Mark Clague | Kelly Dylla | Nathaniel Zeisler | Chris Genteel
University of Michigan
Arts Enterprise
Posted 5.1.2008
In the fall of 2006 Kelly Dylla (viola, MBA), Chris Genteel (voice, guitar & MBA), Nathaniel Zeisler (bassoon, DMA), and Mark Clague (faculty advisor, bassoon and musicology) founded Arts Enterprise (AE) as a student-driven organization at the University of Michigan to explore common ground among arts and business students. Within just a few months, AE had secured University support and began recruiting members and offering programming. In April 2008, AE received the Ginsberg Center Award for Outstanding Campus Impact and put in place a new executive board, led by co-presidents Brian Hall and Michael Mauskapf.
Arts Enterprise has expanded to other campuses, notably at Bowling Green State University where Nate is now professor of bassoon.
How did the University of Michigan Arts Enterprise student group develop? (response by Nathaniel Zeisler)
Basically we wanted a greater chance to develop our entrepreneurial skills in order to become the most successful artists and business leaders we could be. In a stroke of good fortune, I met two students who not only had great music training but extensive real world experience in music business. Kelly Dylla and Chris Genteel were set to enter the MBA program at the University of Michigan in the fall of 2006, just as I was finishing my DMA. The three of us, along with University of Michigan musicology professor Mark Clague, explored ways to create opportunities for students to collaborate to learn about the principles of entrepreneurship. We founded Arts Enterprise, as a student organization / club rooted in the idea of collaboration from a student’s perspective. Arts Enterprise is designed to foster a diverse community of art and business students who work together and share the common thread of creativity in the workplace through their respective disciplines.
What is the purpose of the group? (response by Kelly Dylla)
The purpose of Arts Enterprise is to provide a forum for students of business and the arts to work together to discover and develop ideas that will enhance not only their careers, but contribute to society by enriching lives in the public and private sectors through cultural engagement, social enterprise, and creative leadership. Arts Enterprise students enhance their education by developing innovative cross campus projects that connect them with the community.
What makes Arts Enterprise different from other arts entrepreneurial endeavors is that our initiative is faculty-supported, but student-led. Students come up with the ideas, find the money to make them happen, and promote these events to other students. We have seen students transformed by these experiences. When they first come to us, they do not believe that they can really do this—that they can really make such a difference. Through the process of creating an event, students become empowered to become leaders and champions of the arts. Today’s young artists will make the performing arts relevant in the 21st century. AE fosters first-hand experiences in the power of art and creates the leadership skills to deliver this impact to the community at large.
What activities has the group sponsored or initiated? (response by Kelly Dylla)
We have a number of core program areas, including Music 101, Speaker Series, Beyond Talent, Enharmonia, and a signature project—AE4NOLA:
Music 101
Music 101 at Ross has partnered with UMS in an effort to help business school students engage in learning and experiencing art. This program offers community engagement / teaching artist training for performers in the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance (UMSoMTD), effectively helping them develop arts-based entrepreneurial skills designed to enhance their field of study. Music 101 at Ross also gives business and music students a deeper level of community engagement through participation.
Speaker Series
The AE Speaker Series involves intimate discussions in various formats with entrepreneurs, practitioners, and leaders working in the arts. The goal of this series is for students to learn about the diverse career paths of the invited arts professionals who will inspire students to create their own arts-related enterprise. Past speakers have included Ken Fischer (President of the University Musical Society in Ann Arbor), Aaron Dworkin (President and founder of the Sphinx Organization) and Toni Blackman (a hip-hop artist and State Department ambassador).
Beyond Talent Workshop (BTW)
The Beyond Talent Workshops provide a way for UM SoMTD students to be proactive in jumpstarting their careers in the arts. BTWs also connect faculty, alumni, and guest speakers with students as they learn basic business and arts entrepreneurial skills. Some of this year’s workshop topics include: “Career Strategies For the 21st-Century Artist” (faculty panel), “Do What You Love and Get Paid For It” (Al Cotrone, business school faculty speaker), “Crafting Your Resume” (Mark Clague, SoMTD faculty speaker), and “Using the Internet To Meet Your Audience” (Derek Bermel, SoMTD alumni speaker).
Enharmonia
Enharmonia is a community engagement project that creates a sense of ownership within large ensembles at the UM SoMTD by establishing communication between performers and audience members. Through community outreach, audience education, and development of arts entrepreneurship, Enharmonia connects participating UM SoMTD ensemble members to their local audience (especially high school musicians) and builds enthusiasm for band and orchestral music.
