Here comes the Recession. I’m guessing it will hit around 2020, maybe a bit later since Presidents really hate to run for re-election in the middle of a recession.

What is the shape of a recession? What does it look like? Imagine a huge STOP sign. Economic growth stops suddenly. Instead of growing at 2% to 3% annually, it quickly drops to 0% or lower. The stock market plummets 20% in a severe “correction.” Business freezes up and throws a switch — everyone switches from risk mode to safety mode. Money stops flowing. Plans are frozen. Payments are delayed. The present trumps the future. Survival and safety become paramount. It gets nasty fast and we all have more time to read Schumpeter’s book Creative Destruction.

The good news is that creative millennials are constantly in the business of creative destruction, disrupting the methods and markets they operate in. They’re just not used to being destroyed themselves. First time for everything.

Before you freak out, my experience as a writer covering both business and design, tells me that creatives can actually be better prepared than most business people to ride out a recession. Maybe even take advantage of it. Creatives are empaths, they can understand and feel the people around them better than most. Creatives can also imagine better futures and how to get there better than most. Both abilities are huge advantages when the economy freaks out and just stops.

OK, so what should creative millennials do right now to prepare for a recession? Give me 10 things to actually do, right? First, take a day out of your insanely busy schedule to get ready for the big STOP. Think about a survival strategy. Force yourself to answer this question honestly — what is the smallest amount of cash you need to survive for a year? Do you have it? Where can you get it fast? Understand the fear you have that will come with recession. Reframe your business from growth to safety. Get ahead of of the big STOP that’s coming.

Then do the same for your clients and partners. Use your skills at empathy and the understanding to position yourself to be a savior, one who saves. What can you do to help them survive when the economy comes to a full STOP. For creatives, a recession is a crisis that can destroy dreams. From a personal and business perspective, helping your clients and partners to prepare to endure that crisis will never be forgotten.

A recession is a two-part drama that begins with an economic crash and fear of dying and ends with economic recovery and desire for new beginnings. Creative millennials are great at imagining new beginnings. Start imagining right now. The one thing you get more of in a recession is time. You have huge amounts of time to plan, design and make new Art, new apps, new products, new stuff, new models — new futures.

Plan for that NOW. Pull out the good stuff, the crazy stuff, the paradigm busters, the game changers. Order them. Prioritize. Coordinate with clients and partners and friends. The one thing people need after a recession is fast growth. Be ready with your new concepts, your new stuff, when the recession ends. Be the one who saves. Start now.

And remember…a bag of ramen costs 75 cents. With a bit of shrimp, meat or tofu and green vegetable you can survive for months, years even. Buy them now. Prepare for the big STOP.

Global capitalism sucks, but local “capitalisms” are flourishing. By my count, there are 17 “Indie” forms of capitalism in America today that rival the dominant Neo-Liberal variety. They are vibrant, growing and more equitable economic systems that, surprisingly, often cross the deep political divide. Here is a brief framework for understanding where these different forms of capitalisms, including Donald Trump’s populism, situate themselves on our economic landscape.

Neo-Liberal capitalism was built by both Republican and Democratic presidents who embraced the doctrine of free trade, deindustrialization and the financialization of the economy. Anyone born in the past 40 years, grew up in this system which lost its legitimacy in the crash of 2008 and the aftermath. Neo-Liberalism capitalism had two winners: the billions in Asia who were brought out of poverty to enter the middle class and the millions in Western global city-states who serviced the financial and marketing needs of the open global economy by harnessing new technologies and generating new brands.

We now, of course, realize that there were big losers in the Neo-Lib economic system. In four decades, chasing lower costs, the US sent most of its manufacturing jobs to China and much of its engineering and service jobs to India. In Neo-Lib economic theory, people who lost those jobs would retrain and get other, higher value, higher-paying work. In practice, they experienced downward mobility in income and status.

Which brings us to Indie Capitalism. There is a wide panoply of new kinds of capitalism replacing the dying orthodoxies of Neo-Liberalism. Each new Indie Brand of capitalism offers an alternative to the traditional process and goal of Neo-Liberalism — open markets to generate highest profits for owners. All of them focus on social justice and a more equitable economic system.

Here is the list of the Top Indie New Capitalisms. See if you can find yourself across the spectrum:

Populism: Donald Trump’s economic program uses government interventions — tariffs, taxes, antitrust, defense spending — to regenerate high-paying jobs lost to trade by bringing back to the US the manufacturing supply chain that was shipped to China and Mexico.

Crowdfunding: If you’ve ever launched a product or kicked in money to support a launch on Kickstarter, you’ve played in this form of Indie Capitalism. Replacing banks, venture capital and Wall Street, crowdsourcing brings together hundreds, often thousands of individuals to finance new creative ventures.

