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VOL. 10, NO. 1 
SPRING 2021 

 

Refining Understandings of Entrepreneurial Artists 
Valuing the Creative Incorporation of Business and Entrepreneurship 
into Artistic Practice 

Megan Robinson 
Vanderbilt University 

Jennifer Novak-Leonard 
University of Illinois at 
Urbana-Champaign 

ABSTRACT: There is a disconnect between artists’ applications of entrepreneurial 
behavior in their practice and evaluations of artists as productive members of com-
munity. Informed by interviews with Nashville-based artists, this study investigates 
how artists understand their creativity, artistic practice, and approaches to entrepre-
neurship in the context of an artistically oriented community. The results demonstrate 
that artists engage in entrepreneurial behavior by deploying creativity in multiple 
domains, including art, business, and the social, with their skills in each being im-
portant in preserving the motives of their artistic practice. The findings highlight art-
ists as multifaceted creatives capable of transforming their practices through entre-
preneurial pursuits. KEYWORDS: entrepreneurial artists, arts entrepreneurship, 
domains of creativity, the business of art, artists in community.  
DOI: 10.34053/artivate.10.1.135 

Introduction 
Creativity and innovation are valuable assets for the development of communities, cities, and 
economies (Borén & Young, ; Florida, ; Jackson, ). Though the concept of the city 
as a creative hub is not new to this decade, the full extent of the role of creativity in development 
processes is still being explored (Krätke, ). Psychological research has determined that cre-
ativity is not limited to the arts and is instead multifaceted (James & Asmus, ). While crea-
tivity is no longer predicated on the idea of the “creative genius” or thought to be limited only 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

2 

to arts and culture, discourse around the most likely candidates to inject creativity into commu-
nity development remains centered around artists. 

Contemporary community-development practices often fix the role of placemaker on local 
artists, with guidelines for best practices in creative placemaking—the process of developing 
communities around arts and cultural activities—highlighting the importance of artist-led pro-
jects (Markusen & Gadwa, ; Nicodemus, ). However, there is limited knowledge about 
how artists—especially artists engaged in arts entrepreneurship—understand their role, influ-
ence, and potential to expand their practices in their communities. Placemaking, like creative 
city development, is a collaborative process predicated on hierarchical distributions of power, 
where the perceptions and interests of the institutional regime and other elites ultimately dictate 
the direction development projects will take (Carr, ). While artists may be recruited or in-
vited to lead community development initiatives, they are often only one actor working in col-
laboration with several other partners, including the community, local government, and various 
funding-support organizations. These arrangements may compromise the environmental stim-
ulants, including agentic freedom, cooperation, and recognition, that factor into the ability of 
artists to exercise both their creativity and their entrepreneurship (Amabile, ). 

The present study is an inquiry into artists’ applications of entrepreneurship within the 
contexts of independent, professional art practice, in order to better understand how business-
minded artists or artists who have perceived a need for business skills deploy entrepreneurial 
behavior to impact their creative output. Using community as a lens, we investigate the role of 
environmental and structural constraints in influencing the entrepreneurial decision-making of 
artists, where artists are defined as those working primarily in self-employed, small-business, or 
nonprofit capacities. Where extant literature has focused on the self-actualization of communi-
ties through art (Vazquez, ), this study examines how artists self-actualize their place in 
community through the vehicle of entrepreneurial training and arts entrepreneurship. We ar-
gue that there is a disconnect between artists’ applications of entrepreneurial behavior in their 
practice and evaluations of artists as productive members of their communities. In refining the 
definition of the entrepreneurial artist, we seek to reframe considerations of how artists, as mul-
tifaceted creatives, use entrepreneurialism to advance their practices and career trajectories. In 
doing so, our work seeks to interpret the decision-making logics of entrepreneurial pursuits that 
fall within two intersections noted in the taxonomy of arts entrepreneurship introduced by 
Beckman and Essig (): habits of mind and practice, and venture creation and practice. 

Perspectives of Entrepreneurship in and around Artists 

Arts Entrepreneurship 

Contemporary understandings of artistic process—specifically, how artists incorporate or per-
form entrepreneurship in their professional practice—have shifted to reflect new parameters of 
workforce participation and success in a cultural industry characterized by a nontraditional 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

3 

work structure. Where entrepreneurialism was once defined as the undertaking of business ac-
tivity in the face of uncertainty, contemporary definitions have expanded to include character-
istics such as the ability to recombine disparate skills to navigate change and challenges (Chang 
& Wyszomirski, ; Scherdin & Zander, ; White, ). 

Entrepreneurial behavior is an expectation for freelance workers and other individuals em-
bedded in cultural industry (Lingo & Tepper, ; Win, ). Expectations of an artist’s abil-
ity to perform entrepreneurship necessitates new ventures into entrepreneurial training or skill 
development. Arts entrepreneurship, specifically, has been defined as a process through which 
artists convert various means, such as resources and skills, to desirable ends (Chang & Wyszo-
mirski, ; Essig, ). A key differential of arts entrepreneurship from entrepreneurship in 
other sectors is the diversity of reasons that motivate its pursuit. Motivations behind arts entre-
preneurship may include the desire to profit off of talent or skill, to maintain creative control 
over the artistic process, to address perceived deficits in the cultural fabric of a community, or 
to involve community members in the creative process (Essig, ; Phillips, ). Arts entre-
preneurship may also be motivated by occupational or social precarity, causing artists to criti-
cally evaluate their location, their peers, and their own actions as resources towards stability and 
success (Cornfield, ). 

