Failing your way to success. Yup. That’s how it’s done. It takes a LOT of support and a pretty great attitude too. That’s hard to do on your own. Kind of like weight loss I think. Best done with a herding mentality. That’s why Weight Watchers has been so successful. They understood the power of a “herd” early on.

But since I began 6 years ago- reinventing myself from my spare bedroom blogging to an audience of none- to where I am now?  I have to say it has been littered with set backs and disappointments that I could have allowed to loom larger than life and stop me cold in my tracks. AFTER ALL THIS TIME  I really never thought that the IAE WOULD STILL NOT HAVE the funding resources we need to achieve the grand plan. Love is blind! Thank God for my clarinet customers who are supporting me. Every customer who buys an instrument from me is donating $50.00 bucks to my school. Last year Lisa’s Clarinet Shop donated $27,500 to the IAE and my husband and I and a few others donated again 2 times that sum.

Lisa’s Clarinet Shop is the little engine that could. My husband has been out of work- downsized from one of those big corporate jobs- for over a year and my clarinet customers just keep coming and coming to support IAE. It’s like a miracle. Really.

This is the power of small business. Of passionate purpose driven living. ANYTHING IS possible. ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN if you know who you are and what you simply MUST express with your time on this earth. ANYTHING is possible but you have to have the ability and DESIRE to sustain your effort and to never EVER give up.

And I believe the future is bright. Not just because I am an optimistic person, but because so many people around me are increasingly excited to see what is happening with our students at the IAE.

Every rose began hidden under the mud before it revealed itself and BLOOMED. My dream to realize the IAE does not get to skip any of the steps to Bloomin’ Success. We are walking the walk just like our students and I am searching for another little steam engine to help me over the hill…

THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD
(Watty Piper)

A little steam engine had a long train of cars to pull.

She went along very well till she came to a steep hill. But then, no matter how hard she tried, she could not move the long train of cars.

She pulled and she pulled. She puffed and she puffed. She backed and started off again. Choo! Choo!

But no! the cars would not go up the hill.

At last she left the train and started up the track alone. Do you think she had stopped working? No, indeed! She was going for help.

“Surely I can find someone to help me,” she thought.

Over the hill and up the track went the little steam engine. Choo, choo! Choo, choo! Choo, choo! Choo!

Pretty soon she saw a big steam engine standing on a side track. He looked very big and strong. Running alongside, she looked up and said:

“Will you help me over the hill with my train of cars? It is so long and heavy I can’t get it over.”

The big steam engine looked down at the little steam engine. The he said:

“Don’t you see that I am through my day’s work? I have been rubbed and scoured ready for my next run. No, I cannot help you,”

The little steam engine was sorry, but she went on, Choo, choo! Choo, choo! Choo, choo! Choo, choo!

Soon she came to a second big steam engine standing on a side track. He was puffing and puffing, as if he were tired.

“That big steam engine may help me,” thought the little steam engine. She ran alongside and asked:

“Will you help me bring my train of cars over the hill? It is so long and so heavy that I can’t get it over.”

The second big steam engine answered:

“I have just come in from a long, long run. Don’t you see how tired I am? Can’t you get some other engine to help you this time?

“I’ll try,” said the little steam engine, and off she went. Choo, choo! Choo, choo! Choo, choo!

After a while she came to a little steam engine just like herself. She ran alongside and said:

“Will you help me over the hill with my train of cars? It is so long and so heavy that I can’t get it over.”

“Yes, indeed!” said this little steam engine. “I’ll be glad to help you, if I can.”

So the little steam engines started back to where the train of cars had been standing. Both little steam engines went to the head of the train, one behind the other.

Puff, puff! Chug, choo! Off they started!

Slowly the cars began to move. Slowly they climbed the steep hill. As they climbed, each little steam engine began to sing:

“I-think-I-can! I-think-I-can! I-think-I-can! I-think-I-can! I-think-I-can! I-think-I-can! I think I can – I think I can – I think I can I think I can–”

And they did! Very soon they were over the hill and going down the other side.

Now they were on the plain again; and the little steam engine could pull her train herself. So she thanked the little engine who had come to help her, and said good-by.

And she went merrily on her way, singing:

“I-thought-I-could! I-thought-I-could! I-thought-I-could! I-thought-I-could! I thought i could – I thought I could – I thought I could – I thought I could – I thought I could – I thought I could I thought I could –”

New research finds we’re better able to identify genuinely creative ideas when they’ve emerged from the unconscious mind.

Written By Tom Jacobs

(Hemera/iStockphoto)

Truly creative ideas are both highly prized and, for most of us, maddeningly elusive. If our best efforts produce nothing brilliant, we’re often advised to put aside the issue at hand and give our unconscious minds a chance to work.

Newly published research suggests that is indeed a good idea — but not for the reason you might think.

A study from the Netherlands finds allowing ideas to incubate in the back of the mind is, in a narrow sense, overrated. People who let their unconscious minds take a crack at a problem were no more adept at coming up with innovative solutions than those who consciously deliberated over the dilemma.

But they did perform better on the vital second step of this process: determining which of their ideas was the most creative. That realization provides essential information; without it, how do you decide which solution you should actually try to implement?

Given the value of discerning truly fresh ideas, “we can conclude that the unconscious mind plays a vital role in creative performance,” a research team led by Simone Ritter of the Radboud University Behavioral Science Institute writes in the journal Thinking Skills and Creativity.

In the first of two experiments, 112 university students were given two minutes to come up with creative ideas to an everyday problem: how to make the time spent waiting in line at a cash register more bearable. Half the participants went at it immediately, while the others first spent two minutes performing a distracting task — clicking on circles that appeared on a computer screen. This allowed time for ideas to percolate outside their conscious awareness.

After writing down as many ideas as they could think of, they were asked to choose which of their notions was the most creative.  Participants were scored by the number of ideas they came up with, the creativity level of those ideas (as measured by trained raters), and whether their perception of their most innovative idea coincided with that of the raters.

The two groups scored evenly on both the number of ideas generated and the average creativity of those ideas. But those who had been distracted, and thus had ideas spring from their unconscious minds, were better at selecting their most creative concept.

The second experiment, which featured 68 students, was similarly structured. Participants were given a different assignment (“Come up with as many ideas as possible on how students can earn some extra money”); at the end, they were asked to identify both their most and least creative ideas.

The results replicated those of the first experiment. Those who had employed their unconscious minds were better at selecting both their most and least-innovative ideas.

The researchers aren’t sure how to explain their results; they suggest a “spontaneous tagging process” takes place when an idea is generated unconsciously, alerting us to its level of creativity. While admitting this theory is speculative, they note that — whatever its cause — this sort of discernment is “vitally important for everyday creativity.”

True enough. Knowing which ideas belong in the trash bin, and which deserve to be fleshed out further, is a real gift—one that, according to this research, your unconscious mind is poised to provide.

On Thursday January 26th The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship (IAE) will be teaming up with WBEZ’s new project Front & Center to host a resource fair for the self employed, small businesses, start-ups, and freelancers.

Mini seminars and presentations will run through out the evening at the fabulous Catalyst Ranch located at 656 W Randolph St # 3W in the Polka Room.

Mini Seminar Topics Include: 

Entrepreneurship 101
Presented by Institute For Arts Entrepreneurship

Receiving small loans as an independent worker
Presented Accion Micro Lending

Doing your taxes as a freelancer, small business owner, or independent
Presented by Center for Economic Progress

Create. Innovate. Repeat: featuring 4 fabulous presenters, 7 slides and just 5 minutes each to pitch their most innovative business idea to you.
Presented by Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship.

Partial List of Participants Include:

Co-Lab Evanston providers of shared office spaces.

