’s booth his sculptures really spoke to me through their serenity. Steve was, coincidentally, indeed, one of the two artists who also was quick to speak to me and also quick to tell me he needed to sell some of his work and if I liked it he would make me a deal. He was sincere and not pushy in the least. Of course I took him up on his offer for a discount, but truthfully if he had not offered first, I would have paid full price.

Steve’s booth did not tell me Why? at all. His sculptures did with their serenity, peace and joy written all over their faces and poses, but there was no story in his booth had I needed more encouragement to connect to his work. Steve does not have a website and also readily admitted he needed help with his marketing and connectivity to his market. He even said he wanted to come to Boost Camp, which of course made me feel a little more Joy.

This peace filled man is another one of Steve's sculptures. Chuck and I really liked him but he, and a slightly smaller one like him, were both out of our price range. I did however help Steve sell the smaller one to another couple while I was in Steve's booth.

Ironically, when I first saw Joy I said to him, ” Her name must be Joy because she looks full of it..”  and ironically and magically it turns out indeed it is her name.

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/13/trouble-and-joy-at-the-old-town-art-fair/feed/ 23 People Don’t Buy What You Do, They Buy WHY You Do It http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/13/people-dont-buy-what-you-do-they-buy-why-you-do-it/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/13/people-dont-buy-what-you-do-they-buy-why-you-do-it/#comments Sun, 13 Jun 2010 22:10:58 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=11756 Check out this AMAZING TED video by Simon Sinek. What do you believe in? Who are you sharing your WHY with? How are you doing it? Is it working for you or are you having trouble finding it?

Beginning as a student in anthropology, Simon Sinek turned his fascination with people into a career of convincing people to do what inspires them. His earliest work was in advertising, moving on to start Sinek Partners in 2002, but he suddenly lost his passion despite earning solid income. Through his struggle to rediscover his excitement about life and work, he made some profound realizations and began his helping his friends and their friends to find their “why” — at first charging just $100, person by person. Never planning to write a book, he penned Start With Why simply as a way to distribute his message.

Sinek also contributes to several efforts in the non-profit sphere: He works with Count Me In, an organization created to help one million women-run businesses reach a million dollars in revenue by 2012, and serves on the Board of Directors for Danspace Project, which advances art and dance.  He writes and comments regularly for several major publications and teaches a graduate-level class in strategic communications at Columbia University.

Check out his website too: http://www.startwithwhy.com/

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/13/people-dont-buy-what-you-do-they-buy-why-you-do-it/feed/ 0 A Reflection of Innovation http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/10/who-ever-thought-washing-your-hands-in-a-public-restroom-could-be-innovative/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/10/who-ever-thought-washing-your-hands-in-a-public-restroom-could-be-innovative/#comments Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:00:16 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=11693 Last weekend my husband and I drove to Iowa to attend a wedding. During our drive there we stopped for lunch at a casino. I popped into the restroom and as I was washing my hands all of a sudden, like a ghost, an image appeared in the mirror. The first was a map of the property and then the image changed and simply said “play your cards right”. More ghost like images followed offering other promotional tidbits about the property, food and guest rooms.

How cool to be so surprised by something innovative while I washed my hands. I can’t say I ever thought there could be  anything innovative about a commercial bathroom mirror though either.  I surely had never given it a single thought  that these kinds of mirrors offered more ” capacity” than their intended purpose. And yet, once I saw a new potential for it to be used  in this new way, it but of course then seemed obvious it had been possible all along.  After all I did not need to use that part of the mirror at all to brush my hair or take in my appearance and even if I did, because of its translucent image I could still see myself through it.

And that is the power of innovation- it surprises you. Its clever and new in some way. Maybe even a very small, but impact filled way like the images that sprung to life in the mirror and made my bathroom experience in the casino  the most exciting part about being there.

And last weekend I did play my cards right- by walking into the restroom first and then right out the front door after lunch.

Some of the best innovations are the simplest.

Translucent imagery made using this mirror to market the casino feel like an experience (instead of marketing) because of its ghost like quality.

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/10/who-ever-thought-washing-your-hands-in-a-public-restroom-could-be-innovative/feed/ 1 Another Reminder as To Why The Arts Matter http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/08/another-reminder-as-to-why-the-arts-matter/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/08/another-reminder-as-to-why-the-arts-matter/#comments Tue, 08 Jun 2010 18:42:00 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=11681 We need more than ever to hang on to the arts as the crown jewel of giving us life experiences. And we also need to simultaneously give them tangible purpose by using their gifts more potently as a vehicle to help others achieve, both for ourselves and others, unprecedented economic opportunities. While some of you may view this thought as a curse- having to become more relevant more “accountable”- I see it as true opportunity. It is time we permeate more than just ours, and others, inner worlds but also fuel others abilities with our gifts and  help them enrich, motivate and achieve greater outcomes as a result of what we can share. This requires that we build more skills and learn how to influence others, lead our followers into action to better themselves AND, while doing so, financially flourish ourselves.