Training an Entrepreneurial Artist 

The practice of art is frequently associated with and characterized by precarity; a structurally 
determined condition that encourages the implementation of entrepreneurship as a means of 
helping artists navigate challenges associated with the business of artmaking for professional-
personal or community-based practice. Programs designed to train artists in the business of art 
and arts entrepreneurship strive to enable artists to self-intervene in “overcoming common 
challenges and historical barriers to the production, distribution, exhibition and preservation 
of art” (White, ). Unlike training in non-arts entrepreneurship, which seeks to help partic-
ipants transform business ideas into actionable ventures, arts entrepreneurship is pedagogically 
framed as a means of generating or supporting projects that sustain an artist’s practice and cre-
ativity. Pedagogy on training artists to exercise their entrepreneurial capacity commonly ac-
commodates what arts professionals consider to be the primary driver of arts entrepreneurship: 
the artist’s innate ability and willingness to engage with creative thinking and practices (Pollard 
& Wilson, ). 

Entrepreneurial training programs developed for artists outside of the school context em-
phasize the importance of developing traditional business skills such as business planning, cre-
ating a marketing strategy, financial management, network building, and legal competency. Ex-
amples of such programs include the Arts & Business Council of Greater Nashville’s program 
Periscope: Artist Entrepreneur Training, The Artist Entrepreneur LAB designed by Catherine 
Orer, the Artist as an Entrepreneur Institute by ArtServe, and the Center for Cultural Innova-
tion’s series The Business of Art: Entrepreneurial Training for Artists. Training in arts entre-
preneurship has been framed by several of these programs, including Periscope, the LAB, and 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

4 

the Artist as an Entrepreneur Institute, as a fundamental piece of an artist’s considerable skillset, 
joining with artistic skill and creativity to transform practices, shift mindsets, and help artists 
make a living with their art. Training programs and traditional classroom experiences in arts 
entrepreneurship emphasize an “arts entrepreneurial mindset” that is strongly aligned with el-
ements of traditional business acumen: the ability to collaborate, possession of highly developed 
communication skills, and the ability to think strategically and analytically about one’s own cre-
ativity and creative products (Pollard & Wilson, , p. ). 

Conceptualizing Practices of Arts Entrepreneurship 

While the volume of literature on entrepreneurial training and skill provision for artists has 
been expanding, less is known about the ways in which artists actively perform and engage with 
entrepreneurship in their professional practices, or how artists creatively adopt or adapt entre-
preneurial behavior to suit motivations unique to their personal careers. Research into the trans-
lation of entrepreneurial mindsets into appropriate applications of hard and soft skills in the 
context of a professional arts practice aligns with the argument that “all members of an artworld 
utilize entrepreneurial thinking to guide diverse forms of entrepreneurial actions (or behavior)” 
(White, , p. ). 

Artists have been framed as “bohemian entrepreneurs,” a conceptualization of artists that 
emphasizes individual performance, devotion to work, and freedom of production within the 
“entrepreneurial practice of risk taking, allocation of individual creative resources and self-mar-
keting” (Eikhof & Haunschild, , p. ). As bohemian entrepreneurs, artists use their cre-
ativity to help them preserve the pursuit of art for art’s sake, without being made to feel as 
though they have mined their creativity in the interest of satisfying markets or clientele (Eikhof 
& Haunschild, ). The concept and practice of bohemian entrepreneurship neatly encapsu-
lates three of the four primary motivations for engaging with arts entrepreneurship identified 
by Toscher, Dahle, and Steinert (). These three motivations—to give, give something to 
society; to make, make a product independent of its reward; and to live, to provide one’s self 
with a good life—bring the character and practice of bohemian entrepreneurship into alignment 
with the description of professional artists presented by Vazquez (, p. ): 

They demand the same things as all other businesses—ready access to consumers, suppliers and 
resources; a healthy, affordable climate for developing their goods and services; and connections 
to a supportive community of peers, other businesspeople and leaders. 

Regardless of motivation, artists require tools and support, just like any other business ventur-
ers. 

Still, the effectuating entrepreneur adopts a more intrinsic approach by using their skills to 
self-initiate entrepreneurial activity. Where a traditional business may initiate with a process of 
tool-seeking, an effectuative entrepreneur in the arts may first engage in the identification and 
pursuit of opportunity, encouraged by their ability to create opportunity in the seeming absence 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

5 

of it (Sarasvathy, ). In contrast to Vazquez’s () conceptualization of professional art-
ists, which celebrates the artist’s role in the business of art by recognizing that artist demands 
align with the conditional requirements of any business venture, effectuating approaches to arts 
entrepreneurship account for the artist’s above average creativity across multiple domains, in-
cluding the arts, business and entrepreneurial pursuits, and civic and community engagement. 

The study and identification of arts entrepreneurship as an element of artistic practice par-
tially depends on recognition of the ways in which individual artists engage in processes of self-
management and self-actualization while producing art (Beckman & Essig, ). As entrepre-
neurs, professional artists must reconcile their entrepreneurial identity with their artistic one by 
accepting that their creativity and skill in the production of art is intimately tied to feelings of 
satisfaction or fulfillment as an artist, as well as to professional and financial success (Bass, Mi-
losevic, & Eesley, ). The concept of the “artist-producer . . . an individual who makes her 
work and cultivates the conditions to bring her work to anticipated markets” (Bonin-Rodriguez, 
, p. ), synthesizes components of bohemian and effectuating entrepreneurship. It encap-
sulates a freedom of production in the organizational sense by asserting that artists have the 
capacity to outsource jobs as needed through their identity as producer hyphenates. At the same 
time, it recognizes that artists are often required to create their own opportunities. 

