Creative People Power: Living & a Life
TruArtSpeaks the power of poetry for youth empowerment
Tish Jones has been a poet for as long as she can remember. The performer, organizer, and educator from St. Paul is also the founder and executive director of TruArtSpeaks, an organization that uses…
Creating space for Somali artists to thrive
As hundreds of thousands of refugees fled Somalia over the last 30 years, Minnesota, and the Twin Cities in particular, was quickly established as a welcoming place with ample work opportunities for…
The Life of an ARTrepreneur
Some people know Felicia Perry from her time as a dancer with Ananya Dance Theatre. Others know her as an economic activist who served on the inaugural executive committee and board of the…
These New Orleanians use poems and portraits to create deeper connections in their community
Jose Cotto and Christian Davenport come from very different backgrounds, and both have very different practices: Cotto is an architect, educator, and photographer raised in Worcester, Massachusetts,…
Find Creative People Power on Creative Exchange
"I honestly feel so inspired by the work that these artists have created that represents a life, challenges the status quo, or brings in communities. I feel so incredibly lucky to have the…
Baltimore gallerist and fashion historian Joy Davis on Black spaces and Black stories
Joy Davis attributes her love of "old stuff" to her father, who worked as an antique buyer in the Baltimore area when she was growing up. "Through him I learned the value of material culture, but at…
Reflections on Springboard's intensive trainings
For over a decade, Springboard for the Arts has been offering business skills workshops to artists to help them build a living and a life. Since 2017, we have offered an annual series of intensive…
Diverse Voices Create the Community
Artists are everywhere, on every block and in every community. Finding the opportunities for artists to share their creativity and networks can strengthen community bonds, build relationships, and…
Holly Doll is creating a Native-based art economy in rural North Dakota
This article is part of a series highlighting artists and leaders featured at the Rural Arts and Culture Summit, a biennial, practitioner-driven gathering hosted by Springboard for the Arts that…
Delina White designs apparel and produces fashion shows celebrating and perpetuating Native cultural heritage
This article is part of a series highlighting artists and leaders featured at the Rural Arts and Culture Summit, a biennial, practitioner-driven gathering hosted by Springboard for the Arts that…
The Blue Sky Center is building a creative economy in rural California
The New Cuyama townsite in California's Santa Barbara County is relatively young. Built in the early 1950s by the Richfield Oil Company, it was a company-driven town where the company came in, built…
Realize Bradenton realizes it takes a village to raise a city
The City of Bradenton is a riverfront community of 53,000 people in the urban core of Manatee County, Florida. In 2007, Bradenton created a citizen-driven visioning plan called “Downtown by Design,”…
Rachel Breen sews in support of garment industry workers
Minneapolis-based artist Rachel Breen is probably best known for her work with textiles, which she finds funny, since her connection to her sewing machine was purely accidental. "Three days before…
Indie Grits Labs is nurturing a filmmaking community in Columbia, South Carolina
Seth Gadsden went to grad school to study painting and left a filmmaker. At that time, the South Carolina native and another art school friend of his decided “this whole grad school painting thing at…
Maamoul Press prints comics by Middle Eastern women, for Middle Eastern women (and everyone else, too)
Leila Abdelrazaq is a Palestinian author and illustrator living in Detroit. As an author and artist, she has tabled at zine and comics shows, but felt that there was room at her table—both literally…
Dana Sikkila takes Project Bike all over the state of Minnesota
Visual artist Dana Sikkila grew up in Litchfield, a farm town in West Central Minnesota with a population of a little over 6,000 people. She describes her family and the area she grew up as being…
Leila Awadallah dances stories of Palestine
Leila Awadallah, a 2018-2019 Springboard for the Arts 20/20 Artist Fellow, moved to Minneapolis from Sioux Falls, South Dakota to study dance before she had a sense of the kind of artist she is. “I…
Creative People Power
Springboard for the Arts and Helicon Collaborative are excited to launch Creative People Power, a new report and framework for combining creativity-centered and people-centered development to build…
Jose Alvillar is preserving ancient dance traditions in paint
Jose Alvillar is a Minneapolis-based dancer and painter, but rarely have those two parts of his life his met. Now, as a 2018-2019 Springboard for the Arts 20/20 Fellow, he plans to make those…
ComiqueCon celebrates women in comics
The #MeToo movement may have become a cultural phenomenon in 2017, but the seeds of it were already very much planted prior to the election of Donald Trump. And just as Trump's election brought…
YES! Magazine is new media for a new economy
The work of Springboard for the Arts is rooted in arts-based economic and community development. We believe artists are critical assets in that work, and support them by offering a variety of…
Of art and baseball: Rachel Wacker brings art to the community by working with some unlikely partners
Rachel Wacker hasn't had what might be called a "traditional" experience working in the art world. Based in Saint Paul's Lowertown neighborhood, Wacker has eschewed more "traditional" arts…
Saying “Yes” to 4th Street
In a downtown core experiencing change, the 4th Street Market District partnership leads creative experiments & looks to the future It was a summer Sunday afternoon in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and…
Caroline Woolard defines what it means to be a solidarity economy artist
The work of Springboard for the Arts is rooted in arts-based economic and community development. We believe artists are critical assets in that work, and support them by offering a variety of…
Mary Welcome welcomes new neighbors all around the country
Mary Welcome, née Mary Rothlisberger, is a citizen artist based in Palouse, Washington, a tiny rural town with a population of 998. While Welcome's numerous and diverse artistic involvements take her…
It's not enough to just Get Artists Paid; it's time to stage an Art.Exit
The work of Springboard for the Arts is rooted in arts-based economic and community development. We believe artists are critical assets in that work, and support them by offering a variety of…
How Sacramento's Sol Collective built a sustainable arts activism organization
The work of Springboard for the Arts is rooted in arts-based economic and community development. We believe artists are critical assets in that work, and support them by offering a variety of…
Art on the Block and NOIS envision economic power for the people in Southwest Detroit
Amelia Duran was born into a family with a strong heritage of activism in Southwest Detroit, a predominantly Latin American neighborhood. Her mother’s family has roots in the area that date back to…
5 Questions with Creative Exchange: What we have learned from our artists
Since August 2016, Creative Exchange has been asking each of our Artists With Impact a series of five questions, which appear at the end of every profile. We did this to create a thread of continuity…
Tana Hargest's wide-ranging work addresses issues of surveillance, policing, and public policy
As a long-time arts organization leader and cultural producer based in the Twin Cities, Tana Hargest says now that she is "mid-career" she has made a shift to focus on three different, yet…