Northside Freelancers Network  who can help you connect to the growing Chicago self-employed community. Make sure to ask them about their weekly “freelancers soup” lunch.

Accion will be on hand to discuss how to get a  micro-loans to jump start your own business.

Northside Community Bank can help you find funding for your small, local project.

IndieMade is itself a small business. They create websites for independents, artist, small businesses, and start-up projects.

Rockstar CPA offers CPA services specifically geared towards the self-employed, with a specialty in creative projects.

The Law Project offer affordable legal resources for freelancers, independents, and small businesses, such as creating contracts, negotiating pay, etc.

Chicago! Come on out and celebrate self-employment with us! We hope to see you on January 26th.

Fair begins at 6pm @ Catalyst Ranch  656 W Randolph St # 3W, in the Polka Room

While 2011 was a big year for political unrest, another uprising was afoot in the world of content creators and artists. Everywhere you look, artists are taking more control over their own economic well being, in large part because the Internet has enabled them to do so. You see it in all forms of content, from books, to video to music.

A few examples from this year:

e-books: Probably the most active area in large part because there is huge shifts taking place in digital publishing. From former mid-list writers like Barry Eisler to superstars like JK Rowling, writers are increasingly making waves in digital publishing.

Video: The story of the year for artists-as-entrepreneur came at the tail-end, with Louis CK saying no thank you to corporate middlemen and putting his new concert video online for $5 a pop.

Radio/Music: All sorts of independent entrepreneurs are putting audio entertainment online, from the rise of podcast kings like Leo Laporte to a huge number of independents like Adam Carolla and Marc Maron. Music artists are being given freedom too, through new platforms to create and share their music like Soundcloud.

So what is driving this movement towards the artist-entrepreneur that will give it huge momentum in 2012?  Here are a few underlying trends:

The distribution chain is collapsing across content verticals

The middleman is under attack on all fronts, whether its in video, music/audio and e-books. As devices like TVs become connected, as books become e-readers and tablets, and music is now digital, the storefront is fast-becoming the entire distribution chain.  With e-books it’s Amazon or Apple, with radio it’s iTunes, with video it’s Google/YouTube, Netflix and other upstarts who are investing in original content, or simply direct-to-consumer efforts using web-payment platforms like Paypal.

Louis CK, who created his own site, paid for bandwidth, and used Paypal for payment, captured how many artists are beginning to think when he said in an interview with Bill Simmons that he “didn’t want to cut out the middleman, I just didn’t need one. There wasn’t any reason to have someone there. I just thought make this thing and put it up.”

Content production, distribution and monetization tools are becoming democratized through the web

In e-books, distribution and storefronts have already collapsed into one, but managing distribution across multiple channels is difficult since storefronts are still siloed (Amazon is separate from Apple iBooks, which is walled off from Barnes&Noble, etc). However, companies like Smashwords enable creation and distribution across multiple storefronts, while Vook, post-pivot, is working on SaaS tools to create e-books and manage their distribution, complete with reporting and management dashboards.

In music, artists are starting to embrace sites like Soundcloud to create music and share it, while others direct-to-fan sites like Topspin Media are enabling artists to create commerce sites to sell music in turnkey fashion. And it’s not just music sales, but actual concert tickets. The Pixies used Topspin to sell tickets for a recent concert, utilizing email campaigns and to notify fans and processed the tickets using an iOS app at the door.

With video, big middlemen still dominate, but that is changing as video creation and distribution costs come down in a world of connected devices. As Ryan Lawler wrote in a piece for GigaOM Pro:

“independent content creators stand to gain the most through massive reductions in the cost of recording equipment and editing software, as well as the greater availability of streaming video service on connected devices. They gain new distribution opportunities for their content and greater possibility for monetization. Consider any of the top YouTube video channels, which probably wouldn’t be able to survive in the pay-TV universe but have created thriving businesses due to the cost structure online.”

Generational shifts towards technology savvy-artists

As Matt Mullenweg put in in his New Year’s resolution on GigaOM:

“For a year now, I’ve said scripting is the new literacy. That’s something I strongly believe. In Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, he talks about “program or be programmed.” That is, if you’re not in control of your inputs, you’re not really in control of your outputs either. You’re just a reactionary force.”

Matt is right, in that scripting is the new literacy, and a growing form of artistic expression. Tech-savvy artists are creating apps and developing sites to put their art into the world. Whether its Matt Inmann creating his work and coding his site at The Oatmeal or young app developers like Robert Nay, artists are becoming coders and vice versa, since, as Mullenweg states, scripting is “new literacy”.

No doubt, the vast majority of economic wealth is still distributed through large corporate media, but as new technologies enable artists to reach consumers directly through push-button creation and distribution, there is a movement afoot. Expect this movement to expand in 2012 as more artists take control of their own economic destinies and become part of the artist-entrepreneur generation.

Dear Reader,

This blog has been an incredible labor of love. My labor has come from my deep desire to see the world of the arts evolve and change so that artists have a new voice and can develop and be recognized for their entrepreneurial talents by contribute their gifts in new ways.

As we begin our 7th year, I look back and realize that I have persevered relentlessly over the past 6 years because I believe so much in the power of artistry to change the world as we know it.  I have invested a significant amount of my time and money into it, as a result, in hopes that the content here can develop shared language, create new meaning and be a useful resource for you to use in your entrepreneurial and creative development.  I hope I am achieving my goal.

I wish you all a wonderful 2012 filled with hope, promise and prosperity.

Lisa Canning

A friend of mine recently reminded me that there is no need for creative entrepreneurial types like us to apologize for being “egocentric” in saying that creativity and innovation is scarce, while status quo “inside of the box”  thinking is the great majority. It is a simple fact.

Unfortunately, “explaining” this to the “majority” is usually not possible or helpful because it requires experiential learning to truly develop ones creative abilities enough for anyone to really understand.  What rules the heart can rule the mind but it does not work the other way around. A fundamental shift in the mix of who we highly value learning from, and how we learn, needs to take place for this to occur. It is no wonder societies and humans evolve so slowly despite all the knowledge and tools available to us.

And yet, I believe man was put on this earth to help God make progress on earth. Which, to honor him, requires us to be ethical bound, to morally act and requires tremendous creativity to do. And this single belief has profoundly motivated me through out my life to deepen my intellect, my empathy and my creativity so that I can use my skills to be of service, to the best of my ability, to everyone I know.

As I have grown up, I have increasingly come to recognize that this belief is often isolating and a cause for great misunderstanding.  Developing my empathy, intellect and creativity has taught me how to see deeply and profoundly into others- which is not an easy thing, in this broken world, for others to accept as the gift you have to offer. And yet, as an artist, I have come to learn this is our profound gift to share with the world. It is not egocentric at all for me to say it is what artists have to offer and why God graced us all with the gift of life.

And yet, I find myself often in a space where I feel worried that my time on this earth will run out before I have realized this deep vision for the world I have- to occupy the hearts and minds of the majority with more creativity- to reach the tipping point of true change.  It is an honest to goodness daily fear of mine. And it has often pushed me to feel the need to try and prove my worth with anyone I encounter in the majority in the hope that they will give me the opportunity to open up a whole new world of meaning to them- one that transcends the empty hunger for power and greed and utilize it for real progress on earth and societal good. And by doing so, for true sustainable prosperity to flow. It is hard not to want this for the world when these principals have profoundly served the development of my own life and my businesses and created so much prosperity and good.

While I have never apologized for my work, in some ways by trying to “prove” to others what deep value as an artist I hold, I  think I have.  While the majority entertains my beliefs about the ethical values one develops from the flow of heartfelt creativity, like a muse in the moment, it is short lived and not invested into to deepen its impact and to create true sustainable values. Is this really the only role my work can have?