The possibilities of arts entrepreneurship, when executed within the specific context of a 
community or local practice, are amplified by the same decision-making process that charac-
terizes effectuative entrepreneurship. While many artists have proven themselves capable of 
adopting new forms of practice to suit institutionalized requirements, a different approach, one 
informed by artists’ perceptions of available means and circumstances, the possibilities or con-
straints associated with a project’s execution, and risk calculation, opens up new possibilities for 
entrepreneurial skill recognition and development (Sarasvathy, ). As such, we seek to refine 
past definitions of the artist-entrepreneur—“individuals that achieve artistic and financial suc-
cess by creating their own business of selling their artwork” (Bass et al., , p. )—by arguing 
that entrepreneurship is a creative domain that enhances an artist’s creative identity and activi-
ties once unlocked. We assert that being an entrepreneurial artist is less an exercise in identity 
management, and more a practice of amplifying secondary skillsets with the goal of preserving 
intrinsic motivations important to the spirit of the artist’s practice. 

Applying Arts Entrepreneurship to Community Contexts 

Arts entrepreneurship is motivated by a wide range of goals and environmental or organiza-
tional conditions (Sarasvathy, ; Toscher et al., ). However, the breadth of reasons art-
ists have for engaging in entrepreneurial behavior, and how those reasons may or may not align 
with public conceptualizations about art production or occupations in the arts, contributes to 
public misconceptions about the motivations of artists and arts entrepreneurship in the context 
of community. A recent study of public perceptions of artists in communities found that over 
 percent of adults in the United States who reported having interacted with artists within their 
local communities saw artists as bringing attention to community concerns or causes, with 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

6 

roughly  percent describing artists as both finding new ways to solve problems and represent-
ing or serving as a spokesperson for the people, respectively (Novak-Leonard & Skaggs, , 
p. ). These findings suggest that community members value artists for the same reasons that 
artists are considered irreplaceable partners in targeted community development initiatives. 
Even so, when asked to provide a primary description of the artists they interacted with, the 
most common response given by survey respondents was that artists seek to earn money—a 
response that diminishes the contributions of artists to community by discounting the financial 
costs associated with the production of their work and value of their skillsets and labor (Novak-
Leonard & Skaggs, ). 

The normalization of artists as “social entrepreneurs” who “revitalize cities not only 
through their bottom line but also through their social role” (Stern & Seifert, , p. ) is a 
potentially harmful reduction of the complex, entrepreneurial decision making that occurs 
when artists who are invested in community by virtue of being members of it integrate elements 
of community into their practice, whether to use their art as a tool for community development, 
or to use the community as a tool to amplify their art. The philosophy of art for art’s sake, which 
originated as an attempt to “insulate art from the demands that it be useful” (McCarthy, On-
daatje, Zakaras, & Brooks, , p. ) is directly opposed to the demands placed on creative 
products either produced within or that have been influenced by the context of community. It 
also contradicts an important, perhaps secondary, function of art: its capacity to maintain, 
through its sale, an artist’s ability to sustain their life and their practice (Scott & Bruce, ). 

It is possible that the present conditions of contemporary artworlds necessitates that artists 
become increasingly comfortable with negotiating the creative use of entrepreneurial skills as a 
means of protecting themselves and their work from becoming defrauded by environmental 
conditions outside of their control. However, many independent arts practitioners operate with-
out clear organizational structures, which limits their ability to attack (White, ) or change 
institutional circumstances, such as access to funds, that constrain or are counterintuitive to the 
goals of their artistic practice. Though the value of art in community revitalization efforts has 
been increasingly recognized by government entities in recent years, the structure under which 
these efforts are carried out has raised questions about the ability of artists to successfully insert 
themselves into formalized community development processes, despite demonstrated interests 
in engaging in socially motivated work (Jackson, ). Artists made vulnerable by the condi-
tions of their labor market but still desiring to produce large-scale works may find themselves 
overburdened by grant-funded projects like creative placemaking initiatives that require the use 
of their time, talent, and efforts, but misemploy their expertise during key moments of collabo-
ration or negotiation between the artist and the institutional managers of grant funds (Frenette, 
). 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

7 

Methodology 

The artists interviewed for this study are based in Nashville, Tennessee, which has a global rep-
utation as the birthplace of country music and also provides context for capturing insights into 
artists’ approaches to their practice in response to steady, average growth as well as periods of 
rapid growth. Neighborhood redevelopment and an influx of new residents have brought ex-
citement and opportunity, as well as persistent challenges of affordability and preservation of 
place, to Nashville. Approximately eighty-four people moved to the area per day between July 
 and July  (Reicher, ). The population of the Nashville-Davidson Metropolitan 
Statistical Area (MSA) was nearly two million in , comparable in size to the Columbus and 
Cleveland, Ohio MSAs and the San Jose MSA in California (U.S. Census Bureau, ). Nash-
ville’s development trajectory has exerted a range of conditions upon the artists living and work-
ing in the city, and our respondents provide insight into how artists and their practices are af-
fected by these changes. For example, artists in our study who are local to Nashville or who have 
lived in Nashville for many years cited concerns over the rising cost of living. Artists newer to 
the Nashville area recalled being drawn there by both the vibrant art scene and lower cost of 
living compared to art hubs such as New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. Thus, the experiences 
of professional artists in Nashville offer insights to the experiences of professional artists living 
across the country, be they in places of rapid growth or areas of relative stability. 

