University of Wisconsin Arts Enterprise will host the first ever Arts Enterprise Symposium at the Pyle Center this weekend to help growing artists devise strategies to market their unique skills through personal mentoring by arts professionals.
Samantha Crownover and Stephanie Jutt, co-founders of the Arts Enterprise Initiative, said they saw a need to guide artists who may lack the necessary entrepreneurial skills to succeed in a competitive economy.
“This symposium is for any art student or local artist who is looking for support, skills or ideas in order for them to start up or continue a career in the arts,” Crownover said.
Crownover added the symposium fills an essential void for UW art students.
“Currently, there is no career services program for UW art students which means that art students here lack the valuable information to be successful in the real world,” she said.
The three-day symposium will begin on Friday night with a tour of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art led by a museum curator.
Keynote speakers headline Saturday and Sunday’s events. Toni Sikes, a local art legend who founded The Guild Inc., and Angela Beeching, director of the New England Conservatory’s career services center.
Throughout the weekend, a series of interactive workshops will be held to give the attendees hands-on tools and experience to promote their careers.
UW senior Emily Albun, an art education major, sees real value in the symposium’s mission.
“I feel like the general sentiment among UW art students is that art is something they love but a career in art does not have a concrete path like an engineering major,” Albun said.
On Sunday, a panel of judges will select the winner of the UW New Arts Venture Challenge, which carries a prize of $2,000 and personal mentoring from an art professional tailored to the winner’s artistic specialty.
The four finalists for the prize have already been whittled down from a field of 24 student proposals. Submissions were judged on creativity and contribution to the public domain and ranged from creating a mobile art gallery with movable walls to engineering a light display on campus.
Crownover hopes this first symposium will be a model for an annual event that educates future generations to come on the entrepreneurial side of being an artist.
Tickets for the entire weekend’s events are $10 for students, $30 for staff and $50 for the public.