Two years ago I was offered the opportunity of being mentored by a quickly rising entrepreneurial star in Chicago. He had built an amazing company from nothing, was featured on INC’s fastest growing list of companies for several years and glowed in power and money. He also “appeared” to be “a creative”, like me, too.

As my relationship with this individual developed, what I found underneath the veil was far from what the exterior portrayed. He was in an “open marriage”; his life was spiraling out of control. He was also hiring broken-down-trodden individuals to do the heavy lifting inside his business because he could pay them less and work them to death. And in all he did in life, he placed appearances far higher on his list than true happiness and meaning despite all of his soul searching trips to meet spiritual gurus.

While he thought he was mentoring me, it was I who was mentoring him.

Through my mentorship, this individual came to to emotionally understand that true love and intimacy was more important to him than sex with multiple women. He also came to experience that a creative career and business was far more valuable to him than a past-its-sell-date sweat shop that gushed cash. However,  I was never given any credit for my work. The profound changes that I witnessed in him, during our professional relationship, were not rewarded with generosity for his newly found flow of heart centered creativity; which my mentorship reinvigorated the hunger within him to have.  It certainly also did not make him donate funds to The IAE, or even thank me. Instead he took it freely from me as if it had no intrinsic value or significant economic worth.

And if I had told him upfront the price tag to help him was a donation of $100,000 to my school, he would have laughed and walked away. Why would he pay when all of us artists continue to give our gifts away for free to those who don’t have the skills, but have the resources to pay for what we have to deliver?

Today this individual is happily, for the first time, married to one woman. And he sold his company too and is now working on something truly meaningful to him and which is helping him to build his creative capacity.

Artists can truly help restore the inner lives of the majority not to mention by doing so stop the Penn State’s, Bernie Madoff’s and Enron’s from ever happening. But it is going to require finding the minority of the majority- those financially able and brave enough to invest and act- to step up and give those of us with these gifts a chance to fully integrate our pure heart centered creativity into their world.

Please Lord hear my prayer. I am sure this is the work you put all of us artists on this earth to do. And, finally, I believe our time has come to do your work on your beloved earth. The world is awakening to the real need for promised words and actions to match. Intellectual understanding is not from where we are compelled to act. This is why I dutifully created The IAE- to help artists help others make progress on earth for you.

Please send me the minority who is willing to invest and act. Lord hear my prayer.

When natural or military disaster strikes it leaves thousands of traumatized children and adults in its wake.  Even after the trauma occurs, some individuals will deal with grief many months, and possibly years, later. In some cases, their caregivers may also have experienced their own suffering, making it difficult for them to provide full care. At precisely the time the traumatized child or adult may need special assistance, caregivers and social institutions may be least able to come to their aid.

A colleague of mine, recently shared with me the work of ArtReach. The ArtReach Foundation offers hope through a unique program using expressive arts and creative problem solving to help those who experience the traumatic effects or war, violence and/or natural disaster.  They work with both adults and children.  Their approach allows for the expression of the individual’s deepest fears and traumatic experiences to be shared and creates the opportunity for healing to occur.

This past October, members of the ArtReach Project America team, Christiane O’Hara, PHD and Timothy Puetz, PHD presented in Washington DC at  at an invitation only National Summit called Arts in Healing for Warriors.  This summit created interdisciplinary dialogue that highlighted important elements of the future of arts and medicine in the military. A keynote presenter Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith, along with other prominent speakers described the evidence base for the efficacy of arts programs in promoting recovery from illness and injury, with special emphasis on resilience, psychological healing, family strengthening, reintegration, and other topics of interest to the military.

If you would like to learn more about their arts based healing model, you can download Promoting Children’s Emotional and Mental Health in Communities Traumatized by War: The ArtReach Foundation Model.

I am looking forward to attending the U.S.-Maghreb Entrepreneurship Conference, PNB-NAPEO’s annual regional partnership conference in Marrakech, Morocco January 16-18, 2012.  The IAE is hoping to find an educational partner in Morocco beginning with our academic year 2013-2014. We have already 2 partners in Amman Jordan. Both Queen Rania’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Princess Taghrid’s Institute for Arts and Culture. Students from both organizations will be on the IAE educational network starting in the fall of 2012. In 2013 we hope to expand into Sweden and Morocco. At that time, we will have 2 classrooms and 2 educational networks stranded through video conferencing.

At the IAE our goal is to help artists become creative flexible whole brain leaders. Our model is designed to create an educational space for artists around the world to develop a common universal shared language to stimulate, as a group, our own economic development as well as help others do the same. At the IAE we teach artists how tap into their creativity to fuel community economic development, financial growth and spur innovation. ~ Lisa Canning

Written by Lorraine Hariton and appeared on DipNote: U.S. Deptartment of State Official Blog

Lorraine Hariton serves as the Special Representative for the Commercial and Business Affairs Office, Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs.

As the Special Representative for Commercial and Business Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, one of my responsibilities is the promotion of entrepreneurship overseas — something that is critical to the State Department’s overall mission of “creating a more secure, democratic and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people and the international community.” I am proud that our efforts to promote entrepreneurship have expanded to a new corner of the globe — the Maghreb — as part of the U.S.-North Africa Partnership for Economic Opportunity (NAPEO), a regional initiative under the global alliance Partners for a New Beginning (PNB).

I was privileged to lead a State Department Entrepreneurship Delegation to Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria October 26-November 2. The delegation, which consisted of 20 distinguished U.S. entrepreneurs, angel investors, members of academia, and NGO representatives, was co-sponsored by the Global Entrepreneurship Program (GEP) in my office. One goal of the U.S.-NAPEO is to enhance economic cooperation between the United States and the Maghreb region, and to share best practices between experienced and emerging entrepreneurs with the goal of providing tools and strategies that can help to overcome some of the common challenges that entrepreneurs usually face. Our entrepreneurship delegation supported this goal. We believe that entrepreneurship is a powerful mechanism for job creation that will benefit not just the economies of the countries that hosted the delegation, but the U.S. economy as well. The delegation was enormously successful in generating excitement around entrepreneurship — after listening to pitch-sessions by aspiring entrepreneurs, we selected a total of three promising start-ups in each country for a four-month business incubation prize at the Tech Town Detroit Incubator and a full-tuition scholarship for one semester of instruction at Wayne State University. Entrepreneurship delegate Ahmed Chabbani generously represented TechTown, Wayne State University, and the American Arab Chamber of Commerce to award the prize in person. These efforts represent the type of unique public-private partnerships that the U.S.-North Africa Partnership for Economic Opportunity is building to deepen ties between the United States and the Maghreb.

We also mentored aspiring entrepreneurs in one-on-one sessions, coaching them on how to improve their business plans and pitches. Mentoring is crucial to entrepreneurial success, because it gives aspiring entrepreneurs an opportunity to learn from others’ mistakes and successes. Interestingly, the mentoring sessions were two-way exchanges — not only did our delegates provide valuable operational knowledge, but they also learned about the unique challenges of doing business in each host country. In Morocco, start-ups reported difficulty in identifying seed capital to begin their businesses. In Algeria, aspiring entrepreneurs reported difficulty in managing and distributing their funds. In Tunisia, start-ups said they needed marketing skills to expand their businesses regionally and maybe ultimately globally. As one of our delegates, Driss Temsamani, said, “We were working for a higher purpose; the satisfaction of sharing success with others…We gave them one common message, ‘You can do it!’”