For its sample, this study looks at artists who participated in the Arts & Business Council 
of Greater Nashville’s Periscope: Artist Entrepreneur Training program (Periscope).1 Periscope 
is a year-long professional development opportunity that provides eight weeks of intensive in-
classroom training, one-on-one mentorship with a business mentor, and exposure opportuni-
ties—most notably through the culminating public event, the Periscope Pitch. The program was 
initiated in  and is ongoing. Topics covered by Periscope include learning to set achievable 
goals and project ideations, building and selling unique propositions using information gleaned 
from audience evaluations, framing concepts in a variety of contexts in order to maximize their 
potential, building marketing plans, understanding pricing strategies and developing long-term 
business plans, networking with audiences, investors, and other artists, and learning to pitch 
creative endeavors. Periscope participants also benefit from opportunities to network and ex-
change ideas with peers in other disciplines. Periscope cohorts range from nineteen to twenty-
five participants in size, with the average cohort being twenty-one participants. Program costs 
are subsidized by the Arts & Business Council of Greater Nashville’s funders and program part-
ners, with participants being responsible for two hundred and fifty dollars in attendance and 
material fees as of . Scholarships to cover program fees are available. All past and then-
current participants of the Periscope program (N =  at time of study) were invited to partic-
ipate in this study. 

Periscope artists received an email from the Arts & Business Council of Greater Nashville 

 
1 More information about the Periscope program can be found at the following link: https://abcnash-
ville.org/periscope/ 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

8 

in mid-August of  introducing the study, followed by email correspondence and in-person 
communication with the research team at the Arts & Business Council’s Annual Periscope Pitch 
Night event in September of . In total, thirty-seven Periscope artists completed a prelimi-
nary online survey of creativity and personality indicators, as well as demographic information, 
for a . percent response rate. Respondents received a twenty-dollar Amazon voucher in com-
pensation for their time. At the end of the survey, respondents were asked to indicate their will-
ingness to participate in a one-hour, semi-structured interview. These interviews provided a 
closer look at how artists are shaping their careers and are the focus of this study. 

The nature of the Periscope: Artist Entrepreneur Training program uniquely enabled the 
study of artists post-receipt and in the process of utilizing their intensive entrepreneurial and 
business-driven training, thus enabling this study to build upon and contribute to existing lit-
erature on the practices and constraints of professional artists. In total, twenty-four semistruc-
tured interviews were conducted with artists who had completed the Periscope program. Inter-
views were conducted in Nashville in semiprivate locations of the respondent’s choosing and 
were audio recorded with each subject’s written consent. Interview and survey respondents 
practice a wide array of art forms, with some engaged in multiple forms. Their practices span 
several genres of performance, visual, and craft art, including theater, painting, music, drawing 
or illustrating, pottery, D-making and sculpture, dance, poetry and spoken word, writing, pho-
tography, and film. A concerted effort was made to maximize the diversity of the interviewees 
based on demographic characteristics self-reported through the initial online survey. Table  
summarizes how study participants self-identified in terms of race and attained education; fur-
ther details are not provided due to the limits of the sample size, in the interest of protecting 
participants’ identities. All were aged between twenty-four and sixty-four. 

Interviews were conducted September through October of . Interviews averaged . 
minutes in length, ranging from . to . minutes. Interviewees were compensated for 
their time with a hundred-dollar Visa gift card. Transcribed interviews were initially coded in 
an open coding process, and then later coded line-by-line analytically in two separate rounds. 
Thematic categories were added, refined, and discarded during the analytic coding process. 

Table . Summary of Study Participants’ Demographic Characteristics 

 Survey Respondents 
(n=) 

Interviewees 
(n=) 

Race   
White  ()  () 
Black  ()  () 
Other Race  (.)  (.) 
Education   
Graduate Degree  (.)  (.) 

 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

9 

The semistructured interview guide is underpinned by three themes stemming from extant 
literature on conditions and relationships which motivate and effect arts entrepreneurship: ) 
relationship between practice and location, used to consider environmental conditions that may 
present as barriers, burdens, or benefits to an artist’s practice; ) relationship between self and 
other artists, used to investigate artists’ approaches to building and gaining connections to var-
ious types of networks; and ) relationship between self and success, intended to capture specific 
actions and reactions to self-perceived successes, failures, or setbacks. Interviewees were also 
asked to define the entrepreneurial artist and explain the concept in their own words, for the 
purpose of helping us to develop a comprehensive understanding of how professional artists 
conceive of entrepreneurialism in their field. A cohesive definition of the entrepreneurial artist 
was constructed through an iterative coding process and refined over time, upon completion of 
the interviews. The complete semistructured interview guide is available upon request. 

Creative Approaches to Arts Entrepreneurship 

Gaining knowledge around how artists conceive of the business of art was critical for prefacing 
our understanding of the relationship between artistic and entrepreneurial creativity. Tradi-
tional business practices such as marketing, resource management, and product diversification 
are identifiable in the approaches taken by twenty-one out of twenty-four artists in our sample 
to building and sustaining their practice. Defining the business of art, one respondent said: 

The business of art is invoicing, keeping track of your inventory, going through who owes you 
money, paying people, knowing how much you can pay someone before you have to give them 
a  [tax form]. Social media, building a website, taking good images of the art that you’re 
making. Learning, knowing how to apply for grants. Grant cycles, when things are due. Being 
really excellent at handling rejection. . . . And just being able to keep it all in perspective, in pur-
suit of a higher goal. 

Despite listing the tasks associated with running her practice, this artist and others in our 
sample maintained that there is no singular business of art, just as there is no singular applica-
tion of entrepreneurship to artistic practice. Several artists pushed back against the complete 
intertwining of art with business, believing that profit motives—both in the interests of excess 
or just getting by—increase the potential of artists to compromise their artistic integrity and 
burden their art. At the same time, artists acknowledge that the pursuit of “art for art’s sake” is 
complicated by the reality of artmaking as an occupational choice, with the majority believing 
that art is feasible as a business if the intention remains grounded in the creative pursuit and 
meaning behind the work. 

