In the past, we saw art as a passion—not a business. But today, with the popularity of online shopping sites like Etsy and the growing number of community arts and craft shows, more and more artists are creating a thriving business from their art. Couple that with more creative outlets for musicians and actors, and it’s no wonder why dynamic arts communities are scattered throughout the country with growing opportunities for artists to become entrepreneurs. To help support and guide artists in Akron, Ohio, Summit Artspace is helping these highly right-brained individuals with the business side of things. In fact, evolving with the needs of the artists, this nonprofit community art center organization is revamping its strategic plan and mission in 2020 to focus on connecting artists and artist-serving organizations to the community and to the resources they need to thrive professionally, creatively, and financially.

My grandfather, David Rockefeller Sr., founded the Business Committee for the Arts in 1967 with a mission: to inspire business leaders to support the arts in the workplace, in education, and in the community. He believed that when businesses partner with the arts, it facilitates a mutually beneficial and inspiring collaboration. Today I carry on the philanthropic traditions and values exemplified by my grandparents by recognizing a responsibility to be an active and engaged participant in the community, both at home and globally. I am honored to be presenting Gensler and Access Gallery with the David Rockefeller pARTnership Award at the 2019 Arts and Business Partnership Awards on October 3. 

I am both a businessperson and an artist, which helps expand my perspective and set my business apart. The challenge, on the business side, is that because profit motive is the driving force, the most creative work often doesn't receive the recognition or appreciation it deserves from businesses. The tendency for most businesses is to stick to a proven, profit-driven formula. I'm not saying that profit-driven formulas are wrong, but we should also be allowing room for creativity, innovation and growth—not just in the arts, but in every aspect of business. Businesses should want to hire creative people, people who can create solutions without predefined answers. We need businesses to understand that the arts can and will help them achieve their objectives—even if those objectives are not always related to the arts. We need to frame the arts in a way that businesses can find value in them as well. Having this business background helps me be a better advocate for the arts.

Arts education certainly doesn’t have to (and really shouldn’t) end after high school. At least that’s our belief at COCAbiz, the arts-based business training division of COCA-Center of Creative Arts in St. Louis. COCAbiz provides immersive arts-based training, programming, and consulting for business professionals. We are constantly exploring how to unlock creative energy and build skills to meet today’s business challenges by providing leaders with new tools, techniques, and perspectives from the arts. COCA’s Executive Director, Kelly Pollock, wrote about COCAbiz for Americans for the Arts back in 2011, suggesting “businesses might be more innovative and achieve greater success when they give their employees all of the tools that the arts and the creative process have to offer.” She’s right. As we round out our first decade of COCAbiz, we have learned that arts learning is powerful and needed with business professionals. In a world where automation and technological dependence are becoming the norm, human creativity still reigns as the ultimate competitive advantage.

Content presented by the Institute of Financial Wellness for the Arts (IFWA).

If you’re an employee of Veterans United Home Loans, one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” on Fortune magazine’s 2019 list, you might be invited to a crawfish boil or a party “welcoming the seventh employee named Emily to a department.” Hilton, the hotel company, provides massage chairs for workers on break. And many companies routinely offer stock bonuses for innovative ideas. But for arts organizations operating on lean budgets, those employee perks are impractical. Young actors, dancers, musicians, and arts staffers have more pressing needs than crawfish boils, and one of the aims of the Institute of Financial Wellness for the Arts (IFWA), launched in 2018 and expanding nationally this year, is to provide advice on handling money to artists of all stripes.

The arts are core to what we do at Opsis and our relationship to, and support of, our local and diverse arts community helps us make connections with members of our local and regional community that we might not otherwise be able to do as effectively. As a result, Opsis is well known in our local arts community as an available supporter, participant, and resource. Opsis is a firm filled with people for whom the arts are as personally and professionally important. Folks come to us because we value the arts as a fundamental priority and integrate the arts into our practice with every opportunity. We partner with arts organizations to help raise money, plan and design facilities (often pro-bono or at cost), and we invite creatives into our office for monthly lunch-hour talks that demonstrate this focus and accelerate the exposure of our staff to other creative people from a wide variety of disciplines.

When I envisioned Rollie from the very beginning, I aspired to create a brand that was bigger than me, a brand for the people, and designed alongside other creatives to challenge myself and what is the norm in the industry. This allowed us to create our own unique point of view and USP (unique selling proposition). Being a creative business owner, working with other creatives, felt very natural and empowering to me and the value in doing so was immediate. Our first collaboration came two days after launching the brand; it was with the founder of an award-winning design agency who was simply fascinated by the product and brand story. We collaborated despite not having the funds, with the common understanding to create something we were both proud of; we came runners up for Australian Print ad of the year with our first campaign. The lesson here is that there are other currencies than money.

First launched in 2012, the pARTnership Movement is a program and online platform of Americans for the Arts which demonstrates that by partnering with the arts, businesses can gain a competitive edge. Over the past seven years, Americans for the Arts has developed toolkits, shared stories of success, published how-to workbooks to engage employees, and continued to celebrate America’s best businesses supporting the arts—all for the purpose of supporting the work of local arts organizations and businesses as they seek to build creative relationships. Our goal has always been two-fold: build the capacity of the arts field to cultivate and sustain mutually beneficial partnerships with business; and make the case to businesses why partnering with the arts is good for their people, their companies, and their communities. We are pleased to introduce a new pARTnership Movement website to help us (and you) further this work.

I was recently awarded the Champion of Arts Education Award by the Center for Arts Education in New York City. As the owner of a business that relies on artists, I am deeply committed to supporting arts education initiatives. The arts bring so much joy both to adults and children alike, but this rarely translates to encouragement to follow artistic passions. This raises the question: Why do parents do so much to dissuade their children from pursuing an arts career? We celebrate our children’s work on the refrigerator until something happens that begins to make us shudder with fear. When our child comes to us and says, “I think I want to be an artist,” we try to avoid showing our panic right away—knowing that this might just be a passing notion for the day. Then comes a day, as you begin to plan for your college visits, that your son or daughter says to you, “I want to go to an art school,” or they might couch it with, “Yes, I’d like a school that has an art program … and of course a strong biomedical program.” But, whether your child ends up in an art career or related art career, or does get that biomedical engineering degree, what you’ve supported through their school career is an incredible gift. At Golden Artists Colors, we support arts education because having a creative life is a something that will benefit and last an entire lifetime.