We recently connected with Wendy Swart Grossman and have shared our conversation below.
Wendy Swart, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Going back to the beginning – how did you come up with the idea in the first place?
I never really had a BIG PLAN for my career and life. I am just making stuff up as I go along. Opportunities emerge. And since I am a person who is comfortable with risk and who thrives in the zone where excitement meets fear, I often dive in headfirst.
After a career in babysitting, food service, and community organizing I ended up in US and South African presidential campaigns (Dukakis, Clinton and Nelson Mandela). After years of living out of a suitcase organizing congressional districts, raising money for candidates, and organizing thousands of volunteers, I was burnt out. After taking some time in graduate school to sharpen my organizational management skills, I pivoted to working for nonprofits and NGO’s across the US and internationally.
As a solo-practitioner, I was portable, strategic, and knew how to hustle to get my next client. After many years working with social services agencies on issues from low-income housing, to women’s advocacy, and youth agencies I started working with museums. The first was the Harvard Museum of Natural History, where I shared an office with the world’s largest collection of bat guano. My soul lifted, not because of the bat guano but because I was now working in spaces of beauty, big questions, and knowledge. I practiced my commitment to social impact by using my position to get the resources of the university, through the museum, into the hands of the underserved communities by implementing free, educational programing.
For a variety of reasons, we moved to London, UK for six years where I worked with the Museum of Science. For this position I was helping the museum reorganize their volunteer program to be more inclusive, rewarding (for the volunteers), and helpful to the museum. In 2010 we moved back to the USA and were settling into Boston when I met Jen Guillemin–we actually connected through my 2nd grade son, the mother of one of his friends. Jen was the Director of the Visual Arts Program within the College of Fine Arts at Boston University. We immediately hit it off on so many fronts and she was as intrigued by my background as an activist, as I was of her and her visual arts entry point.
We thought, “Wouldn’t it be fun to work together somehow.” I confided that I had always dreamed of teaching and, given her position she suggested we propose a class to teach at BU. We thought the Artist as Activist would be a great pairing of our skills, but after talking with the head of the graduate program of Arts Administration, he suggested the emerging field of Cultural Entrepreneurship. We got to work putting together a syllabus that included a deep dive into the creative economy and the role artists play. With my experience as a practitioner, I knew I needed to ground the class in some real life skills, so we added a creative startup accelerator to the class. The students, working in teams, present their creative ventures at the last class, Shark Tank Style, in front of a panel of judges. 40% of the students from the class, Creative Startups: From Ideas to Impact, have started nonprofits and LLC’s at the intersection of Arts & Culture, Business & Technology and Social Impact.
Along the way, Jen and I kept playing, prototyping, and experimenting new ways to expose our students to the vital creative entrepreneurial startups that are popping up all over Boston. In 2016 we hosted a conference, Arts and Ideas in Actions: Arts + Business + Social Impact. This conference was a turning point. We were asked to give a TedxTalk and through this process the seeds for our business, Creative Re/Frame, were planted. Through our research and experience we know our skills are needed with our target audience – the 240+ innovation centers emerging on college and university campuses, as well as the over 500 innovation centers across the country.
We launched Creative Re/Frame in 2020 with the goal of infusing arts and creativity into innovation spaces to help them attract a cross disciplinary group of students in welcoming, engaging, fun, and authentic ways. Boston University’s BUild Lab was being launched and we were a part of its initial formation, and our company emerged as one of their success stories.
We knew we could succeed because we already were succeeding.
The timing was right. We had the credibility, experience, good will, proven content, and networks.
Wendy Swart, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
After working with faculty and art students – visual artists, performance and musicians – we noticed a giant gap in their educational experience. Many students coming out of art schools end up as solo practitioners and are incredibly entrepreneurial but they often lack the language, skills and networks to get their creative ideas up and running.
In addition, the innovation and entrepreneurship centers housed within engineering, business and computer science programs in colleges and universities weren’t attracting the cross-disciplinary student base they needed and felt alien to students majoring in the arts.
We launched Creative Re/Frame in 2020 to bridge that gap.
On the one side we infuse arts and creativity into innovation centers so they can see the value of creativity as a launchpad for innovation. On the other side we help run Creative Startup incubators to give the artists the tools they need to launch their creative ventures.
At Creative Re/Frame we encourage our students and clients to:
MAKE like artists, We believe creativity is inherent in each individual. We tap into our students and clients’ creative mindsets to collectively envision new strategic and innovative solutions.
CARE like activists. We know that caring for the larger community makes for better business. With backgrounds as both political and arts organizers, we are dedicated to helping our students and clients create a measurable and impactful social return on investment, in addition to a financial one.