Artists utilize skills relevant to multiple domains of creativity, including art, business, and 
the social, to assist in their mobilization of entrepreneurial artistic endeavors. Our findings sug-
gest that artists identify and utilize approaches traditionally associated with entrepreneurship, 
with artists’ pursuits being limited only by the organizational deficits of the cultural industry 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

10 

and difficulty translating business-training pedagogy into actionable arts applications. Inter-
view participants relayed their ability to evaluate local arts markets for opportunities and re-
counted transforming their own practices to occupy market niches not just in products, but in 
sales strategies and pricing as well. After serving as an instructor for several community arts 
programs, one respondent noticed that the provided courses offered training only to an inter-
mediate level, despite demand for advanced courses: 

Nashville has an amazing number of community art programs but there’s not a lot of infrastruc-
ture or education to cater to them after they kind of hit the ceiling on those programs. Which is 
one of my long-term goals. That building I said I bought, I bought to do that . . . I see that as 
being my next phase of investing in the Nashville community. And also creating more sustain-
able business for me . . . do it in a really fair equitable way but the same prices as a community 
intro to pottery class. You know, have a new next level or a new place to go. 

This artist purchased a building where she intends to hold community classes for advanced 
students in order to meet a previously unfulfilled demand. In the interim, available rooms 
within the building are rented to other local artists as studio space, which defers the costs of 
ownership while simultaneously creating a new artist community and maximizing the potential 
of the building as a resource. 

Our data suggest that the actions artists take to meet market demands for artistic products 
align with the actions one would take when seeking to expand their business. Four primary 
means of business expansion emerged from our interviews. While the first two means, refram-
ing mentality and creation of own opportunity, align with previous research and conceptuali-
zations of arts entrepreneurship, the third and fourth, diversification and targeting, fall within 
the realm of traditional understandings of non-arts entrepreneurship. By reframing their men-
tality towards their practice and thinking of their art as more of an active business practice rather 
than as work that should, theoretically, be profitable, our respondents became more prone to 
seeking, being open to, or self-originating opportunities that might magnify their impact in the 
local artworld. 

Seven respondents mentioned curating shows or performances as a means of highlighting 
their work in the context of other, similarly themed pieces, using curation as a means of growing 
their audience, building a more expansive market, and engendering goodwill between artist 
peers. One artist interviewee, a painter, described the thought process behind inviting other 
artists to join him in displaying work at what had originally been booked as a solo gallery show: 

Two things were in play. They had—I’d met these artists, seen their work, and [was] just really 
enamored with the fact I get to work with them. . . . And so I thought, well, having my work up 
would be really cool, really gratifying, but I want other people to see their stuff too. And I think 
it would be a better, a really cool mix. It would be better than just me. The other aspect that was 
in play was I had already scheduled a solo show for the next month. And so I knew that making 
enough work to fill that space would have been a physical challenge that probably would have 
been beyond what I could have done. So I thought, well, two birds with one stone. 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

11 

This artist, like other interviewees in our sample, demonstrates that artists are multi-faceted 
creatives who engage in resource manipulation, marketing, sales, and workflow management to 
sustain their practices. In the case of the gallery show, the artist analyzed his resources and de-
termined that he had insufficient time to make enough work for two solo gallery showings, 
which, along with his admiration for the work of peers in his network, motivated his decision 
to curate additional pieces for his show. Another interviewee, a stage director, recalled coordi-
nating a similarly rapid redistribution of resources after an injury prevented her from complet-
ing the staging and direction of her own show. She describes adapting to adversity and the ac-
tions which led to the creation of a new—now long-running—theater festival: 

We had a stage, it was booked, I knew that there were other women who had talent and things 
that they would like to share but they couldn’t afford to rent the theater, hire a lighting designer 
and—but we had all that. And so I sent out an email to a bunch of women that I knew, and we 
got like, fifty responses. And that year we did the first women’s work festival and we’ve been 
doing it ever since. . . . But it wasn’t like this opportunity just presented itself. I had to figure out 
what to do because we couldn’t do a show. 

Stemming from the unforeseen circumstance of a sudden injury, this artist broadened the 
collective audience for her work by creating a new practice arm focused on curating and high-
lighting the works of her peers in addition to her own. Under less-than-ideal circumstances, 
artmaking occurred and was multiplied as a direct result of the artist’s creativity in business 
and ability to recognize and create opportunity for others in the face of work-stopping injury. 

Structural considerations and availability of resources presented other challenges for artists 
to creatively overcome. After losing access to production space and, consequently, the ability to 
engage in collaboration, a D-maker artist who specializes in glass blowing created a multipur-
posed initiative designed to take advantage of a public resource, sustain her creative spirit, and 
introduce local youth to the art of D-making: 

When I don’t have [large] studio access I don’t engage in those collaborations because it’s just, 
it’s not really possible. So. I can try to do things in other ways. I’m about to start hopefully 
launching a program through the library doing collaborations with their high school youth and 
their D-makers, D-printmaking space there. And we’ll print objects there and then we’ll come 
[to her smaller maker’s space] and I’ll teach them how to make molds and we’ll be doing some 
casting stuff here. So I’m really just kind of figuring out now how to get back into that space with 
what I have available to me here [in Nashville]. 

Teaching and diversifying approaches to artistic production were the only ways for this 
artist to continue any branch of her D-making practice upon losing access to the highly spe-
cialized production space required for her work. In the absence of affordable industrial space 
suited to the large scale of her productions, the artist utilized her entrepreneurial creativity to 
develop a practice more aligned to her circumstances: a teaching initiative that would grant both 
herself and her students access to a different tool and create new opportunities for making, 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

12 

demonstrating this artist’s entrepreneurial mentality around space, evaluation of resource avail-
ability, and diversification of practice. 

