Creative Capital

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Creative Capital is a New York-based, national non-profit which provides grants and advisory services to artists in five disciplines: Visual Art, Performing Arts, Emerging Fields, Film/Video and Literature. It was founded in 1999 with Ruby Lerner as the founding director; she now serves as President and Executive Director. In its first year, Creative Capital accepted 1,810 applications.[1] It was founded in part to offer support to artists affected by the National Endowment for the Arts' (NEA) cuts to funding for individual artists in the 1990s.[2]

Business Model and Artist Services

The Harvard Business School published a case study of the Creative Capital business model on March 24, 2010 titled "Creative Capital: Sustaining the Arts." In a description of the study, authors G. Felda Hardymon and Ann Leamon wrote about Creative Capital’s use of a venture capital model, investing in their grantees with money as well as advice on managing their careers so that they can continue improving their careers after they’ve spent the grant.[3] As part of that sustainability, Creative Capital's system stipulates that grantees whose projects make a profit return a portion of those profits to the organization. Also, many former grantees of Creative Capital become advisors for new grantees.

Creative Capital's approach to artist services centers on the idea that time and advisory services are as important to the creative process as money. As the grantee's funded project develops, Creative Capital staff meets with grantees to set goals and chart progress. Creative Capital provides funding at benchmark moments for each project, including initial funding, support to build the artist’s personal and professional capacity, follow-up support for project production, funding for the project’s premiere, and support for the project’s expansion beyond its premiere presentation.[4] Of this type of support, Sheryl Oring, a Creative Capital grantee, has said, "For mid-­career artists like me, Creative Capital can help make the difference between whether we keep making art or give up."[5]

Notable grantees include

Emerging Fields

Film/Video

Literature

Performing Arts

Visual Arts

Retreat

After each new round of grantees is announced, Creative Capital hosts a retreat for their artists, including the most recently announced grantees, the grantees from the previous round, some other grantees as consultants as well as people connected to Creative Capital in various ways who act as consultants, workshop leaders or observers. In various workshops and meetings with consultants, artists are taught how to plan the next five years of their lives, in terms of their artistic careers as well their own lives.[6]

Creative Capital hosts a variety of events for its grantees to meet each other and others within the artistic community. Paddy Johnson has written in her noted arts blog, Art Fag City, "These conferences offer grantees an amazing opportunity to connect with other artists and a wide range of curators, distributors, and artistic directors through mixers, meetings with consultants, and artist presentations. They also ask grantees to return to the conference every couple of years, which keeps them in touch with a constantly expanding network of creative art folk."[7]

Professional Development Program

In 2003, Creative Capital founded its Professional Development Program (PDP) which offers a series of evening-, one-day- or weekend-length workshops for artists on marketing, strategic planning, self-management, fundraising, web strategies. In both presenting these workshops in-person nationally and broadcasting some online in the form of "webinars," the program shares skills taught to Creative Capital grantees with other artists across the U.S. These workshops have been described as a “crash course in self-management, strategic planning, fundraising and promotion.”[8]

References

  1. ↑ Dobrzynski, Judith (25 August 1999). "1,810 Artists Seek Grants From a New Foundation". New York Times. New York Times. Retrieved 9 October 2012. 
  2. ↑ Murphy, Tim. "Bohemian Boot Camp". nymag.com. Retrieved 10 October 2012. 
  3. ↑ Hardymon, G. Felda; Ann Leamon (March). "Creative Capital: Sustaining the Arts". Harvard Business Review: 24. 
  4. ↑ "Our Approach". Retrieved 31 October 2012. 
  5. ↑ Murphy, Tim. "Bohemian Boot Camp". nymag.com. Retrieved 9 October 2012. 
  6. ↑ Murphy, Tim. "Bohemian Boot Camp". nymag.com. Retrieved 10 October 2012. 
  7. ↑ Johnson, Paddy. "Expanding The Creative Capital Network". Art Fag City. Retrieved 31 October 2012. 
  8. ↑ Johnson, Annie (3 June 2011). "Workshop brings 'creative capital'". Nashville Business Journal. Retrieved 10 October 2012. 

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