In addition to helping create opportunity for aspiring entrepreneurs in countries with high unemployment and other challenges, our expanded economic cooperation in the Maghreb may lead to the next “big” innovation that can help restart not only the economy of the Maghreb region but also the U.S. economy as well. Our engagement has the potential to be a “win-win.” And I think I speak for the entire delegation when I say that we were all impressed by the energy, drive, and innovation of the aspiring entrepreneurs we met in the Maghreb. Our goal for our future programming in the region is to sustain the momentum we have generated around entrepreneurship. PNB-NAPEO is now planning its annual regional partnership conference, the U.S.-Maghreb Entrepreneurship Conference, for January 16-18, 2012, in Marrakech, Morocco, where we will showcase many new partnerships that came out of the delegation. One example, our delegates are planning to create a regional angel network — with money from their own pockets — to support aspiring entrepreneurs.

I want to especially thank our U.S. embassies in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia and the local partners on the PNB-NAPEO advisory boards in each country for such an outstanding work and support in these efforts. Some of our success is immeasurable, such as the personal impact that our events had on the lives of aspiring entrepreneurs. To quote one of our winners in Morocco, Yassine El Kachchani, “This opportunity was life-changing in a very positive way. I was amazed by the level of openness and the willingness to help that the delegation and the U.S. Embassy showed during this event. […] I’m more than ready to exceed your expectations — this is my new challenge.”

Towards a New Social Contract in the Arab World

On Sept 22, 2011, regional leaders and members of civil society groups participated in a webcast discussion and online chat on social accountability, governance and managing economic transitions the Middle East and North Africa. Watch the webcast or read the chat transcript below.

http://live.worldbank.org/towards-new-social-contract-arab-world

Well, its that time again…….

I’m dusting off ornaments,

untangling a ball full of metal fishhook hangers from each other

and uncurling ribbons on those (damn) wreath bows.

I think it might be time to go shopping.

Ode to Dr Suess: Ding-Dong, Ring-Ring

Ding- dong, Ring- ring

all the bells are RING-ING!!

People shuffling,

Cash registers opening,

Boy! all those entrepreneurs are “hoping”…

All those folks out there, being ”customers”,

AND BUYING stuff up!

and UP!

AND  UP!!

~~

They shop and don’t stop

SAY WHAT?

JUST WHAT??

just what could THEY POSSIBLY BE THINKING???

~~

Inside every customer

is a mind that is

Thinking ….

and THINKING!

AND THINKING!!!