Artist Entrepreneurs in the Context of Community 

Conceptualizing the role of art and of artists, specifically, in community was polarizing for our 
interviewees. When asked about the role of art and artists in community, the majority of our 
respondents focused on the intrinsic benefits of art rather than on specific, artist-led community 
projects or even artist capacities or desires to engage in community development initiatives. The 
sentiment of these respondents is encapsulated as: artists can help their communities to “process 
their own experiences as human beings,” with art as their medium for doing so. A fair number 
of artists in our sample cited concerns that prescribing roles to artists, be they real or imagined, 
puts an unfair burden and pressure on artistic creativity. One artist, a poet, expressed even fur-
ther: 

With artists, don’t think there’s any prescribed role. And I would push really hard against there 
being any because once you define that or assign some sort of specific role, I think by nature 
artists should push against it. And I mean, if I can get anywhere near a role, I would say it’s to 
question, to change, and to offer alternatives. But even that feels kind of risky to assign a specific 
role. I think artists do a lot in a community. But I would not want to assign a role because that 
in itself would be antiartist in my mind. 

Ultimately, the pushback we received from artists in our interview sample regarding the 
idea that artists have a “role” in or should be engaged directly with community through their 
practice is the nearest representation of “organizational attack” identified in our study (White, 
). 

Still, other artists in our interview sample demonstrate that community-engagement has 
the capacity to be a resource rich opportunity and creative approach to practice expansion. A 
quarter of our respondents were able to cite direct, intentional, and self-sought engagement with 
community via their artistic practice, with each project representing a different facet of entre-
preneurial activity. The artists in our sample who chose to engage with community most com-
monly did so via community organizing, teaching, and partnering with nonprofits. The artist 
community organizer crafted a powerful tool from her writing practice and runs workshops 
designed to promote social cohesion and efficacy by bringing neighbors of different back-
grounds together. Four of the ten artists who teach spoke of teaching specifically as a means of 
furthering arts education, appreciation, and exposure in their communities. The stage director 
whose entrepreneurship initiated a women’s theater festival spoke of how the growth of the 
Nashville immigrant population and resulting racial-ethnic tensions inspired her to stage a play 
centered on the lives and stories of characters from different cultural and demographic back-
grounds, to remind the audience that every individual is, like them, just trying to live a fruitful 
life. Another interviewee spoke of her work with various nonprofit organizations: 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

13 

I don’t think that handmade things should just be for rich people. . . . I’ve done a lot of work 
with the Nashville [nonprofit organization]. I used to take my students to paint murals in their 
garden that was designed, they got grant money to have gardens for refugee families from agrar-
ian societies . . . we did a lot of projects around that space. We created murals, we helped create 
this big learning felt diagram that they could take into schools and teach about nutrition. I’ve 
partnered with a lot of organizations like that. Right now I'm working at [job training program]. 

This same artist, along with another artist in our sample and their craft artist collective, also 
organized a program where community members can check out pottery objects from their local 
library in the same way that one would check out a book, in order to make crafted objects more 
accessible to people with lower incomes. Another artist, an illustrator, collaborated with a well-
known local songwriter to provide illustrations for a children’s book, the proceeds of which 
were donated to charity. To him, the opportunity was multipurposed; it expanded his audience 
and professional network while allowing him to engage in a morally fulfilling act of service. 

The artists in our interview sample frequently and creatively engage with business skills 
such as marketing, sales, and resource and workflow management to sustain their practice. 
Their artist entrepreneurialism is motivated by the desire to create and monetize art on their 
own terms, regardless of their motivation for making it. By implementing business strategies in 
their artist practice, artists in our sample have positioned themselves to maintain control of their 
input—their creativity—and their output, the art. While it is likely that the vast majority of art-
ists seek to retain creative control during their production process, entrepreneurial artists are 
better positioned to actually do so, provided that structures beyond their control maintain ac-
cessible pathways to success. 

One such pathway within the community context is monetary support. Artists in our sam-
ple recognize their capacity to creatively apply traditional business strategies to entrepreneurial 
opportunities. But like other businesses, professional artists require capital and support in order 
to grow their practice, despite their demonstrated ability to recognize or create new opportuni-
ties. Some of our respondents perceived funding opportunities contingent on the inclusion of 
“social good” or other community development components as limiting their artistic freedom 
and creative control—conditions not typically exerted on other private businesses. Three artists 
elaborated on the impact of these conditions on their practices, stating that they would prefer 
to practice art for art’s sake and felt that funding contingencies influenced their practice and 
compromised artistic creativity: 

If I was successful eventually as a business then I would consider like, what is my obligation to 
pay back and help the community? But otherwise, I’m not going to behave in a self-sacrificing 
way, in any way that I don’t think other ordinary citizens should or would. So—and that’s prob-
ably, not everybody’s going to agree with me on that point. And I did make a great proposal 
about how to talk back to gentrification and I put it before the city and there was grant funding 
and they decided to put that funding elsewhere. And I have to make ends meet! So I’m going to 
spend my time on things that have to do with the vision that I’ve been developing throughout 
my life, my creative vision that I’ve been developing, and spend my money and time on things 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

14 

that I think can help support me if I’m successful. 

Community-level constraints chafe against artists’ sense of ownership over the direction of 
their practice both as creatives, and as individuals deploying entrepreneurial skills as a means 
of gaining agency in the decision-making processes relevant to expanding their artistic practice. 
For the mixed-media artist quoted, entrepreneurship in the arts came down to points of deci-
sion-making within the context of opportunity recognition. Having seen that his efforts at en-
gaging with community development opportunities were rejected for funding, this artist pivoted 
to the expansion and development of opportunities in other realms of his practice, including 
interactive galleries, art book prints, and digital projects. Other artists communicated similar 
desires to do public art, but cited restrictive and inflexible ordinances, concerns about their abil-
ity to maintain ownership of the work or idea—particularly in regard to large-scale works such 
as murals—and difficult entry into public art or creative placemaking grant awards as barriers 
to doing so. Despite being inherently community-oriented in their practice—building interac-
tive exhibits for galleries, researching ways to embed poetry into public sidewalks—the fact that 
these artists identified the goals of community development grant holders and other institu-
tional barriers as being incompatible with their creative process indicates that, for some artists, 
the entrepreneurial behaviors of recognizing opportunity and engaging in resource manage-
ment are deliberate acts of decision-making designed to protect the original goals of their artistic 
practice. 