And yet the kind of narrow thinking David Brooks describes in this NYT piece is exactly what we all should fear if we do not find a way to create meaningful work that has some measure of practical applicability. Thanks James Willney for passing it along for our readers.

History for Dollars By DAVID BROOKS Published: June 7, 2010 in the New York Times

When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job.

So it is almost inevitable that over the next few years, as labor markets struggle, the humanities will continue their long slide. There already has been a nearly 50 percent drop in the portion of liberal arts majors over the past generation, and that trend is bound to accelerate. Once the stars of university life, humanities now play bit roles when prospective students take their college tours. The labs are more glamorous than the libraries.

But allow me to pause for a moment and throw another sandbag on the levee of those trying to resist this tide. Let me stand up for the history, English and art classes, even in the face of today’s economic realities.

Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo.

Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion. In an information economy, many people have the ability to produce a technical innovation: a new MP3 player. Very few people have the ability to create a great brand: the iPod. Branding involves the location and arousal of affection, and you can’t do it unless you are conversant in the language of romance.

Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. People think by comparison — Iraq is either like Vietnam or Bosnia; your boss is like Narcissus or Solon. People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies. If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.

Finally, and most importantly, studying the humanities helps you befriend The Big Shaggy.

Let me try to explain. Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior: economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling. They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy.

You can see The Big Shaggy at work when a governor of South Carolina suddenly chucks it all for a love voyage south of the equator, or when a smart, philosophical congressman from Indiana risks everything for an in-office affair.

You can see The Big Shaggy at work when self-destructive overconfidence overtakes oil engineers in the gulf, when go-go enthusiasm intoxicates investment bankers or when bone-chilling distrust grips politics.

Those are the destructive sides of The Big Shaggy. But this tender beast is also responsible for the mysterious but fierce determination that drives Kobe Bryant, the graceful bemusement the Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga showed when his perfect game slipped away, the selfless courage soldiers in Afghanistan show when they risk death for buddies or a family they may never see again.

The observant person goes through life asking: Where did that come from? Why did he or she act that way? The answers are hard to come by because the behavior emanates from somewhere deep inside The Big Shaggy.

Technical knowledge stops at the outer edge. If you spend your life riding the links of the Internet, you probably won’t get too far into The Big Shaggy either, because the fast, effortless prose of blogging (and journalism) lacks the heft to get you deep below.

But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech. These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities.

It’s probably dangerous to enter exclusively into this realm and risk being caught in a cloister, removed from the market and its accountability. But doesn’t it make sense to spend some time in the company of these languages — learning to feel different emotions, rehearsing different passions, experiencing different sacred rituals and learning to see in different ways?

Few of us are hewers of wood. We navigate social environments. If you’re dumb about The Big Shaggy, you’ll probably get eaten by it.

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/08/another-reminder-as-to-why-the-arts-matter/feed/ 1 Dan Pink and ArtStart Coordinator Christie Kahil Radio Interview http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/06/dan-pink-and-artstart-coordinator-christie-kahil-radio-interview/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/06/dan-pink-and-artstart-coordinator-christie-kahil-radio-interview/#comments Mon, 07 Jun 2010 02:44:42 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=11667 Check out this interview that was on WFAE 90.7 FM in Charlotte NC with Daniel Pink (Arts Integration Activist and Author of four books including A Whole New Mind)  and Christie Kahil ArtStart Coordinator (ArtsStart develops arts integrated curriculum for Charlotte NC schools). Their radio interview was about the importance of arts integration for student success and why us right brain thinkers are going to reshape our future workforce.

This is a great interview but it will take about an hour to listen to.

Dan Pink and Christie Kahil Interview

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/06/dan-pink-and-artstart-coordinator-christie-kahil-radio-interview/feed/ 1 David Cutler Speaks Out About Creativity and Life as an Arts Entrepreneur http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/06/david-cutler-speaks-out-about-creativity-and-life-as-an-entrepreneurial-artist/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/06/david-cutler-speaks-out-about-creativity-and-life-as-an-entrepreneurial-artist/#comments Sun, 06 Jun 2010 14:26:21 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=11638

An interview with David Cutler appeared on Carla McElhaney blog on Saturday June 5th, 2010.

Pianist, Carla McElhaney is an innovative presence in the classical music field. and is highly regarded as a passionate and dynamic performing artist, teacher, and coach.  She is co-founder, pianist, and Executive/Artistic Director for REVEL, an Austin-based “classical band,”  currently serves on the piano faculty at Texas Lutheran University in Seguin, and maintains a coaching practice that integrates her interest in the field of personal development, her advocacy for Creatives and their work, and her roles as a performing artist, advisor and mentor.

