Photo Courtesy of Denise Avila

Last week Thomas Friedman came out with another great opinion piece, “The New Untouchables” in which he argues that the “huge ethical breakdown on Wall Street, coincided with an education breakdown on Main Street” and that our middle-class workers are rapidly losing their ability to out-compete middle wage workers in foreign nations.  He suggests that The New Untouchables are those who, “have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work”, those with a creative and entrepreneurial mindset, in other words.  Furthermore, he makes the point that,

“Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait.”

The days of work being handed out to those who happen to be standing nearby are over.  Instead we are tasked with using our ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit to seek out new market opportunities and leverage our creative talents into new ventures.  And this call to join the Creative Force is being answered loud and clear by cultural entrepreneurs.

In New Mexico cultural entrepreneurs like Patricia Michaels are building into this new economic reality.  Ms. Michaels designs her own fashion pieces,  has them all sewn here in the US, and leverages the appeal of Native  American community values and expressions to connect with buyers.  Her shows are lively events where customers shake hands with the woman behind the wearable art, listen to the stories of Taos Pueblo that are hand-painted onto the fabrics, and leave with a little piece of Native America elegantly draped around their neck, or tossed across their back.  High fashion + deep meaning = satisfied customers.

Patricia readily talks about her vision for building her cultural enterprise, “I want the world to feel the Native American culture in a way in which they are being invited into a common ground.”

Hand Painted Fabric by Patricia Michaels, Photo by Jennifer Esperanza

Patricia Michaels is uniquely gifted in her ability to translate her Native heritage into wearable art that meets a growing demand for meaningful fashion products.  Friedman advises that, “Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs,  new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive.”

And Patricia Michaels is just one example of a thriving cultural entrepreneur.

This weekend I sifted through about forty academic articles on the Cultural Economy, Cultural Industries, Cultural Enterprises, Cultural Entrepreneurs.  My brain is still swimming with terms like cultural geography, the intersection of culture and economics, and regional economic development.  The consensus is evident: creative and cultural economies are the future of innovative regional economic and community development and offer promising paths toward prosperity and cultural diversity.  A bright spot on our otherwise cloudy economic horizon, you might say.

But a theme began to emerge, well, really more of a glaring “gap in the scholarship” that tickled my brain until I had to scratch it.  And here’s what I realized: the Cultural Entrepreneur was written out of the script in all of this research, thinking, writing, and theorizing.  The individuals who start these cultural ventures, and in aggregate, meet the ever-growing market demand for cultural products; the people who are at the heart of cultural economies were not mentioned in the cast of characters in these varied and voluminous articles.

Yet, in my experience, at the heart of every cultural venture – be it a new ethnic restaurant or a burgeoning niche film studio—there is always a Cultural Entrepreneur center stage.  Cultural industries and economies are not abstract notions or distant academic terms: they are vibrant, dynamic sites of cultural exchange between individuals.  So, over the next several weeks I will introduce you to some of these extraordinary individuals. Moreover, I hope to recast Cultural Entrepreneurs and place them at the center of the cultural economy discussion–right in the spotlight, where they belong.