Sowelu Theater
Portland, OR
503.730.9066

Creative Enterprise

Helping to solve sustainability problems for small groups

Keith Goodman

Creative Enterprise is a community project bringing together artists and craftsmen who practice activities that accentuate the culture in which we live. We are a rotating collective of individual artists, craftsmen and arts and education groups who come together to share creative expression, acknowledge the importance of diverse aesthetics in our culture and the value of each community members creative outlook.

Participants in Creative Enterprise have taken our conversations into the community and influenced changes in many settings. Without proselytizing around the institution of Creative Enterprise, we have encouraged new partnerships and shared resources among groups not directly active in Creative Enterprise in order to better achieve missions and serve the community.

The goals of Creative Enterprise

Creative Enterprise strives to:

Promote trade of services and assets between groups to assist in achieving our missions in a deeper way with less effort and capital investment;
Provide adequate space for presentation by partnering with community organizations that have space not yet utilized by arts professionals;
Increase audiences for the arts through cross-pollination and intersection of groups;
Recognize that adult members of the community need a creative outlet, providing a summer program of workshop classes for community participation and education in order to create respect for culture outside solely academic or professional settings. Making healthy room for all levels of art making;
Create respect for the making of art by mature artists and not relegate them to teacher status in their mid-career while no longer supporting their work;
Create statistics that educate the community around sub-standard artists earnings, dispelling the notion that organizations support artists and develop the understanding that organizations support organizations;
Promote the idea that funding artists directly will provide presenters with projects, fill our spaces and have art for the audience. Artists make work in spite of starving, not because they are starving;
Address losses in K-12 arts programs by partnering with schools for trade of space for workshops and other assets.

Recent participants

Individuals and organizations who have recently participated in Creative Enterprise include:

Keith Goodman and DanceGatherer
JakersProductions
Jinetes
Sowelu
Pacific Crest Community School
Amy Gray
Bill Washburn
Penny Kavan
Andrea Schwartz-Feit