Community Engagement - Arts Enterprise for New Orleans, Louisiana (AE4NOLA)
AE4NOLA is a two-part cultural immersion project designed to help the arts-related rebuilding efforts in New Orleans. Students will assist a pre-existing and ongoing non-profit, New Orleans Outreach, which partners with public and charter schools in the city. AE members will help develop and document a community engagement program with local teaching artists. A second part of this program will engage students in research to gather knowledge about the educational system and its outcomes and benefits to students. AE students selected for this immersion experience will gain a deeper understanding of New Orleans’s heritage, current climate, education system, and community and in the future be able transfer their learning to similar arts education projects throughout the country.
Is the group open to students from all the Arts disciplines? Have you seen any interest from students outside the Arts? (response by Mark Clague)
Interest in Arts Enterprise comes from across campus and from both undergraduate and graduate students. Until recently, most members were from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and the School of Music, Theatre & Dance, but this seems due more to the circumstance of the group’s creation than any resistance or lack of interest elsewhere. The business/music partnership took off because there was a strong perception of need among music students for business skill development and because in addition to the desire for creative outlets there was an extra-curricular culture at the UMichigan business school that provided fertile ground to get things started.
Building student participation is tricky as there are so many activities on campus that any one event or group has to fight for attention and priority. Most of our initial success in recruiting members grew through peer-to-peer networking, which has an instant credibility that no faculty-led program can match. (In this regard, Facebook provides a useful membership tool.) A year later and with AE having developed a solid reputation and track record, more and more people are willing to give our events a try. Recently, we’ve begun to attract some faculty and even non-university community members to AE events — especially enhanced concert features and discussions of arts advocacy.
How do business students benefit from Arts Enterprise? (response by Nate & Kelly with an assist from Chris Genteel)
If you look at companies that are invested in the knowledge economy like Google or Yahoo!, you will see that these companies value a creative workforce that brings people from many different backgrounds to the table. Arts Enterprise offers business students the opportunity to hone their business skills in this very environment by giving them an avenue to collaborate with students on arts campuses; essentially replicating the workforce they will enter after college. Work within Arts Enterprise represents a value-add for business students as many companies are now looking for employees who can thrive within a diverse group of creative individuals.
Furthermore, we have seen first-hand that the arts-based workshops we provide business-students are a significant contribution to their education and creativity. In ‘The Essential Habits of Business Leaders: Lessons from the Arts’, Eric Booth led a full-house of business students through arts-based activities that highlight the habits and skills that artists use in their most creative and productive moments. Other workshops have paired students with theater faculty to explore expressiveness in communication through acting skills, and with rap artists to explore extemporaneous speaking and creative thinking through freestyle hip hop.
How are students reacting to this effort? (response by Kelly Dylla)
When we started the club, we weren’t sure what kind of response we would get from students. However, we’ve seen students seemingly come out of the woodwork: students who are dancers but now major in Public Policy, MBA students who once played an instrument and now want to continue to make classical music part of their lives, or music students who know that the real world is waiting for them and want to be prepared. AE provides a community for students from all over the university who believe in the power of the arts to help create a better society. It’s a great feeling of accomplishment when we see students, who previously felt isolated, find a home with Arts Enterprise.
What are your immediate and long term challenges? (response by Kelly Dylla))
My long term goal with Arts Enterprise was to make sure when I graduated that there would be strong student leadership in place. Just over the past few weeks we have elected a new board which promises to carry on the energy, enthusiasm, and initiative that is the foundation of AE—this is very exciting.
Our current challenges are how to bring our diverse membership together regularly so that they can build the connections that will truly generate innovation in the arts. It should be a goal for the new board to create more social events for the membership to interact casually, as well as to find a central home for members.
How has administration reacted to this effort? (response by Mark Clague)
I’ve been amazed with how much encouragement university administrators have given to Arts Enterprise. Early on Kelly, Nate, and Chris were able to pinpoint a handful of supportive faculty and staff at both the business and music schools. This brought both moral and practical support to the group on everything from reserving rooms and finding small grants to obtaining administrative and program support. Our University Musical Society (a community-based presenter) has also been extremely helpful. For example, some of our early speakers were university alumni or guest artists who were provided to the group at no cost. With this early seed support, our small group of motivated and energetic founders could move quickly to create events and form a full student organization. Initiative has been rewarded with opportunity. A good example is the School of Music’s Dean—Christopher Kendall—who marshaled the support of the faculty executive committee to offer AE several thousand dollars for its first full-year of operation—funding really equivalent to the discretionary budget of a full department in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance (say Piano or Musicology).