STRATEGIZE like entrepreneurs. We set specific, measurable, and achievable goals. We make sure our work is concise and clear with set goals and deliverables to ensure our students and clients are getting to where they want to be.
IMPLEMENT like organizers. We translate ideas into action. We recognize the importance of urgency, setting and implementing tasks and timelines and measuring impact. Creative Re/Frame is highly focused on final products aimed at the systemic change needed to create long-lasting impact.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
Can we talk about imposter syndrome?
As a non-artist (YES, I am creative, but I am NOT an artist) and a non-traditional academic ( YES, I have a masters degree but NOT a terminal degree nor a phD) I am constantly feeling as if I am about ready to be called out as a fraud.
A fake.
An imposter.
Each time one of the students at Tufts or BU calls me “Professor Grossman”, I feel the need to correct them, that I am a practitioner and a lecturer, not a tenured faculty member.
Each time one of my clients asks me what type of art I practice and I tell them I am an improv dancer who knits communities together through shared experiences, I feel I am lying.
What I have come to realize is that this is actually my superpower. I skate seamlessly between worlds as a holistic practitioner combining creativity and wonder with the importance of academic rigor and business acumen. Integrating relatable, captivating stories with anecdotes and date. Being flexible and adaptable while maintaining my nimbleness to help my students and clients make connections between worlds.
My experience as a successful practitioner helps me connect real world examples and stories with information that is essential for classes of undergraduates and graduate students. And, I also bring a range of networks and connections for students to tap into. And, clients needing to infuse creativity into their conferences, team building exercises, or workshops gain from my classroom expertise and appreciate the magic my colleagues from Creative Re/Frame bring into the room.
Imposter Syndrome is just that, a syndrome that I need to take ownership of. One way I combat it is to cut it off before I think it will pop up. On the first day of class, or at a conference, I share with my students and audiences the jaw dropping stories of my wild career, highlighting my high profile jobs, my academic degrees, and my successes. It builds up my credibility, and confidence while validating the importance of having a practitioner in the room.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
I love it when I allow myself to ask the question, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” and see where the answer takes me.
I love it when I allow myself to ask the question, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” and see where the answer takes me.
This question first popped up for me in 4th grade standing in line at the water fountain thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was chocolate milk in the water fountain instead of boring old water?”.
In the midst of a Boston blizzard in January of 2022 this question appeared again and it went like this: “Wouldn’t it be cool if Creative Re/Frame would be asked to give a talk somewhere in Europe for the summer of 2022 and I could find someone to pay for us to go?”
Knowing that the only one who cares about Creative Re/Frame is my partner and I, and that I need to create my own future, I googled, “Creativity, Conferences. Europe, 2022”. The first listing was the Creativity and Cognition Conference sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery in Venice, July 2022. The audience drew from from both academic and practitioner circles from around the world, doing all sorts of stuff around AI and VR. So NOT our normal crowd. But Venice? How could I re-engineer an opportunity to be invited to present?
Yes, I am a creative practitioner working in the innovation field, but (here comes that Impostor Syndrome thing again), I don’t have a phD. I am not a full-time faculty member. But wait: I have a bu.edu address; I have an appointment at BU to teach; I have networks of others who do have phD’s. I reached out to my co-founder at Creative Re/Frame, and together we reached out to our phD colleague and Director at the Institute of Creativity and Innovation at the University of Munich and together who was up for joining us. Together we came up with a conference proposal idea.
I then figured out who the chair of committee was (the power broker) who would decide who would be admitted to the conference in Venice and set up an initial conversation to see if our idea was on track. My thought was, before we apply – would we even have a chance? He was incredibly encouraging, thrilled even. Yes, this was an AI/VR crowd, but the team we had assembled were fascinating practitioners who worked with real people and had up to date information on how to work creatively with cross disciplinary teams to maximize results.
We submitted the paper. We were accepted conditionally, but only to lead a discussion group. Our colleague in Germany said her university would not pay for her to attend if it was only a discussion group. When I brought this back to the conference organizers, they realized this would be an issue for others as well, so they changed the language on our request to have it be a workshop. Semantics!
We were accepted!
Now, who would pay for my flight and hotel?
Realizing that as an adjunct lecturer at BU and a proud member of the SEIU union, I am allowed to attend one conference a year. BU reimbursed me for all my travel, and I was able to leverage the work for my company Creative Re/Frame.
And it all starts with giving yourself the freedom to complete the sentence, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”
Contact Info:
- Website: https://creativereframe.com/
- Instagram: creative_reframe
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CreativeReframe
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/company/creativereframe
- Twitter: @creativereframe