THINKING  To fill IT’S own voids,

and center it’s Being.

~~~

Customers buy to be happy, and satisfy

their worth.

AND customers especially treasure artists, for their gifts,

BLESSED at birth.

~~

we love, we laugh,  we cry,

WE UNWIND……!!!

We harden, we age, we narrow,

WE WHY????

~~

Ding-Dong, Ring-Ring, Customers nearing!

Take niche to find thrive, hurry up, there’s still time!

GO AHEAD, follow the signs to give your customer a ride–

On the ARTWAVE  you know, well.

YOU KNOW?  The one  YOU CAN RIDE!!

You ride to find niche for your customers, who will buy!!!

And BUY!!

AND BUY!!!!

~~

What they pay for is YOU, to teach them to GLIDE.

To glide on the ride that, YOU KNOW how to ride.

Perfectly.

The one that produces Your  OWN version of THRIVE.

We RIDE. We thrive. THEY Ride. They Glide

We all simply enjoy

as we all simply ride.

~~

But do you remember the day, YOUR art called your name????????

It TICKLED your funny bone, calling to YOU, Outloud  AND BY NAME!!

Go Dancer and Painter

Go CartoonIST and VisionIST.

Go off in your sleigh with A Plan,

BECOME AN Artistic missionist!!

~~

Your future,  it awaits you, its only begun.

Your art wave will take you, anywhere,

quite far and far flung!!

..as long as you ride it, AND SHOW OFF  ITS FUN!

~~

To Yonder and Listen and Dreamer and Great VisionISTS;

your patrons, are waiting for you..remember to visit us!

Ding-dong, Ring-ring, my poem is nearly done.

Take the arts into the future, and find life Ohhhh  SOOOOoooooo MUCH richer,

Merry Christmas, Dr. Seuss; you’re a missionIST and my hero

from a patron, gliding,

and sent with love.

Wishing all of you patrons and bloggers a

wonderful holiday season!

Lisa Canning

So often you’ll hear an artist say.. “becoming an artist wasn’t a choice but a gift”.  And yet, with as short as life is, sometimes we need to be reminded why this particular gift was selected for us to receive in the first place.

Our gifts were not given to us for our self serving pleasures. Nor to torment us. Or to use for the sole purpose of competing to win a place at the top of the art circle.

And our gifts were also not given for us to pit one against the other. Nor to leave us broken, miserable, or questioning our purpose here on earth. And they certainly were not given to us to leave us alone, homeless or starving.

Our gifts, of not just a vivid imagination but the ability to render it into productive creativity, were given to us because of the profound impact we can make helping another become the best version of the person he or she truly can be. Our creative gifts were given to awaken the inner lives of others. To touch their spirit, to speak where there are no words. To help another gleam the strength, insight, humility, integrity and values from our gifts to move themselves and our world positively onward.

Let this forward below, from my friend Robert Fishbone– a remarkably creative artist in his own right– about his journey finishing his wife, Sarah’s, book Onward is Best, serve as a reminder to us all.

Onward my friends. May this inspire you to continue to step outside of yourself and use your creative gifts to increasingly find a way to be of service, through your artistry, to others. The world needs your creativity more than ever.

Lisa Canning

An Introduction by Robert Fishbone, Sarah’s husband

It was a blustery December evening in 1958. Little Sarah Jean Linquist stood with her face pressed up against a large window at Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago. Sarah, already an aspiring young artist, was swept away by a magical holiday scene created by some unknown designer. “I want to do that some day!” she exclaimed. That desire resurfaced decades later as this amazing book and as one of the ways Sarah dealt with a life-changing event.

In 2006, in the midst of a long career as a prolific painter and well-respected scenic artist, my beloved wife Sarah was diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer. As someone who courageously and delightfully made every situation her own, even ones that seemed adversarial, she did not let this “new reality,” as she called it, detract from her personal mission: to nurture our family, to spend time with loving friends, to create art, and to wear cool clothes.

In our home, we have often referred to life as the Great Mystery, and mysterious and grand was how Sarah looked at the world. She really wasn’t trying to figure life out or even unravel it…she just wanted to dance with it.

Her first chemo treatments left her with peripheral neuropathy. Her hands and feet became numb, so much that she not only had some difficulty walking, but with her eyes closed she couldn’t feel the difference between sand paper or silk, a real challenge for an artist who draws and paints. To regain her fine motor skills Sarah began cutting up paper and assembling the pieces into shapes and objects. And then she remembered gazing into those Christmas windows at Marshall Field’s. With this Aha! moment she began this wondrous book.

Sarah wrote a classic journey tale. Her story combines foolishness, bravery, loyalty, risk taking and the need to count on others to help you push through the unknown. To illustrate her story, Sarah created a series of 3-D sets, each a miniature landscape through which her characters journeyed. She constructed her Paper Land, Popcorn Land, Metal Land, Teddy Bear Land, Wood Land, and Desolation Land using different materials and found objects. For her heroine she fashioned Dolly, a small wooden doll with wild red hair. She set her story within the context of her favorite time of year: Christmas.

Making landscapes became a wonderful adventure. Sarah was determined to find just the right pieces for her “Lands.” She borrowed heavily from her own giant stash of “arty stuff” collected over many years; she also loved to cruise garage sales and auction web sites. She invited family and friends to donate mini Teddy bears, stuffed crows, and small wooden doors or to help make a whole garden of cloth flowers. Sarah had so much fun explaining her story and giving tours of her evolving sets to the steady stream of visitors who passed through our house.

Sarah worked on her book project whenever she had time, even after two major surgeries and during four different chemo regimens. I figure she averaged four hours a day for four years. That’s almost 6,000 hours devoted to her vision: a new Christmas classic that parents and grandparents would read to their children in the days leading up to Christmas.

Very sadly though, Sarah died in June, 2010, before she could finish her book.

Soon after her passing, ten family members and close friends, each one committed to Sarah’s mantra of “Ain’t Life Grand,” agreed to complete Sarah’s project and make her dream a reality. Working together for over a year, we have grown closer as friends, and as family. We have gained new insights into Sarah’s extraordinary artwork and how she looked at the world she had created. And just as working on her book was a way for Sarah to find greater purpose in her life, to keep pushing forward, our efforts to complete her book have helped us all heal.

Sarah’s book is part of her legacy to us all. She has given us amazing landscapes to journey through, a tale to help us to experience the magic of Christmas, and a memory of her hard work that empowers each of us to reach for something beyond our daily lives, to probe the Great Mystery even more deeply.

This book is a testament to Sarah’s abilities as an artist, to her devotion as a wife, mother, sister, daughter and friend, and to her delightful spirit. I hope you have enjoyed reading and sharing this book as much as she loved creating it.

Calling all Chicago Creatives!

Regardless of your background,entrepreneurs and artists are visionaries, each in our own way. We all want to make a difference, create and be innovative. Isn’t it cool to try and prove that creating the “impossible” isn’t that hard to do?

On Wednesday September 21^st, The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship (IAE) opened its doors with 15 students ranging in age from 24 to 63 year of age. Our pilot class includes 3 fashion designers, 3 visual artists, 2 actors, 2 dancers, a chef, a musician, a skin care product designer, a recent Illinois International film festival award winner, and a fashion stylist who was just chosen by Clinton Kelly (TV’s What Not to Wear) as a consultant for his new retail venture The Perfect Fit.

Since school opened, IAE students have been working on the development of their emotional intelligence. A clear understanding of oneself, our beliefs and values, is essential to selecting the right idea to develop into a business as well as to be able to authentically communicate to others. For almost a year, my colleague Joyce Thomas, University of Illinois, and myself, along with other IAE faculty, have been working to build a highly interactive learning model for IAE students. Artists learn by doing so it was essential we were on our feet and experiencing the learning as often as possible.  Our approach to education has been very challenging to design. Especially because most classes in entrepreneurship, these days, are offered like a series of topic driven workshops and are not designed to deepen individual identity and build on one’s beliefs and values. Before our launch, IAE faculty were a little nervous about how well our students would buy into our learning style. Not to mention our belief that emotional intelligence building is a core building block to success as an entrepreneur. We certainly could envision students being unwilling to trust us, and each other, enough to engage in a very personal, yet highly interactive, learning style right from the start.

Our classroom is also an analog classroom. No cell phone or computers are allowed. Although we use lots of technology as teaching tools, we also worried how well this would be received. In today’s interruption driven world, we felt strongly that going back to a time when we could experience each other and truly listen was critical to creating a space to learn how to develop a shared language with others. As well as would help our students further develop their abilities to speak and write.

Since our launch, I think the biggest shift in our thinking is our renewed belief and understanding of just how hungry our students are for this kind of learning and training. And, ironically, running as an analog class has left students commenting how much they look forward to and value our time together.  My only hope is to find the resources we need to continue to build the IAE. I can no longer self fund this project. We must find a few foundations and corporations willing to step up to fuel us into self-sufficiency.  And yet, just recently a mid level manager from Chase Bank sat in on one of our classes and thought our artists, and what we were doing with them in the classroom, would help branch employees communicate and work more effectively. She left excited to help us pitch to Chase executives. We also have received interest to expand our school, through video conferencing, into both Princess Taghrid’s Institute for Arts and Crafts and Queen Rania’s Center for Entrepreneurship in Amman Jordan, as well as from someone who sits on a board for an art school in Sweden.

If you know someone who would benefit from our program, please let them know our early bird application deadline is December 15th.  We have already received a handful of applications for next fall. And if you know someone from a foundation or corporation that would be interested in funding our program, please share this post with them.  It’s time to innovate through artistry.  Our world simply needs more creativity infused in everything we do so we can restore America to all she can be. And it’s time for artists to contribute our soft skills to fuel growth and innovation around the world.