Hyper-local: Blue Marble ice cream in Brooklyn is a great example. Launched by two women, an international economist and an actor, their goal is to have a business that sustains their families and the local cow farms where they source their milk. Local is critical.

Lifestyle Business: This is a variation of hyper-local where a business is set up to maintain a modest lifestyle. No scaling. No $1 billion “unicorns.” Small is critical.

Locavesting: A cross between Kickstarter and the stock market, you invest money and get a real equity stake in a new venture. Congress passed legislation last year permitting local investing. It’s crowdfunding with an equity kicker, kind of like socialized capitalism.

Impact Investing: Putting money into companies or organizations that generate positive social or environmental impacts as well as a financial return. This is big, nearly $9 billion invested, with many mutual funds specializing in it. Doing good with big institutional bucks.

Upstart Co-Lab builds funds that specifically invest in creative and artistic projects that generate a financial return. It’s a twist on impact investing that focuses on creativity. Focus is on big funds investing a slice of their money in creative projects.

Non-Profit Profit: Acumen pioneered in taking “patient” money from banks and private funds to finance individual Asian and African entrepreneurs who build companies specializing in clean water, housing and food. The key here is enabling entrepreneurialism to do good.

Artists Collectives: Meow Wolf is a wildly successful artist cooperative doing immersive engagements in Santa Fe. Opening new artist coops in Las Vegas and Denver. It is a new capitalist form combining the coop, private investing (by the author of Game of Thrones) and New York VC money. Hottest Indie Capitalism at the moment.

Universal Basic Income: Give everyone a sustainable middle class income regardless of their work. Robots and AI will do away with jobs anyway so separate income from work.

Peer-to-peer economy: Direct transactions between people using online markets, cutting out big banks and corporations. Peer-to-peer lending is the best example.

Sharing economy: a broader version of peer-to-peer that shadows the traditional barter economy. Open-source economy is another expression of this concept.

Gig economy: Independent freelance contractors supported by online technology. Huge in creative, artistic and transportation fields. Uber and immersive engagements…

Crypto-currencies: A form of monetary exchange outside the government- controlled regimes of dollars, euros and other forms of money. The crypto ledger promises to democratize finance and, like peer-to-peer, is a tech-favored form of social economic relationship that resembles barter.

Stakeholder capitalism: 1960’s style capitalism where profits go to all stakeholders, not just shareholders. Stakeholders include employees, local communities, sub-contractors, local charities. Think Hewlett-Packard in the early days.

Social entrepreneurship: Harnessing creativity and money to start new ventures that generate social capital to benefit society. Ashoka and the microcredit Grameen Bank are examples. The focus is on supporting small-scale entrepreneurs, especially women.

Cultural incubating: NEW INC, a museum-led art/design /tech incubator, is a co-working space providing intensive mentoring to build the skills for growing creative ventures that generate cultural and capital value. The first of its kind, NEW INC has the most diverse creative population of any US incubator.

So think about your own practice and see if it fits any of these new forms of Indie Capitalism. Or, perhaps, you have invented one of your own.

She touched my dad too. “Hen (Henry), taste this,” touching his arm. “Hen, you’ve got something on your chin,” touching his face. “Hen, help me with this on,” turning to get her blouse zipped up. “Hen, here’s the shopping list,” closing her hand on his. “Hen, let me put those drops in your eyes,” as he went blind.

But it was when they danced that I knew they loved to touch. The first time I saw them dance together, it was like water flowing. I was struggling with the lindy and they danced ballroom like in the movies. I was struck dumb. They just floated across the floor.they were two as one.

My mother’s face glowed as she moved in my father’s arms. As he led her through the complex steps, across the crowded floor, right through the mundane here-and-now to the state of joy.

I never saw that face off the dance floor. I looked for it when I brought my homework home to her. I looked for it when I chopped onions in the kitchen cooking with her. I looked for it during the day playing. I saw kindness and love in her face, but more often frustration, exasperation, anger. Emotions of a struggling mother who, I later learned, wanted to be building something bigger than a family.

But I did learn about love. Intimate love. How it was different from other kinds of love. Where you go to find it. How long it can last. How sweet it is. My mother taught me that.

I was a fat baby — 40 pounds at 12 months. I can prove it. There is a studio shot of me with the fattest “pulkas,” thighs, in the world. No way I could stand up, much less waddle.

My mother stuffed me so much that the doctor ordered her to put me on a diet. She refused. What did he know about being healthy?