An Interview with David Cutler

Composer, pianist, educator, arranger, conductor, collaborator, concert producer, author, blogger, consultant, speaker,  advocate and entrepreneur David Cutler talks about shooting for maximum impact in his highly charged, highly creative life.

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/06/david-cutler-speaks-out-about-creativity-and-life-as-an-entrepreneurial-artist/feed/ 2 Our Press Release About The Creative Enterprise Microfinance Fund http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/03/our-press-release-about-the-creative-enterprise-microfinance-fund/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/03/our-press-release-about-the-creative-enterprise-microfinance-fund/#comments Fri, 04 Jun 2010 06:54:00 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=11615 Gorilla Tango Financial and The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship(TM) Partner to Build the Creative Enterprise Microfinance Fund

CHICAGO, June 3 /PRNewswire/ — The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship (IAE) and Gorilla Tango Financial have announced a strategic partnership to provide up to $10,000 of financing to qualified creative enterprise start-ups, small or medium businesses that have successfully completed The IAE’s 2-week business plan development workshop known as Creative Enterprise Boost Camp.  Applicants who enroll in The IAE’s two-year program, beginning in January 2011, will be eligible to apply for an additional $25,000 to continue the development of their enterprise while they attend school.

With a joint mission of fostering the growth of the creative economy, The IAE and Gorilla Tango Financial are uniquely positioned to help those in art, design, fashion, film, music, performing arts, and publishing to realize their creative vision through educational training, mentorship and access to capital.

“We have secured $100,000 as our startup/beta stage funding and we are looking to place this entire amount into various projects in 2010,” said, Dan Abbate, CEO of Gorilla Tango Financial and president of Gorilla Tango Theatre. “Our mission has always been to foster the growth of new and exciting productions in our theater in a sustainable and profitable manner. We are looking to expand that mission through Gorilla Tango Financial, which will supply advances, loans, investment and other types of venture capital to support small, medium and large entertainment projects in any media.”

“At The IAE we support the development of creative individuals by teaching them how to build profitable small businesses. Our students need not only the business experience, education and mentorship we offer to them but  access to non-traditional sources of funding to be able to make the difference they seek to make in the world,” says Lisa Canning, executive director of The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship. “We are incredibly excited about the opportunities this partnership holds for our students to not only learn the skills they need to thrive through our programs, but have access to the capital they need to launch their businesses.”

Deadline to apply for The IAE boost camp is July 1st. Applications for The IAE’s two year creative enterprise certificate program can be found at www.TheIAE.com. For more information about Gorilla Tango Financial, visit www.GorillaTango.biz. For more information about the Creative Enterprise Microfinance Fund contact Lisa@TheIAE.com.

About The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship

The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship is a two-year program to teach artists how to earn a living. With a curriculum that combines experiential learning, mentorship and a personalized classroom environment that provides one-on-one time with the faculty of successful artist-entrepreneurs, artists are taught how to build their own arts based business while still in school.

Founded by 25-year business veteran and serial artistic entrepreneur Lisa Canning, The Institute is based on her enthusiasm for the new wave of whole-brain thinking and the firm belief that the arts – and artists – can and must be allowed to contribute to the world’s financial recovery.

Enrollment is limited to 45 students. Applications are available online to apply for the institute. There is no age limit for enrollment and the requirements to apply simply include artistic excellence and a desire to be self- sufficient. For more information about the school, go to www.TheIAE.com.

SOURCE The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/03/our-press-release-about-the-creative-enterprise-microfinance-fund/feed/ 1 And The Winner Is…. http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/03/and-the-winner-is/ http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/03/and-the-winner-is/#comments Fri, 04 Jun 2010 05:04:21 +0000 Lisa Canning http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/?p=11606 We can’t offer enough thanks to all of you who submitted entries for The IAE logo contest, as well as all of you who voted! We had over 5000 views of the logo entries, over 700 votes and about 100 comments through the blog and emails received!  THANK YOU for caring enough to help us make this important choice that will reflect our identity to the world!

THE WINNER

The designer who submitted the winning entry, and OUR NEW LOGO, said this about their submission: ” Your website presents the picture of a dynamic, community-oriented organization and I’ve tried to express those attributes in the logo I’ve designed for your institute.”

We could not agree more! We felt, like so many of you, that this particular entry stood out because it was unique, very clever and creative, reflected a diverse collaborative community and most importantly embodied an entrepreneurial spirit!

Thank YOU Ryan Swanson, instructor from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago,  for referring our winning entry to us!

And with out further ado….(drum roll please!) the winner is…

]]> http://blog.entrepreneurthearts.com/2010/06/03/and-the-winner-is/feed/ 1