The IAE learning wall is a reduction of what our students believe is their most essential nuggets of learning to date.

Written by Chicago street artist C Drew

This crime?

I am the person arrested for selling art for $1 on State Street but later charged with a 1st class felony for audio-recording my own arrest. I am still being prosecuted for this … this crime? Why am I willing to risk my freedom so some unknown artists can sell their art in the streets and in the parks of a city that doesn’t care for them or for myself at all? Please, don’t feel sorry for me! Laugh and shout the word freedom. I am happy to be fighting this fight. I am proud of my actions. I feel free. I am not ashamed of their felony.

Art is speech!

Art is speech. Artists polish their speech by perfecting their art. The word “communication” could be substituted for speech but because the First Amendment uses the word speech, so do I. There are many forms of art but all art involves communication and is considered speech in terms of this essay and by the full meaning of the First Amendment, in my opinion. Sometimes art’s effect is explosive and dangerous to those in power. When you add up the sum of all the art/speech activity in a society you have culture. Culture develops self-identity and self-identity gives meaning to our lives. Many forces attempt to define what our lives mean, what our history means, what cleans our teeth whitest or what our rights are or are not. They often do so to attempt to control our future allegiances and actions.

Artists may be categorized into thematic art collectives, hip-hop culture, pop culture, Western culture, Mid-eastern culture, and on and on. Cultures can clash. Many human beings are willing to fight and die for their various culture’s existence. In a diverse democracy we need to learn to be tolerant of the many cultures that make up our society. Cultural clash does not have to be physically violent in an open society. Physical violence most often occurs when one culture attempts to use law or force to suppress other cultures in order to shove their cultural attitudes down someone else’s throat. The Free Speech Artists’ Movement goal is to make Chicago more friendly to artists to open up opportunities to any artists wishing to make a living by selling their art in public. This is the single best way to support all of Chicago’s cultures – by allowing the creators of culture – the artists – basic grass-root opportunities, as is their right under the First Amendment. That is why I happily risk my freedom, to support the multicultural expressions of Chicago’s many artists.

Street Art – The Foundation of an Urban Cultural Ecosystem

Street art activity and street vending in general are the grass-roots of an economic ecosystem. This low level economic activity is capable of feeding many at a subsistence level. It acts, where it is found alive and well, as a stabilizing system, an economic safety net, and in the case of art, also as a complex social-intellectual engine pumping up the volume of any local marketplace of ideas and culture. Street art culture in a healthy urban cultural ecosystem is the algae of urban intellectual ferment.

Street artists and First Amendment vendors attract an audience in public and do not have to ask permission of any curatorial committee or social gatekeeper to to present their ideas. No up-front costs or unattainable overhead expenses should prevent them from participating. This is the very essence and experience of freedom. It allows the beginner to grow and develop and provides a cushion for the unemployed during hard times. I have seen artists who might have succeeded with their art, if they had a place to sell it directly to the public, give up after a bout with hard times. Street art cultural opportunities allow such artists to survive by selling their art. Street art cultural opportunities, open air art markets, free for artists to participate, are a critical social safety net for any urban arts “cultural marketplace of ideas” to reach and maintain its full potential.

The lively activity of many artists and thinkers provides inspiration to an enlightened public in this intellectual ferment. Take artists out of the public and this ferment slows down. This is exactly why the First Amendment protects art and speech in public. The legal meaning of the First Amendment phrase “make no law abridging freedom of speech” has come to mean – “write laws to limit speech least so as to encourage as much speech as possible.” That’s just what the Free Speech Artists’ Movement wants.

Let’s take a single narrow example of how the absence of street art activity affects cultural activity overall. The percent of the public who seek out art in galleries or art openings in Chicago, is low – very low. The managers of cultural institutions can blame the public for this or blame their salesmanship. I blame the fact that artists have been run off the streets of Chicago. The street artist reaches the public directly – grabbing people’s imaginations as they walk by. Street artists apply the full force of their creative personalities to the task of selling art and create art appreciation where often little existed previously. Some of street artists’ converts go on to attend openings at formal art galleries. This is just one contribution street artists make to urban culture. Street artists’ collective activity contributes, like a social catalyst, to the overall cultural activity of an urban area.

The existence of art scenes, where artists gather and support each other while collectively promoting their art, allow many more artists to thrive at a basic economic level – the first level – the street level of opportunity. In an open society the artist is free to build an audience from the entire public or any small portion of the public that they can communicate their artwork to, by working on the streets and in the public parks.

Thus, a robust street arts culture effectively contributes to the freedom artists experience in an urban area. Once this street-arts-freedom culture is established other artists region-wide are attracted to this energy. The culture of street art begins to feed on itself and grow. This growth of street art sales and the infectious creative energy of the artists, feeds every other arts institution in the cultural ecosystem above it. Your opinions/insights on this are requested to extend this paper into a dialogue

( http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Art-Patch-Project ).

First Amendment Case Law on Selling Art/Speech in Public & Chicago’s Grass-Roots Art Reality

In a nut shell, First Amendment case law interprets the phrase “make no law abridging the Freedom of Speech” to mean, if a law is passed that limits speech (art) there must be a very important need for the law. The law should be narrowly tailored to meet that need (ex: if the reason is the safety of the pedestrian then a narrow law would be to leave 7′ for the public to walk on a sidewalk and be 10 feet away from any doorway). The law should not be broadly written limiting speech (art) greatly (ex: noselling of speech (art) in the downtown or in any alderman’s ward that doesn’t want it). Also, if speech (art) is limited, the speakers (artists) are to be provided an ample alternative to exercise their speech rights as judged from the point of view of the speaker (artist).

One other very important fact of First Amendment case law that many citizens and artists alike don’t understand is this often repeated statement. “It is well settled that a speaker’s rights are not lost merely because compensation is received; a speaker is no less a speaker because he or she is paid to speak.”

This means if it is legal to give art away at a spot – it should be legal to sell it at the same spot. If I don’t block foot traffic while giving the art away, then I shouldn’t block traffic selling it either. If traffic, the City’s reason for the law, is not affected differently by my giving the art away compared to when I sell it, then there is no constitutional reason why I should not be allowed to sell my art at that spot.

Once the foundational layer of a cultural ecosystem is destroyed it is difficult to bring it back. Street arts culture has been destroyed in Chicago. Speech is being lost wholesale. One of the most laughable lies that the City tells about why they need to discourage artists from selling in public is that, if the City doesn’t have these laws and policies, artists will swell the sidewalks and parks with activity and no one will be able to walk safely down the streets. In reality, it takes time and great effort to rebuild street art activity. Because street art activity has been (unconstitutionally) discouraged by law in Chicago in the last 15 years both the public and the artist base have lost a culture of street art. The public is not used to meeting artists on the street and artists are not practiced in creating viable street art businesses.

Today in Chicago the public ignores the lone artist who attempts to use a speech permit to sell art and after acting alone for some time the artist gives up. If Chicago eliminated the peddlers license requirement tomorrow for artists to sell art it would take a major effort by artists to create viable street art scenes in all but a few great locations. This is because street art activity is the foundational part of a cultural ecosystem based on the interactions of the public and artists over time. Just like any business that takes a standard minimum of two years to develop a customer base, re-building any given art scene will require a similar gestation period. Artists developing a street-art ecosystem will have to invest their time and effort over a length of time to get interactions with the public (conversations and sales) going.

The peddlers license requires artists to pay $165 upfront to buy their rights that may not be made back for some time as artists get started. Street Art Culture in Chicago is dead and this explains why the “speech permit” (see below) locations are not utilized. This creates a massive chilling effect on an ambitious artist’s initiative to attempt to build an art scene of one.

Unconstitutional Laws! Speech Permits?

How is the peddlers license unconstitutional and what are speech permits?

The Chicago peddlers license was written for non-speech items like umbrellas and socks. It was written broadly to protect established businesses and to deny street vendors access to large portions of Chicago where economic opportunities abound. Aldermen add to the peddlers license prohibited districts through “aldermanic privilege.” If an Alderman proposes a change only in his ward, it is passed unanimously. Two Aldermen have barred vending in their wards completely. Barring vendors this way is only constitutional if it applies only to the sale of products not protected by the First Amendment. It is only a privilege to sell non-speech items in public. Privileges can be licensed and regulated freely by the government under our constitution, speech can’t. Speech is not a privilege. Speech is a right.

Speech is a right and is protected under the First Amendment. When the City Council added speech to the peddlers license they took artists’ First Amendment rights away and treated speech like a privilege -not a right. This destroyed what street art culture existed in Chicago at that time. This is not the only way the city has shredded street art culture in Chicago, just the most outrageous. Then again, the complete ban on artists selling art in all the City’s public parks is arguably as bad or worse.