My mother paraded me around the neighborhood in a huge baby carriage. People stopped to pinch my cheeks and say, “what a fat baby!” That was bad. It was one thing to BE fat and happy, another for people to SAY it. Saying it out loud could cast an evil spell on me. Make me sick or die. The evil-eye, a “kneina hura,” or “canary” in English. So my mother lied and said I was not fat. “It’s the sweaters. He’s wearing a lot of sweaters.”

But I was fat. My mother was driven to feed me. “Eat, eat, eat.” “Have some bread. Have some bread.”

I resisted. The first conscious act that I remember is refusing to eat. Keeping my mouth shut was my Declaration of Independence. Later, I hid food in my cuffs.

I became a skinny person. Lean. Strong. My own body. In resisting my mother, I became my own self. I also learned to never, ever, give in to bullies.

I was about six when my mother gave me my origin story — “ I bought you on sale at Macy’s bargain basement.”

My mother is 99 1/2 so I’ve heard about that bargain for decades. Each time I cringe. I remember, as a little boy, thinking that if she got me on sale, she could return me.

At some point later, I realized that my mother loved shopping. It was sport for her. Elbows out, pushing the other mothers aside, she competed for the great prize — the bargain. So maybe I was a prize, a true “find.” Maybe she wasn’t going to return me. Maybe.

Also, there was the other origin story. “You were born on my birthday. It was very cold.” The odds of being born on your mother’s birthday are 1 in 365 or 0.00273973. Pretty rare. Growing up, I never had my own birth day. It was always shared with my mother.

We shared personalities too. And so we fought. Exhausted after one battle, my mother said “you are me.” I remember smiling, thinking “yes, I am strong now.” I can’t be returned to Macy’s. Well, probably not.

My mother is passing on but that could take a bit more time. Her mind, sharp and cutting through 97, is mostly foggy, but she can still surprise me with insight and wit on one of her clear days. I plan to post stories about my mother and me for as long as she lives or until I run out of memories.

Looking at Mike’s numbers, you will see that we have neglected our manufacturing for decades. We prefer to outsource production to cheaper labor countries or bring in cheaper labor to work here. We accept a low-cost labor Fordist model of making, unlike Germany, Japan or Sweden, who do not. My own work on innovation shows that a remarkably small amount of innovation has taken place on the assembly line, the factory or making in general. Very little investment has gone into the making of things in America over the past half century

For those of us in the “creative sphere,” the designers, the techies, the fashion people, the startup folks, the VCs, the aggregators— we need to take some responsibility for this. We accepted the decline of making as long as we could design great apps that disrupt and connect or great stuff that is made somewhere else. But that is another conversation.

Mike works at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington DC. He was chief economist at Business Week when I worked there with him.

Michael Mandel / 11.13.2016

Here are some bullet points on the economics of the election:

1. America is divided between the Digital Nation and the Physical Nation. The Digital Nation includes tech, entertainment, publishing, telecom, finance, and professional services such as management consulting, accounting, computer programming, design. The Physical Nation includes manufacturing, mining, construction, retail, transportation, health care, and the rest of the economy The Digital Nation makes up about 25% of private sector employment, the Physical Nation 75% (we first laid out this division of the economy in a March 2016 report).
2. While there are many factors going into Trump’s election, on the economic side, there was one reality: The members of the Physical Nation finally got tired of suffering while the Digital Nation soared. And since the Physical Nation outnumbers the Digital Nation 3–1, that’s the election.
3. For the past fifteen years, the Digital Nation enjoyed strong productivity growth, stable prices, high investment in IT, rising employment, and higher (and rising) incomes. By contrast, the Physical Nation has suffered from weak productivity growth, rising prices, weak investment in IT, weak employment growth (outside of healthcare), and lower (and barely rising) incomes.

Digital Nation vs Physical Nation

Productivity growth rate (2000–2015)

Digital Nation — 2.7%. Physical Nation — 0.7%.

Real compensation per worker, growth rate (2000–2015)

Digital Nation — 1.3%. Physical Nation — 0.8%.

Employment growth rate (2000–2015)

Digital Nation — 1.3%. Physical Nation — 1.4% or 0.1% (without healthcare)

Share of private sector employment (2015)

Digital Nation — 25%. Physical Nation — 75%.

Share of private sector compensation (2015)

Digital Nation — 35%. Physical Nation — 65%.

Share of IT investment (2015)

Digital Nation — 75%. Physical Nation — 25%.

Annual price change

Digital Nation — 0.8%. Physical Nation — 2.4%.

Data: BEA, BLS, author calculations

The split between the digital and the physical sector was first described in Mandel (2016). Numbers may differ slightly from earlier calculations.

