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City Club Missoula – Montana WorldTrade Center Wants Artists to Know How to Market Their Work

You could flick a wet paintbrush in New York City and dot the faces of 10 artists, so the concept of “clustering” is pretty easy to deal with.

But in Montana, clusters of any subgroup of the population are hard to find outside of the major towns spread across 147,000 square miles of mountains and flatland.

This isn’t just Geoff Sutton’s challenge, but the challenge of Montana’s entire arts community.

“We live in a place where ‘creative cluster’ is two artists working 50 miles apart,” said Sutton, who has spent the last six years marketing Montana’s artists as program director of the Montana World Trade Center http://www.mwtc.org .

Sutton was speaking earlier this week to City Club Missoula http://www.cityclubmissoula.org , a nonprofit organization promoting ideas and discussion in the Garden City.

The big question: How do Montana’s creative minds market themselves to places beyond Montana’s – or even America’s – borders?

By JAMIE KELLY of the Missoulian

Full Story: http://missoulianentertainer.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1010:tradecenter&catid=42:artgeneral&Itemid=28

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Broadcasts of City Club with Geoff Sutton (Bresnan Cable Channel 11):

Beginning this Sunday @ 5pm, repeating Monday @ 8am

This program will air each Sunday and Monday until the next City Club meeting.

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Adult Education and Montana’s Folk and Traditional Artists

The three years of the TRACE/CAE programs developed by Dr. Cindy Kittredge at MSUGF illustrates the importance of heeding the concepts of adult education in developing market ready programs for Montana’s folk and traditional artists.

Characteristics of the participants of the TRACE/CAE programs reflect the needs of rural Montana:

• 95% of the individuals enrolled had worked in their particular medium for at least two years.

• 80% were female.

• 5% of the participants were traditional students (22 or younger).

• 95% of the participants were nontraditional students (adult learners, with two individuals over 65 )

• 81% of the participants were in the age category of over 40.

• 45% were from rural areas of Montana (9,000 people or less), with 33% being highly rural (either outside of small towns or from communities of less than 1500 inhabitants).

Programs developed by Kittredge at MSUGF and through MAC reflect the proven needs of adult learners:

• Accessibility. Working adults are usually place-bound and need access to quality experiences.

• Flexibility. Nontraditional learners learn best when they can schedule their time to meet the pressures of their life.

• Experiential. Nontraditional learners tend to be self-directed and respond to learning by doing. Research shows that the average adult takes on 20 or more learning projects a year. Montana’s folk and traditional artists have learned their art by doing and so are acquainted with this style of learning.

• Affordable. Adults often find themselves fulfilling the needs of several generations and so cannot afford the traditional classroom approaches. Also, rural adults tend to have less cash available for investing in their art.

• Collaborative. Researchers have shown how adults learn through networking.

• Fulfill Immediate Needs. Adults generally don’t embark on learning theoretical concepts simply for the sake of learning. Instead, they learn in order to fulfill specific needs. Translated, that means that artists who see the need to learn about business and are offered a concrete reason to learn the tools will participate in learning opportunities that normally wouldn’t be their first choice, simply because they have a concrete rationale to collect and apply information.

TRACE/CAE Outcomes:

• Nearly 5,000 Montanans availed themselves of offerings from workshops, presentations and events connected with these programs.

• The program resulted in 24 micro-business launches.

• Graduates of the programs increased their annual sales by 152% and increased their saleable inventory by 71%.

• Participant out-of-state sales increased by 309%.

• The state of Montana invested $300,000 in these two programs. The short-term economic impact from the two programs was $832,000.

Taken from “Hidden in Plain View: The Unharnessed Power of Montana’s Artrepreneurs” by Dr. E.K. Kittredge, 2007.

For more information, contact Dr. Cindy Kittredge, Montana Arts Council Folk Arts and Market Development Specialist, (406)468-2160 or [email protected].

Full PowerPoint of Geoff Sutton’s presentation:

http://www.matr.net/files/CreativeEnterprise.1.ppt.pptx

http://www.matr.net/files/CreativeEnterprise.2.ppt.pptx

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Please join City Club Missoula http://www.cityclubmissoula.org at our September 14 Forum with Dick King, Mayor John Engen and others to discuss the proposed Missoula Economic Blueprint

City Club Missoula, a nonprofit organization, brings people together to inform and inspire them on vital issues. We welcome everyone who cares about the greater Missoula area. Our public forums encourage the discussion of new ideas and the free exchange of thought. For further information or to get on our email list, contact [email protected]

Become a member of City Club Missoula

City Club Missoula designs public forums on vital issues and encourages the free exchange of thought. We invite all points of view in a non-partisan setting. Your membership supports this important mission.

Membership Benefits:

* Support civic discourse in our community.

* Network with community leaders and involved citizens.

* Advance notice of upcoming events.

* Member discounts on forums.

Please join us as a member of City Club today http://cityclubmissoula.org/join/index.html

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