Enitiative Projects in Arts and Culture

Enitiative funding has been awarded to the following projects that exemplify the vision of entrepreneurial Scholarship in Action for arts and culture:

•Arts Immersion in a Global Market
•Cayuga Records Initiative
•Economic Survival as a Working-Producing Artist
•Educating Arts Entrepreneurs
•Entrepreneurial Apprenticeship in Educational Theatre
•Imagining America’s Cultural Incubator
•Making Art More Visible
•Sitting Still
•South Side Newspaper Project
•The Mix, Goldring Arts Journalism Program
•The Syracuse Poster Project
•The Urban Video Project
•Transforming the Rust Belt Architecture
•Weaving Design Thinking With Entrepreneurship, the University, and the Community

Arts Immersion in a Global Market
Music Historian Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Art Historian Romita Ray, both professors in the Department of Fine Arts in The College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University, have been awarded an Enitiative grant to infuse entrepreneurship into their course, Arts Immersion in a Global Market, to be taught at the SU Abroad center in London.

Cayuga Records Initiative
Steven Keeler, Professor and Director of Cayuga Community College’s Programs in Broadcasting, Audio & Music Production, and Telecommunications Technology, has been awarded an Enitiative grant to create a student-managed record company, record label, and music publishing enterprise, supported by a music business practicum course.

This project will enable students to gain real world skills and transfer those skills to entrepreneurial activities. Students will learn the business of running an independent record company, from selecting talent to final distribution. Components of the course will include auditioning local music groups as potential signees to the recording label, recording musical groups, releasing, marketing, and distributing groups’ songs, and creating a business plan template to be used in the music business practicum.

Economic Survival as a Working-Producing Artist
Margie Hughto, a Professor in the College of Visual & Performing Arts at Syracuse University, has been awarded an Enitiative grant to teach students how to survive as artists after they leave SU.

Self-employed artists who make a living by their own hands, talent, and vision are, by necessity, entrepreneurs. However, they have the added challenge of reinventing themselves continuously, not only to answer their own personal passions, but to keep a fresh sales product before the public. To prepare artists for the real world beyond academia, Margie will add an entrepreneurial module to the ceramic studio graduate curriculum to introduce students to the business side of art – designing products that sell, marketing, public relations, and retail sales.

Educating Arts Entrepreneurs
Eileen Strempel, Assistant Professor in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences, has been chosen as an Enitiative eProfessor.

Professor Strempel is the Director of Strategic Planning for a new Master’s Degree program in Arts Administration/Arts Leadership being launched at Syracuse University. As an eProfessor, Strempel will assure that from the very inception of the program, its curriculum will be infused with entrepreneurship, foster student internships that bring “intellectual entrepreneurs” into local arts organizations, and embody both entrepreneurial theory and best practices while simultaneously benefiting local arts organizations and their communities.

Entrepreneurial Apprenticeship in Educational Theatre
Syracuse Stage and the Department of Drama at Syracuse University have been awarded an Enitiative grant to help artists launch a sustainable workforce entrepreneurial venture.

The program will provide real-world experience in theatre for acting and musical theatre majors, using the successful Syracuse Stage BACKSTORY touring educational outreach program as a vehicle. An entrepreneurial apprenticeship will prepare students for sustaining a career as theatre professionals. This will be accomplished through instruction, training, and applied knowledge provided by theatre professionals designed to enhance students’ entrepreneurial skills and instill the ability to self-manage their careers. Students will learn to market their program to schools, book and schedule presentations, organize tours, understand and work within a program budget, and explore revenue sources.

Imagining America’s Cultural Incubator
Laura Reeder, Executive Director of Partners for Arts Education, has been chosen as an Enitiative ePractitioner.

Partners for Arts Education (www.arts4ed.org) will be working with Imagining America (www.imaginingamerica.syr.edu) to create a cultural incubator that does for the arts and cultural sector what technological incubators do for practitioners and students in the technology field. She will institute a program in which people at any stage in developing artistic and cultural expertise can identify how to make a life and a living in these fields, ideally in Central New York. A combination workshop/interdisciplinary seminar series will be established to provide a way for people to continue to expand their skill set and, more than that, to include an entrepreneurial component, through which people explore the transfer and enhancement of arts and cultural skills that translate into a livelihood.

Making Art More Visible
Nancy Kramer, Professor of art in the Cayuga Community College Studio Art + Design (SA+D) program, has been awarded an Enitiative grant to enhance the visibility of the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center by engaging art and design students in the design and production of advertising.

Students enrolled in SA+D classes will actively participate in an entrepreneurial venture directed toward increasing public awareness for the creative arts. The students will learn how a professional arts organization functions and survives financially. Specific courses within the SA+D curriculum will be tailored to create promotional materials for the Art Center, such as individualized shopping bags, program announcement displays, and t-shirts that can be sold in the Art Center gift shop.