4. The Digital Nation is concentrated in blue states. States that voted for Clinton in this election averaged 35% digital, while states that voted for Trump are 23% digital on average. Here are the top states, measured by share of private sector GDP coming from the digital sector.

Top Digital StatesShare of private economy that is digital

DC — 49.9%

Delaware — 47.8%

NewYork — 43.8%

Massachusetts — 37.7%

Oregon — 37.4%

Connecticut — 34.3%

Virginia — 33.5%

California — 33.5%

Colorado — 32.5%

Rhode Island0 — 31.5%

Maryland — 31.1%

Georgia — 30.8%

NH — 30.4%

Illinois — 30.1%

New Jersey — 29.8%

Minnesota — 29.8%

Washington — 29.4%

Missouri — 28.0%

North Carolina — 27.7%

Utah — 27.6%

Pennsylvania — 27.2%

Arizona — 26.8%

Florida — 26.5%

South Dakota — 26.3%

Ohio — 25.8%

Nebraska — 23.5%

Kansas — 23.3%

Michigan — 23.3%

Wisconsin — 23.2%

Data: BEA, author calculations

1- See clearly. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 1–2%, just like Al Gore. So remind yourselves every day — The majority of voters chose YOUR inclusive way of life.

2- Survive. We are now in the maelstrom of VUCA — a space that is Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic and Ambiguous. The first order of the day is to protect what is precise to us — our friends, our families, our institutions, our values, our culture. So we need to find the money and power to keep our way of life going during the Trump years. This is absolutely crucial.

3 — Learn. We screwed up our Social Justice Project. In our world of inclusivity, we excluded the white working class. We defined out class as we embraced gender, color, orientation and identity. Why? We must change that.

We screwed up our social media. It turns out that all our communication and all our data and all our citizen journalism simply mirrored Fox News — they were just another echo chamber that misled us. We excluded the people we made invisible in our concept of “inclusive.” That’s got to change.

And we screwed up our “tech philosophy” — the idea that all disruption is good. Those middle class cabbie jobs killed by Uber? Let them create new ones. Those manufacturing jobs producing our screens? Let them go to China. It’s better to do the higher value mind work — design, coding, tech. Right? Talk about privilege. The creative community dmay have focussed on the “Maker culture” but the assembly line, the plant, the dirty work? Not so much. Disruption as a philosophy is socially naive and politically dangerous

4 — Fight. It’s time for the Millennial generation to take power. It embraces inclusive, creative culture like no other demographic. Trump’s election was the last battle of the long Boomer culture wars that began in the Sixties (in 1968, the year of the Stonewall “Riot,” it was still illegal for black and white people to marry in much of the South). The fight now must now be led by people in their 20's and 30's who are now beginning to understand the nature of power and how to use it.

The next year will be the hardest, as womens’ right to control their bodies is taken away, as gays’ right to marry is taken away and as the ugliest forces in society feel embolden to move out of the shadows.

So…take the time to mourn. Take the time to understand our mistakes. Take the time to change. Then fight.

The New York Times ran a great piece by Holland Cotter recently— “In the Art World, Globalism’s New Spin,” which celebrates the current discovery of African, Asian and Latin American contemporary artists by our big, elite museums. Call it “global south,” “globalism,” or “global consciousness,” this trend in art is in marked contrast to the nationalism and nativism currently defining our political spaces. It is a recognition, finally, that great art is being made outside our conventional Euro/US--centric frame by artists of all genders.

Yet nowhere in this new space of post-colonial art can we find the work of Wendy Red Star, Judy Chartrand, Robert Davidson, Zig Jackson and other contemporary Native American painters, performance artists, potters, photographers, glassmakers and video artists. America’s colonial experience was, in may ways, more important in defining its culture than Europe’s, if for no other reason than the struggle to be free is ongoing, and not completed. At this moment thousands of Indians from hundreds of tribes are facing off police and soldiers at this very moment in Standing Rock, North Dakota to protest the building of an oil pipeline across sacred deeded to them by treaty a hundred years ago.

America’s “post-colonial” era is still being constructed. Hence the art produced today by Native Americans embodies the issues of both historic and contemporary culture: appropriation and technology, racism and materiality, tradition and gender equality, storytelling and who tells the story, the modern state and pre-colonial culture, civilization and who get to define what is “civilized.”

