The Chicago Artists Coalition’s executive director Carolina Jayaram wants artists to get in touch with their entrepreneurial sides, and if her vision for the CAC pans out, it will soon become a national resource for creative professionals of all stripes — not just visual artists but practitioners in the fields of dance, music, theater, literature, publishing and media … even the culinary arts. Jayaram has only been in the job for three years, but in that time she’s re-booted the entire organization, sharpening the CAC’s mission and boosting its profile by launching a slew of new programs, many of them aimed at helping arts professionals become better business people — which in turn, Jayaram says, will help the city of Chicago grow a larger and more sustainable “creative marketplace.”
How will CAC get there? A major piece fell into into place with the CAC’s 2012 acquisition of Chicago Artists Resource, a popular online website containing jobs and events listings and “how I did it”-type profiles of successful arts professionals that had been formerly been run by Barbara Koenen at the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. When priorities at DCASE shifted, the Chicago Artists Coalition took over CAR with plans to expand it with content from cities throughout the country. Right now, the website already garners around 40,000 unique visitors a month.
Jayaram, a petite, energetic brunette who at 39 is the same age as the organization she leads, sees CAR as the hub around which all the CAC’s programs will eventually revolve. CAR will also allow the CAC to reach artists across the nation. For example, Jayaram says some of the seminars and workshops for CAC’s Art.Business.Create (ABC) program can now be streamed on CAR. Artist residencies and exchange programs could possibly have online components too. That way, artists all over the country can benefit from the CAC’s programs, and by adding resources and opportunities in cities like Los Angeles or Boston to the mix of offerings, Chicago’s creative community will reap huge benefits too.
Talk to Jayaram for a bit and you’ll quickly understand that as she sees it, having an entrepreneurial mindset isn’t just about making money — it’s thinking outside the box, being enterprising and creative, and having the resources to put vision into action. Artists, she points out, are already entrepreneurial by nature. Sitting amid the colorful warren of sub-level studio spaces where the CAC’s artist residents work, Jayaram cites the example of her friend Susan Lee-Chun, a Miami visual artist who created a successful business based on a treat she invented called “ChunBuns” — a kind of hybrid of a Twinkie and a Whoopie Pie — all the while continuing to make artwork and exhibit at a top-notch gallery.
“We’re graduating more and more of these incredibly talented young artists from our schools,” Jayaram explains, “yet very few of them are going to end up in the MCA or represented by Kavi Gupta or Rhona Hoffman. So what are the rest of them going to do? I want to give them career choices that are viable and exciting and dynamic so that they can be leaders — so they could create the next Groupon or Vosges chocolate. Chicago’s perfect for that — this is such an entrepreneurial, small-business city.”
Don’t think that just because the CAC wants to help artists hone their business acumen, it’s abandoning all those other things that artists still desperately need, like affordable studio space, better exhibition opportunities, and access to art-world movers and shakers like MCA Chief Curator Michael Darling or art dealer Monique Meloche. Far from it — in the past couple of years Jayaram and her team have amped up the CAC’s existing visual arts programs by creating the BOLT residency and adding a 12-month-long curatorial residency to an existing exhibition program for emerging artists called HATCH. There’s also a new program for collectors, and this year CAC even launched its own mini art fair, Edition Chicago, which was timed to coincide with Expo Chicago.
What’s on deck for 2014? Jayaram is on the hunt for live/work spaces and is “in the very early” stages of developing Folio, which Jayaram says will be “an online tool for the larger community in Chicago to find and hire artists, and where artists can also find and work with each other.” The MacArthur Foundation was excited enough about Folio and CAC’s plans for CAR that it decided to fund the organization for another cycle — a total of $150,000 over the next three years.
Despite all the changes, Jayaram insists the CAC’s core mission remains the same: to help artists have creative careers. “It might be a little bit different than what they had envisioned when they first started at Columbia College or SAIC, but it’s still creative. They’re not going to end up working at a bank and being like, ‘what happened’?”
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