VOL. 11, NO. 3 
SPRING 2023 

 SPECIAL ISSUE: THE EXPANDED FIELD OF ARTS ENTREPRENEURSHIP  

Guest Editors’ Introduction 

Adrienne Callander 

University of Arkansas 

Johanna K. Taylor 

Arizona State University 

 

 

 

Artivate is a living archive capturing a global view of the past, present, and future of arts 

entrepreneurship. For this special issue, we invited scholars to participate in a collective 

activity of futurecasting by contributing research that advances ideas that should be 

central to our field. Arts entrepreneurs are continuously reinventing their creative 

practice, the spaces in which that practice happens, and the types of collaborators they 

engage along the way. Not only are arts entrepreneurs expanding platforms of connection 

with consumers and audiences; they are also innovating new ways of working that impact 

larger social, economic, and political environments. As we collectively navigate the post-

pandemic era and the pressing need to critique, challenge, and change existing social 

structures, artist leadership is in demand across sectors and institutions. This issue 

explores how and where arts entrepreneurship happens in our contemporary society 

beyond expected models and recognizes the breadth of contexts where artists are already 

embedded and the systems through which they are building new pathways. As arts 

entrepreneurship is still speculating itself, we continue to navigate how it is implemented, 

taught, and studied. To that end, the contributors to this issue look across our expanded 

field to introduce new ways of framing arts entrepreneurship. They call our attention to 

both emergent ways artists are impacting systems and the work that has been long 

happening at the margins of the field. 

In This Issue 

To assist in the effort to gain insight into the key ideas shaping the field today, we invited 

past, present, and future Artivate editors to submit their thinking around concepts they 



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2 

see as pivotal in driving the field forward. The resulting Editorial Perspectives presents a 

futurecasting glossary that explores the multiple realities facing collaborative work (Paul 

Bonin-Rodriguez on the entrepreneurial “we”; Andrew Taylor on the plural sector; Neville 

Vakharia on collaborative organizational culture); suggests how we can meet and 

participate in our rapidly changing world (Diane Ragsdale on worldmaking; Jose Ruiz-

Resto on entrepreneurial futures); and invites us to return to basics and strengthen our 

foundations of teaching, scholarship, and practice (Gary Beckman on pace; Linda Essig on 

uniqueness and originality).  

The three articles included here explore the overlaps that arts entrepreneurship 

touches from policy to activism to philanthropy through new organizational modeling, 

structural transformation, and cross-sector collaboration. 

Amy Whitaker’s “The Rise of Hybrid Practice: Creative Institutional Design as Arts 

Entrepreneurship” introduces hybrid practice as the blurring of traditional nonprofit and 

for-profit forms to build more flexible and adaptable arts entrepreneurial models. 

Whitaker presents hybrid practice as a mode of institutional entrepreneurship that opens 

up new ways of navigating and impacting social, political, and economic structures. She 

further proposes that this approach to organizing ultimately constitutes a creative act 

extending artistic practice to systems-level design. 

Megan Jordan’s “Artist Activism as Arts Entrepreneurship: Artists Disrupting Social 

Structures and Changing the Future” makes the case for artist activism as a form of arts 

entrepreneurship. Through an in-depth study of twenty-seven artists embedded in 

activist work, Jordan focuses on the critical moment of the COVID-19 pandemic and its 

coinciding with the Trump presidency to explore the entrepreneurial practices found in 

the ways that artist activists navigated their work while striving for social and political 

change.  

In “New Ways of Supporting Arts Entrepreneurship: A Case Study on Maniobra,” 

Javier Hernandez shares his personal experience building an organization that provides 

direct funding to Puerto Rican artists in the form of salary, fringe benefits, and healthcare 

that enable them to sustain their art practice and daily lives. Intertwined with an analysis 

of the artists’ experiences, Hernandez presents the social, personal, and economic 

implications of this innovative funding model for other communities and the role 

philanthropy can play in the reimagining of artist support services.  

Expanding on Hernandez’s article, Artivate is launching a new section with this issue 

called Galleries. The inauguration of this section spotlights some of Maniobra’s 

participating artists. 

Concluding Futures  

Contributors to this futurecasting issue call our attention to new ways of framing arts 

entrepreneurship that highlight hybridity, structural change, and sector spanning. They 



ARTIVATE 11.3 

3 

expand our field beyond its more prevalent categorization as a sub-discipline of business 

venturing to that of vanguard arts practice. This trajectory points us towards institutional 

entrepreneurship studies and its focus on the tension between agency and social 

structuration as an important path forward for inquiry and discovery in arts 

entrepreneurship practice, scholarship, and teaching. As practitioners, scholars, and 

educators, we concern ourselves with how best to prepare present and future generations 

of arts entrepreneurs to lead and what knowledge we are producing that connects 

expanded audiences and collaborators to broad forms of arts work. To that end, the 

peripheries captured here aim for the horizon. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Photo by Ben Mack, www.pexels.com/photo/magnificent-view-of-ocean-beneath-light-pink-sky-5326901/ 
 


	In This Issue
	Concluding Futures