The current generation of contemporary Native painters, film-makers, jewelers, fashion designers, performance artists, sculptors and weavers are making remarkably innovative art, yet they struggle to break out of their public frames of “indigenous” and “ethnographic” and “historic.” While major collectors such as Charles and Valery Diker and Ellen Taubman integrate their Native art with their Rothkos and Basquiats in their private homes, none of the key art museums in New York or LA or San Francisco or London or Berlin or Beijing has staged a major contemporary Native art exhibit within the current socio-political art context. (The Museum of Natural History’s “Totems to Turquoise” and MAD Museum’s “Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation” were excellent exhibitions but, in the end, were regional compendiums of artists without context.)

So, which artists might be included in a Native exhibit at the New Museum? Here are a suggested few. Most share a 21st century Native modernity, living and working in the hybrid space of city and reservation, gallery and social media. And yes, it is entirely possible to put on an exhibit of contemporary Native WOMEN artists who share a common political and artistic zeitgeist.

Wendy Red Star is perhaps the best known multi-media artist using humor and imagery to challenge the appropriation and commoditization of Native American culture (the sexy Indian maiden on Land O’ Lakes butter; Washington Redskins; the language of going “off the reservation,” Urban Outfitter going “Navajo,” Isaac Mizrahi’s totem designs). A Cree who works out of Portland, Red Star is a contemporary of Cindy Sherman.

http://www.wendyredstar.com/white-squaw

http://www.nativepeoples.com/Native-Peoples/November-December-2014/Wendy-Red-Star-on-the-Rise/

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/06/edward-curtis-portland-art-museum-native-american-photography

Marla Allison won an Innovation Award for her portrait of her mother — with an LCD screen embedded in the picture so the object of the painting tells her own story. As we watch her sitting in shorts, with sneakers on, Marla’s mother tells us in her own words how she was moved into a Japanese concentration camp (her words, her perception) after WW11, once Washington allowed the Japanese to return home. The government considered it good housing for Indians.

http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/summit/video/marla-allison-best-both-worlds-combining-traditional-art-new-age-technology#.VzTGbUs5BuY

http://www.marlaallison.com/bio.html

Sydney Freeland is a transgender Navajo whose film, Drunktown’s Finest, captures the alcohol-fueled conflict inside Native cultures caught in the twilight space of modern colonialism — decaying rez life and urban promise.

http://www.vice.com/read/trans-and-navajo-drunktowns-finest-999

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3091286/

Shan Goshorn has reinterpreted weaving with her intensely political and beautiful baskets. She too won an Innovation Award for her basket that wove cut-up copies of the 1831 Indian Removal Act signed by President Jackson into extremely complex traditional Cherokee basket patterns.

http://www.shangoshorn.net

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/12/03/activists-baskets-unique-art-shan-goshorn-16-photos-152549

Jamie Okuma evolved from award-winning soft sculpture artist to major fashion designer. Her commentary piece on Pocahontas with fellow artist Keri Ataumbi is brilliant.

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/08/27/pocahontas-beaded-jewelry-collab-wins-special-award-santa-fe-156518

https://www.google.com/search?q=native+american+shoes+okuma&biw=1359&bih=573&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiF7-PyhdXMAhVMwiYKHVpeByYQsAQIGw

https://www.facebook.com/Jamie-Okuma-526730207343384/

Keri Ataumbi is one of the finest metal-smith jewelers in the country.

http://ataumbi.com/about-the-jeweler/

https://wheelwright.org/case-trading-post/artist-spotlight-keri-ataumbi/

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/12/22/sister-act-kiowa-artists-keri-ataumbi-and-teri-greeves-honored-living-treasures-158416

Sho Sho Esquiro is the youngest designer on the booming Native fashion scene. Exhibiting in New York, she laughs at the cultural appropriation of Native headdresses and feathers by designers and offers up a cutting edge, urban look that incorporates face paint and pointed edges.

http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/ABC_Univision/photos-native-american-designers-ny-fashion-week/story?id=20214908#

https://www.google.com/search?q=sho+sho+native+american+fashion+designer&biw=1359&bih=573&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjx5Knag9XMAhWEcz4KHbOVC20QsAQIJA

Liz Wallace is a brilliant metalsmith and pioneer in plique à jour. Her work is mesmerizing and her politics are personal and deep into her art. Wallace’s work reminds us of a history we are not taught in school.

http://lizwallacerocks.com/blog/20-lizzie-enos-shibuichi

https://www.facebook.com/lizwallacejewelry/

http://www.lizwallacerocks.com

Judy Chartrand is an extraordinary multi-media Canadian Cree artist whose work captures the Canadian effort to eradicate the “Indianness” of Indians or First Nations peoples. Chartrand began studying her art at 15, living on Vancouver’s Skid Row. She is serious, humorous, thought-provoking.

http://www.firstvisionart.com/tania/judy.html

White works

Helen Hardin did complex, geometric, abstract paintings and prints, transforming the spiritual figures of her Native American culture into dazzling contemporary images.