The peddlers license is a prior restraint on speech. If you do not have $165 to pay for one or if you have an outstanding debt to the City, you can’t get a peddlers license which prevents you from exercising your speech rights from the get-go (a prior restraint). The peddlers license is broadly written.

It bars speech in broad tracts of Chicago without providing any but the most meager and illegally constructed alternatives.

History

Artists were added to the peddlers license in 1994. Daley followed the lead of NYC Republican Mayor Giuliani. The artists of NYC fought boldly in court and won all their speech rights back. Artists didn’t fight back in Chicago. The medicinal marijuana t-shirt sales people fought for their First Amendment rights in Chicago in 1995. All they wanted was to sell their t-shirts at the Taste of Chicago. That is about all they got. Their law suit, Ayres v Chicago, resulted in creation of the “speech permit” in 1999.

In Ayres v. Chicago, the court discovered that the prohibited districts were broadly defined and therefore violated the First Amendment. So the City created 10 speech permit corners, four around Grant Park for festivals and six in the Loop. They called this an ample alternative to make up for the way the peddlers license prohibited districts violate artists’ speech rights. A person who buys a peddlers license may apply each month for a speech permit by submitting all the designs they hope to sell for review. The speech permit is good only for the corner it is issued for and only for one month. An artist must resubmit each month and all designs must be submitted a month ahead of time. Therefore, no topical statements are allowed by the provisions of the ordinance. If Daley does something outrageous today, the earliest you could sell your art commenting on it is a month later. In a month all public interest in a topical issue has evaporated. How in the United States of America could eliminating topical speech be a constitutional speech regulation?

Only five people are accepted per corner per month. This regulation means only thirty people can apply in the entire City (4 fest corners have no traffic except during festivals). It guarantees that there will rarely be more than 1-3 people per corner even if it is booked each month because no artist is going to be on the corner 24/7. When more than five apply per corner the Department of Business Affairs is to hold a lottery (behind closed doors) to select the 5 lucky winners. Talk about total control to pick their favorite five people! And if you don’t like the results – you can come back next month and try again –ha-ha… This your is freedom?

The fact is nobody uses this farce of an alternative. These speech corners in no way offer an ample alternative for the three pages of broadly written prohibited districts defined in the peddlers license.

However, these speech corners might be an interesting point of attack for artists who wanted to organize to demonstrate artist-power in Chicago.

So What – Who Cares?

In Chicago there is not one single art scene where artists can sell their art to survive that is free from excessive fees and curatorial roadblocks. Even the blues musicians are gone from public in Chicago. It should be illegal to confiscate a musicians guitar or a graffiti artist’s notebook. Our street arts tradition is lost. The constitution is in tatters. When I go out in the public to print art-patches much of the public avoids me as if I were a homeless person asking for money. They equate the sale of art with the homeless because the homeless have won their First Amendment rights to ask you for a dollar. But the homeless artist can’t legally sell you a portrait on a paper plate in the Loop for that same dollar because that is a crime. For the most part – my activities of selling art is criminalized by the peddlers license in the parts of Chicago where it would be possible for me to develop a viable street art presence. The City and the State are presently cooperating to complete the task of criminalizing me for my arts activity by prosecuting me for a 1st class felony (4-15 years in State prison) from when they arrested me for selling art for $1 on State Street. What is their reason for the felony – because I audio-recorded my own arrest.

Interestingly, the eavesdropping law they are using to prosecute me is also a violation of our First Amendment right to gather information in public.

The appreciation of art in public is at a low ebb. People do not expect to see or to relate to artists in public under these conditions. Why does the public stand for this? They take it because the don’t know what they are missing anymore. It happened without any announcement. The media never did its job.

The artists were threatened and arrested and no one covered it in Chicago media. Artists were not organized. Now its our living history.

When I talk to artists about their rights to sell art, many are unaware of their First Amendment rights and few desire to build an audience in public. The most important reason is they see no successful examples of artists selling art in public in Chicago. So the public has lost interest in street artists and artists have lost interest in street level art activity.

The street arts ecosystem is gone. One lawyer told me, “they’ve cut artists’ balls off in Chicago and artists are living like that.” What he meant was “they took artists’ rights away and artists accept that now.” What remains is a stunted grass-roots arts infrastructure where the flame of independent culture is hidden in many isolated private locations struggling to maintain minimal levels of public involvement. A street arts culture helps community arts groups promote themselves and provides opportunities for their volunteer artists to survive while they help out to build community arts institutions reflecting diversity. An additional part of the isolation that independent community art groups endure is a result of not being able to post their notices on the poles and public locations. This law changed in the late 1990′s forcing some of us on to the Internet. We still need that public forum of light poles and traffic sign poles for communicating with our local patrons and backing our Facebook pages up in real-space. Artists need to be able to post art in public. Local businesses needs the same thing. Community organizations especially need this forum – the streets. Street communication has been taken away from us in Chicago! We are poorer for it.

Take street art culture away and the gatekeepers of culture gain even more control. Today artists of color are selected by and exhibited at all major cultural institutions. However, community controlled arts groups that are devoted to a single ethnic group still have great trouble finding funding. Small independent arts groups run by artists devoted to nurturing emerging artists also find difficulty surviving beyond the elbow-grease level of volunteer staffs.

In Chicago the cultural gatekeepers are in control. There is not one single art scene where local artists can sell their art to the public and build an audience as emerging artists at the grass-roots level. I have observed artists for twenty years at the Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center, a non-profit art center I helped found in 1987. Artists struggle to make a living from their art in Chicago and often give up in frustration. The first level of audience building opportunities have been destroyed by laws that discourage art and culture at the street and public park level. This is a violation of our First Amendment right to survive and build our audiences in public. It is cultural repression.

Art Fairs rent back public space to artists for a few days at prices ($150-$400) that skim the profit off the top of the artists sales and thereby build their for-profit ventures off the backs of artists who attempt to make a living in public. This is cultural share-cropping. The fact that street/park alternatives for selling their art are legally denied artists encourages them to consider cultural share-cropping (working in art fairs). Most artists succeed only in promoting their presence through art fairs and eventually give it up as unprofitable and too much work. Others battle for a few prestigious gallery positions as captive artists in service to the whims of wealthy patrons. Still others seek to promote themselves online but find that without a public presence their traffic and success is greatly limited.

There is no alternative to a vibrant street arts culture reaching out to involve new audiences in arts and culture, whether it is an individual artist developing his/her audience or the City as a whole developing a local market for arts and culture. Artists’ rights are being violated. Chicago’s arts community is stunted.

Art is the Solution.

Artists have created a way we can help change Chicago’s unfriendly attitude toward artists. The Art Patch Project is a win-win, non-violent, community-art pathway to change. We are on a slow but determined path toward educating the public – beginning with the youth – by marching the art of many local artists (a growing number) around the legal walls that bind us until these laws crumble. We are accepting designs from artists which we print on cotton patches. We add the artist’s title, contact information and our free-speech issue website address on each art-patch. We give away art-patches in all their variety in public .

Young and old alike are wearing or displaying art-patches. The public is being introduced to many artists they would never be aware of otherwise. These are the artists the public is missing. That is our message – that the artists on the patches are not able to be seen in public. When the public begins to realize the many artists they are missing in public – they will be able understand why the policy of denying Chicago’s artists their First Amendment rights is misguided. In the long term we are increasing awareness of artists rights to sell art in public using the Art Patch Project. This builds the foundation for real change.

The Art Patch Program is combined with our intent to sue Chicago over its violations of our First Amendment rights. These effective actions are why the City and State are trying to stigmatize me as a criminal. The level the City is willing to go to prevent us from succeeding is a measure of just how important the changes we ask for are.

I am willing to risk my freedom for future opportunities for artists. Our collective freedom – the right to create art scenes through which many artists can survive – is worth it. Don’t let their threats scare you away. Take a stand. Feel free!

What Can You Do?

Artists can help make Chicago more friendly to artists by submitting a single graphic black and white design to the Art Patch Project. In exchange we will promote you, your art and your website/email address far and wide. Submitting artists need not be limited to Chicago based artists. You can promote links to our website, facebook page and help establish a discussion of artists rights at our yahoo group

(see below)

Love freedom. Love art. Love Chicago.

In Chicago? Help out Wednesday’s and Sundays when we teach a free screen print workshop. Students and volunteers help print the art we give away. 1630 W Wilson Avenue. Wednesday from 2-7pm and on Sunday, 3-6pm.

Contact

Art Patch Project at umcac@art-teez.org, 773-561-7676 http://www.art-teez.org

Free Speech Artists’ Movement: http://www.Facebook.com/FreeSAM

Street Artist Adventures: http://www.c-drew.com/blog

E-mail comments to Art-Patch-Project@yahoogroups.com