I can’t say that every person at the university has embraced the group with enthusiasm, but I’m aware of no organized opposition. We’ve assumed that some arts faculty may see entrepreneurship training as an unnecessary distraction to time spent in a practice room or studio, but we don’t pressure students to participate. It might be because AE events are extra curricular as well as student organized that there have been no complaints. All along, we’ve been sensitive to not putting entrepreneurship in opposition with other University programs or curricular philosophies. Arts Enterprise is positioned as an extension that complements traditional business or arts training. Developing business skills and creativity does not displace work in the practice room or an accounting course, but rather makes the application of these traditional skills more effective. Great musicians, for example, need great audiences and thus the marketing and public speaking skills developed in AE workshops become useful tools to get those audiences hooked on great music. (The same holds true for great products or services and their consumers.) Basically, we try to make our members more successful in reaching their own goals. Ultimately AE strives to contribute to American culture as a whole by bringing art to audiences in ways that broaden attendance and deepen individual impact. For me as a professor, it’s this potential to transform the work of students and in turn to affect American life more broadly that makes my work in Arts Enterprise so personally rewarding. It’s a big investment of time for all of us, but one that we believe in.
What will be the most difficult obstacle the group will encounter in the near future? (response by Mark Clague)
As faculty advisor my biggest concern is for ongoing student leadership. The entire AE executive board will graduate after this first full-year and I want to make certain that the founders’ fantastic creation continues. How does an initiative become an ongoing program? All of us are working to develop future leadership and forge permanent, strong connections to a variety of university administrative units to assure ongoing support. There are also micro-level issues of simply finding the most effective ways to facilitate communication among AE members and balance central decision making with distributed initiative. I think it’s important that members know not only what is happening, but why a particular event is a priority to attend. Students need to know how something is going to make a positive impact on their work, in order to make the time to participate.
Kelly's enthusiasm about Social Entrepreneurship reflects a growing Fine Arts interest in the topic. How does the group integrate different student interests? (response by Kelly Dylla)
All Arts Enterprise events are created by students. At first, we wanted to hear all ideas from all participants in AE. While we still believe all ideas are important and should be given a voice, it is really the board leadership that makes events happen. Therefore, it is mostly the students who are on the board that listen to what other students think is important, and create events that are resonant with the needs of students. In addition, I think we’ve created a strong foundation of program areas that provide a framework most of the programming ideas that students will come with. The amazing thing about having these opportunities for students to create events and play with ideas is that this is the perfect environment to take a risk, and to learn from mistakes. How many artists have tried to promote a concert or gallery opening, and realized that they have never done this before, and don’t know even the most common pitfalls of entrepreneurship? I think the most important teaching AE has to offer is how much time and organization it takes to create a public event. However, when the events do go well, and most of them do, students have an intense feeling of accomplishment and empowerment that they can make a difference in how our society perceives the performing arts.
What advice could you offer to those contemplating similar efforts? (response by Nate Zeisler)
There are three bits of advice to consider as you embark upon an endeavor such as Arts Enterprise:
1. A strong, student-run, cross-campus leadership team drives Arts Enterprise: The Arts Enterprise movement at the University of Michigan was, and continues to be, successful due to highly motivated, highly engaged students driven to enhance their educational experience. When starting an Arts Enterprise campus movement, focus your efforts on gathering a small team of energized students who will develop a mission, formalize programmatic activity and, most importantly, grow the student membership.
2. Funding is not the issue: By harnessing resources on both the arts and business campuses, Arts Enterprise is able to generate revenue streams from multiple sources in order to drive programmatic offerings. The AE model we have developed aims to provide a wide variety of activities for a comparatively small amount of money. Take advantage of local talent (faculty, other students, and community members) and your alumni!
3. We can help: As founding members of Arts Enterprise, we would love to see this take off on other campuses around the country and thus to create a national network for students to help each other learn about entrepreneurship. We would certainly be open to hearing your ideas and sharing our experiences to help jumpstart other campus initiatives.
You can email Kelly, Nate or Mark here.
AE's 2007-08 Executive Board including AE founders from right back row (Mark Clague, Chris Genteel, Nathaniel Zeisler, and Kelly Dylla). Front row from right includes Lisa Hiatt, Emily Weingarten, Tiffany Lin, and Dana Linnane.