Another artist who expressed frustration with funding contingencies recalled an instance 
of decision-making during which her small performing ensemble was made to reevaluate their 
personal and professional resources before ultimately reframing a project to include the com-
munity outreach component required to secure support from available grants: 

Everything I think in terms of art and artists is kind of seen for me through the lens of if I want 
to be an artist or if I want to be—if I want to make music in this ensemble, I have to have funding 
and support to make it happen. And sometimes, you know, you have to kind of scoot a little bit 
over to do things like outreach and things like that, that match up with the funders’ priorities. 
And I don’t—we don’t do it ever that its so far outside of what we do that feels not relevant, but 
it certainly does stretch our capacity. 

In instances such as this, where the artist reframed a project in order to meet funding con-
ditions, artmaking happened not strictly because a Nashville arts organization provided a grant, 
but rather because this artist was able to simultaneously draw upon skills in two domains of 
creativity, the arts and business, to reimagine her artistic vision into an entrepreneurial pursuit 
fitting available resources. As an arts entrepreneur, this artist, a small ensemble performer and 
private lessons instructor, recognized that her primary artistic pursuit was more intimately tied 
to the availability of grant funding than the pursuits of the mixed-media artist quoted above, 
which helped to motivate her decision. 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

15 

Refining the Definition of the Entrepreneurial Artist 

Artists in the contemporary economy are hindered more than helped by persistent, popular 
notions of the artist as flighty, fanciful, and perhaps most damaging, destined to struggle finan-
cially for the sake of producing their art. These stereotypes contribute to the precarity by which 
artists have long been defined by creating a substantial barrier in artist-client relations, forcing 
artists to constantly negotiate the value of their labor and work. 

The situation is such that in the contemporary economy, a sustainable arts practice is in-
dicative not just of artistic success, but of communicative and interpretative ability as well. Post 
receipt of entrepreneurial training, the majority of our interviewees felt more confident in their 
work, that their work was improving, that they were making better choices with regards to their 
art, and that they were more effective at targeting their work to an audience. These benefits 
indicate the presence of an underlying mechanism within artists, namely, the unlocked ability 
to evaluate art production—a key element of arts entrepreneurship. Artists describe using their 
creativity to drive their decisions and their business skills—considering art not just in terms of 
motivation, style, purpose, or intent but also in terms of time and cost—to elevate, rather than 
diminish, their creative practice. 

From our findings, we have derived a refinement of the term entrepreneurial artist by nu-
ancing a new conceptualization of artist entrepreneurs developed to capture the mechanism and 
effects of interactions between creativity in art and creativity in business, specifically. Our find-
ings support the assertion that artists purposefully seek to develop practice models that fulfill 
their personal aspirations for success while accommodating their desires to protect their crea-
tivity and artistic products via maintaining control of the creative process. We have found that 
artists recombine their disparate creative abilities to navigate the challenges of their labor mar-
ket (Chang & Wyszomirski, ; Scherdin & Zander, ; White, ). They produce their 
desired end, creative control, by converting their available means, a high propensity for creativ-
ity in multiple domains, through the mediating structure of their artistic practice (Essig, ). 

We therefore assert that definitions of the entrepreneurial artist may be refined to include 
those who consider their artmaking to be their own micro or small business. We specifically 
claim that entrepreneurial artists should be defined as artists who are “doing the work”; striving 
for financial stability by conducting cost-benefit analysis to assign accurate value to their art and 
labor and help determine which projects to pursue, diversifying their artistic skillsets and crea-
tive products, and capitalizing on their available resources to develop cohesive collections. 

Notably, the refined definition of entrepreneurial artists derived from this study of profes-
sional artists is not significantly different from definitions of entrepreneurship that could be 
applied to entrepreneurial members of other economic sectors not related to the arts. It serves 
to capture the breadth of artists’ experiences and abilities while validating their substantial ef-
forts at restructuring the processes of their work (Center for Cultural Innovation, ). 

Limitations 
Our sampling process excludes, by design, artists who had not expressed a formal interest in 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

16 

learning about entrepreneurial approaches to creating artistic outputs via the Arts & Business 
Council of Greater Nashville’s Periscope program at the time of study. As our respondents’ par-
ticipation in the Periscope program has the potential to induce selection bias, future research 
would benefit from an expansion of the sampling frame to encompass artists who have not yet 
received or who have no interest in receiving formal entrepreneurial training, as well as artists 
training and working in other contexts. Further, while our results are likely generalizable to 
artists seeking to engage in individual creative pursuits, the findings may be less applicable to 
artists who are not engaged in independent profit-seeking within arts markets. Still, while we 
may speculate that a broader sampling frame could lend a sense of balance or further nuance to 
our findings regarding the expectations and experiences of artists engaged in community-based 
work, that entrepreneurial artists with formal training in business continue to perceive of them-
selves as being cornered into undesirable scenarios in regards to their ability to exercise agency 
alongside their creativity is a significant finding with implications for grant- and policy-making 
approaches. Our findings indicate that entrepreneurial artists engaged in community-based 
work possess tools that help them to operate independently and profitably in their field. Future 
research is well positioned to explore in greater depth how the presence or absence of entrepre-
neurial training in an artist’s skillset impacts their approach to or perceptions of opportunities 
for community-based work. 