Helen Hardin - Google Search

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Hardin

Lisa Hageman Yahgulanaas is a Haida weaver who does Raven’s Tail Weaving. For nearly a century, the Canadian government outlawed the making of traditional art among the First Nations peoples. The contemporary return to making beauty in traditional arts is a political act and a reclaiming of identity. Lisa’s chief’s robes are extraordinarily complex and beautiful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnUmnMCe_Ig

http://www.ravenweaver.com/about.html

Pat Pruitt. Jump genders and you find immensely talented contemporary male Native artists. No one speaks so eloquently about the role of technology and materiality in art today than Pat Pruitt. Pat became a legend in the body piercing culture (and still sells his work out of the Halo body piercing and tattoo shop in Phoenix) before becoming one of the leading metalsmiths of this generation. He designs and creates with computers and cnc, works in titanium and Damascus steel and sells globally through markets and modern social media.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vusaYFln_iQ

http://www.patpruitt.com/man.shtml

Robert Davidson is a Haida painter who has played a revolutionary role in art. His form line painting is perhaps the most significant advance in abstract art since Pollock. Taking traditional form lines that compose Haida, Tlingit and other Northwest Indian art, Davidson simplified and amplified the ovoids and curves to create new compositions.

http://www.robertdavidson.ca/new_works.php

http://www.robertdavidson.ca/biography.php

Tony Abeyta works in mixed media paintings that capture the emotional dynamism of the New Mexican landscape and culture. His subterranean creatures in black and white, moving up from the center of the earth, are spectacular visions of the earth.

http://tony-abeyta.blog.cdsavoia.com/post/53855802176/abeyta-discusses-his-strive-for-innovation-in-his

http://www.owingsgallery.com/artists/tony-abeyta/?gclid=CjwKEAjw1Iq6BRDY_tK-9OjdmBESJABlzoY7IDMZkVq1rJNKjRs0vS3p3hUyeV1FuP0C-sm9j1FYMRoCQerw_wcB#/images/5/

http://www.tonyabeyta.com

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/06/11/native-artist-tony-abeyta-talks-inspiration-and-aspirations-149830

Michael Yahgulanaas, fuses traditional Japanese manga comic formats with traditional Haida storytelling to challenge stereotypes, ugly or romantic, about First Peoples. His graphic paintings are bold and modern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Nicoll_Yahgulanaas

https://graphicallyinclined.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/strokes-of-genius/

http://haidamanga.com/series/1/the-wave

Lee Marmon’s photographs capture the true world of Native Americans living on the reservation in contrast to the romanticized imagery of the Noble Savage staged by Edward Curtis. His “White Man’s Moccasins” captures an old man sitting, with traditional jewelry and a headband. On his feet are Converse High Tops, white man’s moccasins.

https://notartomatic.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/the-photography-of-lee-marmon/

Preston Singletary, is one of the finest artists working in glass in America today. Glass was never a traditional Native material but Singletary (working in Seattle, of course) has made it a conveyor of Northwest Indian stories. A new materiality for ancient cultures.

http://prestonsingletary.com/about/

http://prestonsingletary.com/work/

Dartmouth-trained Mateo Romero is perhaps the most politically eloquent of contemporary male Native mixed media artists. He combines timeless photographic images of pueblo Indian life with abstract expressionist forms. Vibrant colored paint meets digital image to generate enormous energy. A vibe.

http://www.mateoromerostudio.com/#!bio/c1tmc

http://now.dartmouth.edu/2011/12/video-conversation-artist-mateo-romero

Rick Bartow and Fritz Scholder, both gone, were extraordinary artists of immense power.

http://www.opb.org/artsandlife/article/rick-bartow-northwest-artist-dies/

Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian

It is perhaps not a coincidence that the growing number of exhibitions in London and New York of women, African-American, Latino. Latin American, African and Asian artists coincides with the recent rise of female curators who see the world in a wider, more inclusive way. I appeal to these curators to widen their vision even further to include the extraordinary talent of contemp0rary Native American artists as well.

I work in an incubator these days (the art-tech incubator NEW INC) on New York’s Bowery, after careers at BusinessWeek and Parsons New School of Design. That puts me inside what is probably the fastest growing social space in the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America— the creative space. If you lump all the places that promise creative interaction (co-working spaces, accelerators, digital creative agencies, high tech startups, social media firms, and, of course, incubators), you arrive at a vast and growing social space specifically designed for one purpose — nurturing creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.

