Write, write, write…
You may be wondering, how can I learn more about Carl, about his work and how he thinks? Here’s a collection of articles and essays written over the years, with new updates to share how I approach strategy, creativity, business and more. Happy reading, and if you want to know more, be in touch!→
It has been a dire and dispiriting week, month, and year for Twin Cities arts organizations. From theater to dance to music to visual arts, 2024 has been cruel. Here, as best as I've tracked it, is a rundown of the blows and blow-ups that have come thus far.
Earlier this month I was looking for something to give to myself, something to help wrap up this year. I found a print by artist and art director Mónica Nadal that seemed right for this time when so many of our competing and complementary interests have come to the front at once, when urgency has been a defining characteristic. A simple, elegant print reading, “Tu lucha es mi lucha.” Your fight is my fight.
This isn’t necessarily writing, but I was delighted to be on the ImagineMKE podcast in December 2020, getting to chat about being a third culture kid, the process of creative exploration and discovery, building coalitions for change, and all kinds of other topics. Give it a listen to learn more about me!
I was lucky enough to spend about an hour in an Instagram Live conversation with my friend Maria Galea on Monday. Maria and I met last fall in Salzburg, Austria, as members of the Salzburg Global Seminar Young Cultural Innovators Forum. Maria has been working on launching a new network for visual artists in Malta called Artz ID, a platform for connection and resource-sharing, which is near and dear to my own work and interests. I was supposed to head over to Malta this fall to lead some workshops on strategy and development, but we all know how that story is playing out.
“How do I know my value?”
That was a question posed by an artist in a recent workshop around Artists Statements, and if you stop for a moment, the question is profound. On one hand, there is a practical answer, one that we at Springboard for the Arts have been seeking to help artists answer for years. In our Work of Art: Business Skills for Artists curriculum, there is a whole section on pricing your work. You, as the artist, have to know what your target income is from your creative work, what the costs of your materials and labor are, what your overhead costs are. It takes research, and yes, you’ll have to do some math.
I brought two books with me to read on the plane to Austria to participate in the Salzburg Global Seminar’s Young Cultural Innovators Forum, and they couldn’t have seemed more different. One was Damn Good Advice (for people with talent), the collected wisdom of maverick ad man George Lois. Even the title tells you what you need to know about Lois – brash confidence, a sense of some disdain for mere mortals, and a laser focus on talent and creativity. This is, after all, the man who created iconic covers for Esquire magazine in the 60s, drowning Andy Warhol in a can of tomato soup, and setting up Muhammad Ali as the martyred St. Sebastian.
I started writing this on Sunday night, in a blur of fading adrenaline and bodily exhaustion, thinking with gratitude over the events that had just take place over the past week. Over the weekend, the Twin Cities had hosted the Americans for the Arts Convention (AFTACON), bringing 1,000 arts and culture leaders from around the country and Canada to the Twin Cities. I was honored to organize the local host committee along with the City of Minneapolis Office of Arts, Culture & the Creative Economy, working with artists, arts leaders, government officials, and marketing folks from the Twin Cities.
“Through purpose, you discover joy."
Those were the words of Laysha Ward, executive vice president of Target, who was receiving an honorary doctorate at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs graduation ceremony. I was there to watch my little sister receive her Master of Public Policy on Saturday, the endcap of a whirlwind trip that started on Tuesday night. It began with a late flight to Denver, then a drive over the mountains to Salida, a beautiful town nestled in the Rockies, to first participate in the Colorado Creative Districts Convening to talk about Springboard for the Arts’ healthcare programs and toolkits, and then to deliver the welcome keynote for the Colorado Creative Industries Summit and share Springboard’s Creative People Power framework. The trip continued with 16 hours in Los Angeles, enough time to stop at Venice Beach, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, and finally, to watch a dear friend get married. Then a red eye back to Minneapolis for the graduation. Whirlwind. Manic. And all joyful.
“Thank you. Thank you for being an artist. Thank you for making your work. Thank you for choosing this life which can be hard. And hard to explain.”
Those are the first words of Andrew Simonet’s lovely, practical meditation Making Your Life as an Artist, and it seemed an appropriate place to start this train of thought. In this seemingly fragile moment with so many of our arts organizations it also feels important to point out that being an artist is something carries on as organizations come and go. As Simonet shares from his own life, it is not easy, and takes time, luck and non-arts jobs. Despite advantages of state and philanthropic funding in Minnesota, being an artist as a career is difficult, so thank you.
"Do you know what the secret of life is? It's people who change people."
I’ll tell you the truth, my favorite days are the ones where your internal body temperature and the air temperature are almost the same, a hundred degrees, a breeze, sweat blowing off you. They are the days when the barrier between you and the everything almost disappears, a feeling of having given over all of you to the air, and in that heat, anything can happen. This feeling will come back later.
"Politics is not just about power and money games, politics can be about the improvement of people's lives, about lessening human suffering in our world and bringing about more peace and more justice." – Senator Paul Wellstone
On October 26, 2002, I was standing in line at the credit union on USC’s campus. I was a sophomore in college, getting ready to pull money out for a road trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco to take part in an anti-war protest. The cataclysm of 9/11 was a year past, we had started a war in Afghanistan with no clear objective, the rumbling was serious about invading Iraq, and all this was happening in the context of mid-term elections.
“This might not strike you as an intellectual bombshell, but people like to sit where there are places for them to sit.”
I think about that quote from William H. Whyte a lot, ever since I encountered it, handily enough, in the Project for Public Spaces' A Primer on Seating. I think about it as I travel, as I wander through new cities and old, as I look at my own neighborhoods and regular haunts. Where are people sitting – if there are people around to sit? Where are people invited or disinvited to sit? Where can people be?
Up until a contract is signed, nothing is set in stone - which means you can and should push back against anything you don't think is right. This can especially be the case with zombie clauses - mindless rights grabs of the content you create that let the organization you're contracting with (and anyone who they choose to share it with) use it however they want, in whatever way they want.
Several years ago, as part of the Artists In Storefronts project in Whittier, artists Sheila Regan and Anton Pearson created a striking image on the side of Rainbow Chinese Restaurant on Nicollet Avenue. Emblazoned across the side of the building, in moss-growing gel, were the words "EVERYONE TOGETHER DIFFERENT". The collaborative process of creating the piece, the ephemeral and delicate nature of its materials, the work to maintain it, and the power of the phrase have stuck with me as fundamental characteristics of a civil society. It is inclusive (EVERYONE); equitable (TOGETHER); and diverse (DIFFERENT).
Over the weekend, 89.3 The Current and the Walker Art Center hosted Rock the Garden, one of the highlights of the Twin Cities summer concert calendar, which we cling to so tightly to make the most of our precious warm months. And, as it has for the past few years, it rained over the weekend. Now the festival itself is “rain or shine,” and the rain had started to sheet in just as the first act of the day, Baltimore-based electro-dance act Dan Deacon was about to take the stage. Sticking to the rules of “rain or shine,” Deacon would have worked onstage, and a few sodden fans would have braved the rain to thrash about in the mud.
