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Baltimore Profile: Scott Burkholder Looks to Connect Art with Entrepreneurship
Posted July 19, 2011
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Scott Burkholder
Scott Burkholder - unabashedly pro-Baltimore, compelled towards social venture capital - is looking to connect art with entrepreneurship.
Burkholder is the executive director of The Baltimore Love Project, whose self-described mission is to connect people and communities across Baltimore City through love themed murals.
Many have seen the murals painted throughout Baltimore - on Broadway East/2313 North Ave., at the Mt. Washington Arboretum/Kelly Ave., Carroll Park/Gwynns Falls Trailhead - and are familiar with the story behind them. Numerous publications have devoted pieces to the murals' talented artist, Michael Owen, including The Baltimore Sun, b!, and Bmoremedia.
Owen and Burkholder devised the plan to execute the same mural image of four silhouetted hands spelling out the word "love" on 20 distinct walls throughout the city, and have taken on the secondary mission of drumming up the capital to finance the work.
Yet one gathers after several conversations with the Kansas native-turned-ardent Baltimorean that Burkholder is aiming, and will likely attain, something broader of scope - and is in fact one of the city's up-and-coming leaders.
Burkholder spoke to citybizlist recently about Baltimore, arts, entrerepeneruship, and his vision for their integration.
As with several other entrepreneurial transplants in the community, Burkholder is a fierce advocate for Baltimore and its startups and entrepreneurs. He is connected with a plethora of business leaders and like-minded, sociallly consicious, ambitious individuals who want to convert Baltimore into more than a simmering startup incubator. A graduate of Johns Hopkins with a degree in Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, he is also a co-organizer of Create Baltimore, a conference for artists, entrepreneurs, and technologists.
Art is a constant theme. He reasons that art could soon be where wine was 30 years ago, pre-Robert Parker. Burkholder said that not so long ago, wine was considered no more than jug alcohol, but with the proper advocacy and teching of Parker (not to mention the movie Sideways), wine-drinking accelerated as enthusiats began relishing the difference between a tannin and terroir, let alone a Grigio and Noir.
Ultimately, Burkholder said that he would like to create a social venture capital fund to finance the business education of artists with the goal of empowering them to make a decent living doing what they love. Speaking generally, he said that artists tend to lack the business acumen necessary to sustain themselves at their craft.
When asked what skills they would require, he said first and foremost was the ability to perform an honest self-assessment and recognize their limits. Using a baseball analogy, Burkholder said some aspirant ballplayers eventually discover that they can't hit a 90-mile an hour fast ball. It's up to them to recognize their limits and find a different vocation. The same holds true of artists.
Burkholder said that an artist's ascension to professional success can be charted in four principal phases:
1. Demonstrating technical mastery to others, as in completing small freelance projects that generally net modest returns.
2. Integrating some level of creativity into more lucrative projects, but still confined to limits of a circumspect project.
3. Having more freedom to create art that has been commissioned by others - but still held accountable to the project's guidelines.
4. Creating art freely, tabula rosa, that he/she wants, that collectors want to buy.
Particularly at stages one or two, Burkholder wants to be able to aid in the business education - i.e., helping them understand a reasonable rate of pay per hour or project - and parcel to that, knowing their talents, experience, ability, and charging power, in knowing whether they can charge $20 an hour or $100 an hour.
Just as there exist any number of business incubators in Baltimore - which provide space and connections, secure funding and investments - Burkholder said that there should be a similar form of incubators for artists in which demand is linked to supplier.
Whether that takes form in a for or not-for-profit entity is up for debate.
More broadly, and a seemingly growing trend among the city's entreprenurial community - is that not only is art social and economic in nature, but financing local arts, just like buying from local businesses, is an endeavor worth more than the price of investment.
If and when Baltimore's art scene intersects more prominetly with entrepreneuship, don't be surprised if is in the middle of the picture.
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