This is the normal working space of Millennials who, in their 20s and 30s, are just beginning their march to power in business and society. So nearly every middle-aged corporate manager, b-school dean, design school provost and real estate mogul is rushing to build new spaces for the new demographic. Many are simply taking their employees out of their corporate cubbies into We-Work open spaces. Microsoft, for example, is giving 30% of its New York employees, 300 people, We-Work memberships, according to Business Insider. That’s 2/3 of Microsoft’s global marketing and sales team in NYC.

But what really makes a social space creative ( instead of just crowded and cheap)? Is there any theory behind the success that I see at NEW INC in generating successful innovation within the art-tech arena? I think so. At Parsons, my close colleague Ben Lee introduced me to the work of Randy Martin, a dancer-turned-academic who ran NYU’s Department of Art & Public Policy. He coined the term “Risking Together.” Creative spaces — incubators, dance stages, science labs, sports fields, auctions, financial markets — involve Volatility. This Volatility captures the energy, magnitude and uncertainty of change but NOT its direction. So the purpose of an incubator or any creative space is creativity itself. The outcome is unpredictable. You often “pivot” from the original idea to another (think SnapShot or AirBnB). “Messing around,” “playing around,” without a specific direction is essential to Risking Together. And, of course, it is messing around together. The messing is social, the risking is social, the volatility occurs in a social space.

One more critical bit of theory: Risking together in a social space requires buffering the volatility to gain access to creativity and maximize the engagements and “flow.” You have to actively manage the volatility in a social space to get access to its energy and opportunity without being destroyed by it. Remember the concept of Creative Destruction? That comes out of volatility that overwhelms and destroys.

We have a foundation for this kind of thinking. Walter Benjamin’s “Flaneur” wanted to buffer the energy and excitement of the city to gain access to its new urban creativity. He surfed the volatility of late 19th century Paris in the streets and especially the Arcade, which then was a new creative social space to exhibit a new phenomenon — fashion.

Peak creativity in an incubator or any creative social space comes from designing a volatility through which people move, engaging others to generate innovation. I call this the Vibe. Too much volatility and people get overwhelmed or destroyed. Too little volatility and it’s boring and unproductive. You “shoot the spread of volatility” in a creative space. You’re in the, the zone. This spread of volatility is the Vibe and you have to actively design this Vibe.

Here’s an example that happened at NEW INC just 10 minutes ago as I write this piece. Two people (let’s call them Jennie and Jose) came out of a conference room smiling. They walked over to me (the Mentor — I both mentor and work at NI) and announced they were going to work together on a project. Jennie is a partner with two other women in a new consultancy that focusses on emotion-centered design. Jose is a techie working on an algorithm and product that could be a “buddy” in our lives. Perfect match. I know because I Mentored Jose yesterday about his project. Jennie is in the incubator because she worked with me at Parsons and I suggested she and her team join. I mentor Jennie and her team. She and Jose worked with a Professor at Pratt and share educational history and culture. Now they will work together to create something new of value.

So the Vibe isn’t a random collection of people or teams. It isn’t a group of people who choose on their own to be in a space. And it isn’t a set of corporate employees put into a co-working space by their employer in the hope that creativity will “rub off” on them. Risking together works only when there is a talented Curator of Vibe designing the volatility of the social space and screening the people who inhabit it.

Nor is the resulting creativity a deliberate process, such as problem-solving or brain-storming. The behavior of Jennie and Jose inside the social space was “flaneurial,” of people having an open state of mind to possibility, to what is different and desireable. And then being able to engage. Call it mining the fat-tail of a volatile social space, NEW INC.

One more thing. Successful creative social spaces require outside Patrons as well as internal Curators. Scaling a new idea or startup requires outside networks — Patrons outside the Vibe who can provide the resources of Financing, Prototyping, Making, Marketing and Branding are dynamic. They are as important as the actual participants inside the Vibe. And, again, it is the Curator who selects and screens the Patrons.

The Curator of Vibe is the new management role of the Millennial generation. What the manager did for efficiency in the 20th century, the curator does for creativity in the 21st century. Curating the Vibe in a creative social space is key to the productivity of that space — and weak curation (or none at work at We-Work and other co-working spaces) is the major reason why so many incubators generate so few meaningful new products, services or startups.

We know we’re all Risking Together now, creating our many futures. What we don’t realize is how really hard it is to design the social spaces that allows that creativity to happen.

How to Use Creative Intelligence to Create 4 New Business Models in 1 Day in Lisbon — And See The New MAAT Museum.

