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VOL. 9, NO. 1 
SPRING 2020 

 

Editors’ Introduction 

Paul Bonin-Rodriguez 
University of Texas at Austin 

Neville Vakharia 
Drexel University 

Welcome to a two-part special of Artivate. This issue reflects a doubling of both thematic scope 
and editorial team. We welcome two guest editors to this issue, Susan Badger Booth and Mark 
Clague. Susan is professor of arts management at Eastern Michigan University, and Mark is 
associate professor of musicology and arts entrepreneurship and leadership at the School of 
Music, Theatre, and Dance at the University of Michigan. Both Susan and Mark bring a breadth 
and depth of specialized knowledge of the city of Detroit and the role that arts entrepreneurs 
are playing in its revitalization.  

Special Issue: Detroit 
Susan and Mark’s introduction, entitled “Detroit’s Perpetual Renaissance: Timeless Visions and 
Daily Blindness in the Detroit Arts Scene” tells a compelling story of Detroit’s multiple renais-
sance efforts from the 1950’s to the city’s 2013 bankruptcy to the current artist-driven, entre-
preneurial efforts that are addressing the city’s pressing social issues. Two additional articles 
focused on Detroit provide unique insights into the role of arts entrepreneurship and its place 
within venerable cultural institutions and in understanding the city’s musical history. A book 
review of Julie Pincus and Nichole Christian’s Canvas Detroit delivers additional context on 
Detroit’s artists and artist collectives. 



ARTIVATE 1.1 

2 

Spring  
The second half our issue takes a more global approach, with articles focused on arts entrepre-
neurship research in Ghana, Canada, and the United States.  

While this issue of Artivate was in development, our world changed as COVID-19 began 
taking its deadly toll. We could not avoid addressing the impact of the pandemic on artists and 
the arts sector as we went to press. In our special editorial “Arts Entrepreneurship Internation-
ally and in the Age of COVID-19”, we sought to collect voices of thought leaders in our field, 
asking for their reflections on what the future and role of arts entrepreneurship could be in a 
postpandemic world. Their insights and optimism provide useful context for us all. Times of 
disruption, such as we are experiencing, are also times of innovation. Now more than ever, art-
ists and arts organizations must continue to be the entrepreneurial thinkers and doers who will 
help us emerge from this pandemic as a more thoughtful, creative, and innovative society. 

The articles featured our spring 2020 issue represent exciting work for the field. “The Stu-
dent Entrepreneurial Journey,” Keren Naa Abeka Arthur and Albert Kwame Arthur’s study of 
visual arts students in Ghana, offers insight into the influence entrepreneurship can play in ed-
ucational experiences and outcomes. Their call for “policy makers in academia, industry and 
government” to work to integrate entrepreneurship into secondary and higher education 
comes at a moment when academic arts programs are facing unprecedented challenges.  

“Crowdfunding Canadian Theatre: An Exploratory Analysis of Kickstarter Data with US 
Comparison,” by Mohammad Keyhani, Safaneh Mohaghegh Neyshabouri, and Abbas Hosseini 
Amereii, contributes to a growing body of literature of crowdfunding as an entrepreneurial 
technology. This early study offers a descriptive analysis of the uses and limits of the platform 
for financing theatre companies in Canada. Comparing those findings against a US experience, 
the authors find that the distinctions to be largely of scale.  

In what may yet prove one of the most important questions for our field post–COVID-19, 
B. Kathleen Gallagher begins “The Roots of Great Innovation: State-level Entrepreneurial Cli-
mate and the Sustainability of Nonprofit Arts and Culture Organizations” by posing the ques-
tion, “Do entrepreneurship levels affect the population dynamics of arts and culture nonprof-
its?” Drawing from over two decades of data, Gallagher’s findings point to the relationship 
between local nonprofits and a city’s “entrepreneurial climate” and address the policy implica-
tions of her work.  

 
Issue cover image: Photo by Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 2.0, 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/kenlund/21756434151. 