Or Join our yahoo groups at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Art-Patch-Project

Written by Peter Spellman, Berklee College of Music

First, let’s dispel of some myths. Musicians sometimes fall victim to the notion they are doing something so precious and valuable that they can’t understand why the world isn’t shoving money in their pockets and adulation on their heads. “Why am I not famous yet?”– a question rarely asked out loud but certainly poking around inside many musicians – especially those aspiring to the heights of pop fame and worldly success.

Is it me, or is there a bit of an entitlement mentality here – that the world owes you a living, or something?

Well, surprise, your “work” is no more valuable than the auto mechanic’s and the zookeeper’s. Let that sink in.

Reality check: The “culture industries” we play in perpetuate the myth by allowing the marginalization of “art” on the one hand, and the divinization of the same on the other. “Art,” according to this view, is created by the very few and must be protected behind marble and glass in buildings resembling temples of old. The message is clear: Look, but don’t touch. At the same time, “art” is elbowed out of reach of the common man, and the training of the same must happen in credentialed institutions of “higher learning,” else you may not wear the badge of “Artist”.

This might seem odd coming from someone employed by the world’s top contemporary music college, but I base it on observation of hundreds of music careerists over many years. While most musicians I know take a humble stance in relation to their work, the myth persists and can affect musicians’ inner lives to a great degree, sometimes without them even knowing it.

Let’s face it. The upward climb can seem to last forever. In reality, it is never-ending — unless you are planning on hitting some pre-determined plateau and squatting there.

Don’t fall into the trap of feeling that the race is not going well just because you’re not at the finish line yet.  The race has something to celebrate all along its track. What becomes tiresome to the aspiring musician is not achieving some significant milestones. We’ll address that later.

Perhaps it’s helpful to remember all those ten year “overnight” successes. Indie rockers Death Cab for Cutie released their first record in 1998 and didn’t get their wider recognition until their first Grammy nomination in 2008. It took almost ten years of total immersion into his craft as a songwriter and vocalist for John Stephens to make the transition to Grammy-winning John Legend.

And, lest we forget, when the Beatles landed in NYC in 1964 for their first U.S. appearance, they had already been together since 1957 and had clocked an estimated 1,200 gigs, many consisting of eight hour sets at Hamburg and Liverpool clubs!

Here’s the reality: A full-time performing (or, songwriting, or recording, or what have you) career may not be in the cards for you. The unrelenting laws of supply and demand are real, and are being felt more today than ever before. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try for it. Of course you should, and many will achieve it. But musicians need to give themselves permission to be weekend warriors with non-music day jobs too.

That’s OK, ok?

Being a full-time “artist” is a fine goal, but try seeing that goal in light of Meister Eckhart’s words: “An artist is not a special kind of person. Rather, every person is a special kind of artist.” A business meeting is a jazz jam; a DIY rock band is a management team. Don’t let industrial age divisions of labor blind you to the possibilities for creative engagement everywhere and anywhere. You can create in myriad ways with myriad means in myriad venues.

“Be a Picasso of production, a Rembrandt of the receiving department, a Michelangelo of management, or a Gauguin of gofering,” writes career expert Lee Silber. “Life is art, and even the bad times are part of the experience that will contribute to your creativity in the future.”

It’s all mind set, IMHO.

Adapted from, Musician 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…Developing Music Careers in Uncertain Times. Get the whole enchilada here

About Peter Spellman
Peter Spellman found his way into music as a guitarist in various New York bands and then switched to drums after seeing the Police perform in the late 1970s. Since then he’s performed and recorded with reggae outfit, The Mighty Charge, world music ensemble Friend Planet, and now with the Underwater Airport crew. He’s scored films for the National Science Foundation, composed video games for Massachusetts General Hospital, and coaches music entrepreneurs at Berklee College of Music. He is author of “The Self Promoting Musician” and “Indie Business Power: A Step by Step Guide for 21st Century Music Entrepreneurs”. Find him at mcareerjuice.com

Lisa Canning, Founder of EntrepreneurTheArts.com and The IAE.com

It’s time to come up with some new models for what it means to serve on a board. In the classic board model  I have always been struck by the fact that to serve on a board requires endless altruism.  Human nature shows us that for most human beings it’s hard for anyone to remain, let alone for an extended period of time- like a 3 year board term- altruistic. It’s much more likely for someone to start that way and then want to move towards a more reciprocal relationship.  While the concept of  being of service selflessly to an organization is a noble one, it is simply too hard to execute or maintain for most of us; especially now given the  volatile economic climate we are living in.

So what are some better models? Do we need really need a “working” volunteer board or can we do better to support our organization through strategic alliances, partnerships and developing a strong donor base to pay for the talent we need to help our organizations grow?

How many times have we seen a strong leader at the helm of a NFP who leaves the organization and it suffers dramatically?  NFP’s are no different than a for profit model. Except in the for profit world we pay people to sit in our world and do the work we need. Maybe what NFP’s really need is to become more profitable to do more of the same and use their boards more as sounding boards rather than try and use them as substitute workers for their organizations…

By Rick Moyers

In honor of achieving independence as artists,  back in 2007 during the Fourth of July holiday, I wrote a story called Do Not Enter.

Writing this story motivated me to write more stories about people who have a dream but are struggling  to realize it.  What all the characters have in common is their interest, for different reasons, in patronizing Miya LeBleu’s Blue Bike Shop in a town called Nowhere.

Eventually I combined these short stories into a book called Build A Blue Bike. It was picked up by New York literary agent, Susan Schulman, but was never published.  If you are interested in reading some more of my stories a few more are on the blog. You can search under The Blue Bike Shop. Here is a link to one more about Miya LeBleu the bike shop owner.

This story, Do Not Enter, was also the inspiration for my design of The ETA logo.

Do Not Enter

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, thought John.  And yet, all down the hallway John saw 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; what 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.

The cash in John’s hand quickly became the bike in his dream. As a celebratory gesture the sales clerk 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 ”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,   thought John.

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 with all of their 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.

Written by Peter Spellman, Berklee College of Music

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Unless you were born under a rock, you probably are familiar with the name Crayola. It is the most popular and recognized crayon brand in the world. Every year, Binney & Smith, the company that makes Crayola products, manufactures nearly 3 billion crayons, at a rate of 12 million a day. That’s enough crayons to circle the globe six times!

The company was founded by Joseph Binney in 1864 as the Peekskill Chemical Works. In 1885, the founder’s son, Edwin and his cousin, C. Harold Smith, became partners and changed the companies name to Binney & Smith. Up to the turn of the century the company focused on producing items such as red pigments for barn paint and carbon black used in making lamp black and automobile tires. And their primary method of product development? Simple: ask their customers about their needs and then develop products to meet those needs.

In 1900, the company began making slate pencils for the educational market, and they found that teachers seemed happy to tell company representatives what they desired. When teachers complained about poor chalk, Binney & Smith produced a superior, dustless variety. When they complained that they couldn’t buy a decent American crayon (the best were imported from Europe and very expensive), it developed the Crayola. The company introduced the product to the market in 1903, as a box of eight colors that cost a nickel.

Once the company found its niche in the children’s market, it became incredibly focused. For a hundred years it has manufactured superior art supplies for children. Today it dominates the market – even in the face of the electronic revolution. In The Five Faces of Genius, Annette Moser-Wellman assessed the company by saying, “The biggest threat to Crayola’s business has been the entry of computer games for kids. Instead of drawing and coloring, kids are tempted by interactive CDs and more. Instead of trying to dominate computer games, Crayola has chosen to flourish within their limitations. They do children’s art products better than anyone.”

Binney & Smith could have lost focus in an attempt to chase new markets and diversify itself. That’s what toy manufacturer Coleco did. The company started out in leather goods in the 1950s and then switched to plastics. In the late 1960s it was the world’s largest manufacturer of above-ground swimming pools. It had found its niche. Yet in the 1970s and 1980s, it chased after the computer game market and then low-end computers. (You may remember ColecoVision.) Then it tried to capitalize on Cabbage Patch dolls. This ultimately drove the company into bankruptcy.

It would have been easy for Binney & Smith to chase after other successes, but it didn’t do that. The company has remained focused. And as long as it does, it will continue to excel and sell more crayons and children’s art supplies than any other company in the world.

Focus assumes attention. The expression “pay attention” should alert us to what focus and attention exacts from us. In these times of multi-tasking/attention-deficit/split-my- brain into a billion parts, it takes a greater level of concentration to achieve that focus.

Forward Padawans!

About Peter Spellman
Peter Spellman found his way into music as a guitarist in various New York bands and then switched to drums after seeing the Police perform in the late 1970s. Since then he’s performed and recorded with reggae outfit, The Mighty Charge, world music ensemble Friend Planet, and now with the Underwater Airport crew. He’s scored films for the National Science Foundation, composed video games for Massachusetts General Hospital, and coaches music entrepreneurs at Berklee College of Music. He is author of “The Self Promoting Musician” and “Indie Business Power: A Step by Step Guide for 21st Century Music Entrepreneurs”. Find him at mcareerjuice.com