I’ve been to hundreds of Design and Innovation Conferences but the Productized Conference in Lisbon was one of the best. Maybe it was Lisbon, a beautiful, hot new start-up city with a sweet vibe (the photo of the new MAAT Museum building captures the spirit of The city). Or maybe it was the free-thinking, funny and smart group of European participants who made up the most creative group I’ve seen in years. Or… yeah, maybe it was the Portuguese curators of the Productized Conference who put it all together for the second year running.

I gave a full-day Master Workshop. In Portugal, that means 9–6:30, with two sessions in the AM and two in the PM. The workshop was structured around the Creative Strategies in my book, Creative Intelligence. The conceit is that, like sports, we can all train and practice for innovation and creativity and we can all get better at it. Some of us can be champions.

Session 1: Mining for Meaning.

I talk about why value creation begins with knowing what is truly meaningful to people — not just what they need. I show a slide of a Chinese wedding in a third tier city. Computer makers are competing for market share of the rising urban middle. HP and other Western companies compete on technology — faster chips, more memory. Lenovo, the Chinese company, asks its customers WHY they buy PCs and they reply — ”we buy personal computers for wedding presents.” They buy PCs as GIFTS. Ritual gifts. So Lenovo expands the PC box and makes the graphics brighter — and picks up market share. Know what is meaningful. Mine for Meaning.

Then I hand out about a dozen pictures to the workshop participants — faces of a teenage girl and boy, a middle manager, a retired person, a 20-something starting a career, a mother, an immigrant, more — and tell them to decide what is most meaningful to each. Pick one, write it down, discuss.

Then each group presented and defended their decisions about what was truly meaningful to each demographic and cohort group.

Coffee break.

Session 2: Framing/Reframing.

I talk about how Meaning is manifested as Story. We frame what is meaningful to us in narrative — and we can reframe that narrative. I also talk about how we express our narratives in how we Engage the world — and we can reframe that engagement (think of the reframing of selling from store to online, conversation from phone to social media).

People then pick a persona from their photos, take what is most meaningful to the person, and tell their story, frame the narrative. I ask them to tell us how that person engages the world — their friends, doctors, jobs, family. Then we Reframe — and tell another story to express Meaning and other ways of Engagement.

Groups then present and discuss their stories and engagements — their frames and reframes. We vote on the best.

Lunch!

Session 3: Serious Play.

I talk about Connecting Dots and Metaphor as Creative Strategies to generate new products/services. It’s not about brainstorming 1000 ideas and yellow stickies. Examples: connect an old value of listening to music to an old value of sharing your music with friends to a new technology platform and what do you get? Spotify. Connecting an old value of crashing on a friend’s coach to an old value of making a bit of cash to a new social media platform and what do you get? AirBnB. Simple just connection 2, 3, dots. Uber? Amazon? Fresh Direct? Dots.

I also talk about Metaphor. P&G has moved from Design Thinking to Metaphor to spark new products. The coffee percolator was the Metaphor for the engineer at HP who invented the ink jet printer. A saw mill cyclone vacuum was the metaphor to Dyson for his vacuum cleaner.

I ask each workshop participant to connect the dots of their personas, starting with what is meaningful to each of them. They create new products and services by connecting dots. They do an amazing job.

Then they rise and defend their new concepts to the workshop group. It gets real fast.

Coffee break.

Session 4: Scaling.

I talk about Scaling creativity and bringing new products/services/businesses to the market and society. Scaling skills are very different from creating skills. I talk about the roles of the Curator and Patron in scaling, doing exactly what curators and patrons do in the art world — deciding what is truly new and marketable and providing the resources to go from concept to reality.

I tell each group to build a business plan to bring their new concept to market. The plan must include what is meaningful, what the story is and how they plan to engage customers and clients.

The results are pretty cool. Here’s one. On-Demand — Short-term help for working moms at home or grannies in retirement. An online service that vets a range of service providers and delivers them at your door for an hour or two. From baby-sitters and dog-walkers to companions and nurses’ aides. An Amazon Prime for services.

Here’s another one for seniors. Connect people not comfortable with the latest tech to the latest tech by talk. A Siri for Seniors that allows them total access to the world of their grandkids through a mechanism that is meaningful to them — conversation. Whose voice should it be?

A third was Friends and Family drug and food reviews. Get trusted information and reviews from those you trust when you shop for anything, anywhere. Just connect a few dots and focus on what is meaningful to you in a era awash in ads.

Here one more: Top 100 Dream Companies. Get the true truth about companies you dream about working in from people already there. Plug into a protected platform where people in their 20s and 30s can tell you about their bosses, their teams, their work, their love-lives. Then list the Top 100 Dream Companies and run the list in Fast Company.

Fun, right? A creative process that incubates new business concepts fast based on what is meaningful to people.