Though Nashville offers the opportunity to study artists’ creative practices both in the con-
text of steady and rapid growth, an additional limitation of this study is the inability of the 
midsize study environment to replicate the arts scenes of much larger cities such as Los Angeles 
or New York. Despite these limitations, Nashville is a suitable environment to derive insight on 
entrepreneurial artists given the competitive nature of its arts market. Where artists in Nashville 
benefit from the ability to test new work in the context of a critically developing arts scene, they 
suffer from the same issues of affordability and lack of space identified by artists in other cities. 

Discussion 
Entrepreneurial artists engage in business and entrepreneurial practices as a means of control-
ling their creative process and output. They use their skills and capacity for creativity to combat 
one of the most prevalent, damaging narratives facing artists in the market: the idea that their 
work does not have to be priced well enough to financially support them, because of the nature 
of their motivation for pursuing it. Entrepreneurial artists have a mentality of “my art is my 
business,” and take several approaches towards achieving success, including: diversifying and 
taking advantage of the full range of their artistic skillsets, identifying and targeting audiences 
and later seeking opportunities to show directly to that audience, being open to opportunities 
that could enhance their practice or network, such as collaborations, and taking the initiative to 
create their own opportunities to help ensure practice longevity. 

Compared to the general population, artists self-rate as possessing above average levels of 
creativity in the domains of math, science, and engineering, business and entrepreneurship, the 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

17 

social, civic and community pursuits, and everyday creativity, far beyond their traditional artis-
tic pursuits.2 Our respondents’ approaches to the business of art suggests that artists who have 
undergone entrepreneurial training are capable of exercising creativity in domains beyond their 
artistic practice. As such, we argue that creativity in art, business, and the social are neither 
perpendicular nor parallel to arts entrepreneurship, but instead comprise a helix structure of 
creative domains inhabited by the entrepreneurial artist. The resultant capacity of entrepreneur-
ial artists to be involved with the construction of community—through intentional planning or 
just by the nature of their work—is limited only by the degree to which artists are supported in 
their pursuits. As a creative domain, arts entrepreneurship is a practice of self-preservation just 
as much as it is a process of self-management and self-actualization (Beckman & Essig, ). 
Artists in our sample rejected the idea that a defined role of artists is to be engaged with or 
involved in their community, with conversations about available funding opportunities yielding 
frustration about community development contingencies embedded into grants. Our findings 
indicate that entrepreneurial training empowered our respondents to initiate community-fo-
cused approaches to their work on their own terms, thus allowing them to maintain creative 
freedom and control over their artistic practice. 

Artists, when inclined, can make powerful contributions to community development. But 
like those of other private citizens and businesses, the entrepreneurial pursuits of artists are 
driven by a diversity of motivations, and many of our respondents felt that being assigned a role 
of “placemaker” due to their artistic abilities limited their freedom to creatively pursue those 
motivations via their practice. While a quarter of our respondents reported engaging with com-
munity as a natural element of their practice, several others initiated loose attacks against fund-
ing structures that require artists to engage with community development, citing concerns 
about stretching their capacity, inequality of expectations between themselves and other entities 
also engaged in processes of community development, and burdening their creativity. Where a 
healthy portion of extant research looks at entrepreneurial training as a means of furthering 
artists’ skills or abilities to contribute to community development, our findings suggest that 
where cities seek to embed artists into development practices via funding, artists, particularly 
entrepreneurial artists, can interpret the conditions of these funds as being asked to operate 
beyond the scope of their practice. Our findings indicate that for many Periscope participants, 
their entrepreneurial training has been conceptualized and implemented as a means of artist 
development and career making, directly, rather than it being fashioned into a backdoor for the 
development of community-based art. 

That entrepreneurial artists see opportunity in community beyond the scope of formalized 
placemaking activity is an indication of their ability to creatively and agentically redefine the 
social scope and impact of their practice. As is, formalized community development projects 
risk failing to provide adequate space for artists to flex their capacity for arts entrepreneurship 
within formal organizational structures (Frenette, ). It is possible that, when embedded into 

 
2 This study, available upon request. 



ARTIVATE 10.1 

18 

the organizational structures of community development initiatives, beliefs and stereotypes re-
garding artists’ abilities to engage in formalized work negatively impact the degree to which they 
are treated as experts, to the detriment of projects and communities that would benefit from 
their unique entrepreneurial perspective (Frenette, ). 

The failure of communities, and specifically, funders, to recognize the primary entrepre-
neurial motivation of artists—a desire to maintain control of their creative process—while ig-
noring the considerable social good artists undertake in their practices, undermines the effort, 
training, skill, and labor involved in the production of art. Investing in artists via entrepreneurial 
training has the potential to yield artist-led community benefits and projects similar in class to 
creative placemaking initiatives, while simultaneously honoring the desire of entrepreneurial 
artists to maintain control of their input and product. The entrepreneurial artists in our sample 
demonstrated an ability to see and act upon opportunities in community on their own terms. 
Many went so far as to create and amplify opportunities for themselves and other artists, using 
their artistic, entrepreneurial, and social creativity to guide the stewardship of their practices in 
preservation of the motivation for pursuing it. In recognition of this, we assert that conversa-
tions about the role and character of artists in communities should be reframed to consider their 
proclivity for creativity not just in the artistic domain, but in the realms of business, entrepre-
neurship, and the social as well. 

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Cover Image: Photo by Tiffany Bessire, used with 

permission from The Arts & Business Council of 
Greater Nashville. https://bessirephotog-
raphy.smugmug.com/Arts-Business-Council/n-
MKB78M/Periscope-Pitch-/ 

 
This research was supported in part by an award from 
the National Endowment for the Arts (Award#: DCA 
2017-05). Thank you to the Arts & Business Council of 
Greater Nashville for supporting our access to artists.  