Sitting Still
Anne Beffel, Associate Professor of Art at Syracuse University, has been awarded an Enitiative grant for her project, Sitting Still, which uses fast-paced new media communication forms (video and websites) to rigorously slow down and extend attention spans.

Sitting Still is a collaborative work with students of many ages from Syracuse and Memphis, Tennessee, with workshops, classes, and exhibitions at multiple venues. Participants will build skills that are critical to their success as designers, artists, and entrepreneurs: focus, ability to listen carefully, and communication. Beffel will teach a related course at SU, Contemplative Time Arts and Social Entrepreneurship, to run concurrently with a Fowler High School course. Professors and professionals from disciplines such as medicine, conflict resolution, and psychology will lecture to teens and college students on the role of attentional focus in well-being and communication.

South Side Newspaper Project
Steve Davis, Associate Professor and Chair of the Newspaper Department at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, has been chosen as an Enitiative eProfessor.

Professor Davis will lead the South Side Newspaper Project, a joint project between Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and the South Side Community Coalition. The project will create a community newspaper that shares news, events, history, and happenings from the perspective of residents of Syracuse’s south side. The project will train and employ community members and student journalists, side-by-side, as the chief writers, photographers, and graphic artists. The newspaper will be turned over to community members to be owned and operated as a self-sustaining enterprise.

The Mix The Mix, Goldring Arts Journalism Program
The Goldring Arts Journalism Program is the first graduate program at an accredited school to teach journalists to write about the arts and culture. The Mix is an arts supplement included in the Syracuse Post Standard. Articles in the publication are researched, written, edited, and illustrated by Goldring graduate students. The Mix is often the students’ first professional publication and an important step forward in connecting with an arts community on every level.

The Syracuse Poster Project

Misc Jim Emmons, of The Syracuse Poster Project, and Roger DeMuth, Associate Professor at the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, have been awarded an Enitiative grant for the project’s capacity building program.

The Syracuse Poster Project, founded in 2001, brings together community poets and Syracuse University illustration students to create an annual series of posters for the city’s poster panels. Each poster features an illustrated poem about downtown, the city, or nearby countryside. Students gain practical experience in developing the posters from concept through sales. The project contributes to the revival of downtown, strengthens the city’s sense of place, and reaches a broad audience by selling and exhibiting poster prints.

With the Enitiative grant, plus funding from Verizon, National Grid, the Central New York Community Foundation, and the Gifford Foundation, the project will develop a patrons’ program and on-line store for selling poster prints.

The Urban Video Project

The Urban Video Project (UVP) has been awarded an Enitiative grant to bring art to the streets and buildings of Syracuse. Inspired by Syracuse’s Connective Corridor and Th3, UVP is the brainchild of the 40 Below Public Arts Task Force and the Avalanche Collective.

UVP provides a platform for the presentation of multimedia artworks while making use of underutilized urban spaces in Syracuse’s downtown area. Working closely with a number of University and community partners, UVP will produce a series of experimental outdoor video projections throughout the year. The next phase of the project will be to define a number of venues in downtown Syracuse that offer infrastructure that supports projection as an artistic medium (projection surfaces, audience-friendly viewing spaces, safe electrical, etc.). UVP is intended to make Syracuse, NY, a destination for artists working in this medium.

Transforming the Rust Belt Architecture
Julia Czerniak, Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at Syracuse University, has been chosen as an Enitiative eProfessor.

As Director of the UPSTATE: A Center for Design, Research and Real Estate, Professor Czerniak will guide a group of architectural students to the Netherlands to see some of the most progressive models of urban design in the world and meet with the architects, landscape architects, and city officials responsible for realizing them. Upon returning to Syracuse, these students will translate the innovative work they have seen into the context of the post-industrial American city, more specifically the “Rust-belt,” of which Syracuse is a part. These students will be involved in implementing phases of this large-scale project as young architects encouraged to begin their professional careers in Syracuse.

Weaving Design Thinking With Entrepreneurship, the University, and the Community

William Padgett, Associate Professor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, has been awarded an Enitiative grant to create a team-based communications design course that will create and implement innovative commercial, nonprofit and institutional entrepreneurial endeavors that can be introduced to the regional marketplace.

Students will research the regional marketplace, identify consumer needs and patterns of consumer behavior, marketplace deficiencies, and potential business opportunities. They will then formulate business and marketing plans. Design students will be responsible for naming and advertising, as well as conceptual and visual direction. The resulting class projects will create innovative entrepreneurial turn-key ventures that can potentially revitalize the regional marketplace and create a strong bridge connecting the University and the Community.