PDP Stories: Chicago Artist Leon Borkowski on the Creative Capital Blueprint

2013 is a landmark year for Creative Capital—we’re celebrating the tenth anniversary of our Professional Development Program! In that decade, we’ve worked with more than 5,500 artists in 150 communities. In honor of each of those artists, we present the new monthly series PDP Stories, in which we’ll share our participants’ accounts of how we’ve impacted their careers and lives.

Our first PDP story comes from Leon Borkowski, an artist from Chicago who took our Core Weekend workshop through the Chicago Artists Coalition in May 2012:

Your blueprint has created hope for all of us and is a call to logical action. In addition to this, it has been our good fortune to have forged 23 important new relationships. Our class is representative of the creme de la creme of the Chicago art scene. The sensitivity, intelligence and accomplishments of this peer group are inspirational. I have already received many e-mails and calls from participants and I look forward to future dialogues. This form of communication is a valuable sound-board for ideas. The workshop has been an exceptionally rewarding experience. As a new wave of entrepreneurial artists, I know that we can make a reciprocal contribution by our example and through the dissemination of the principles that we have learned. How exciting!

Our path is now clear. All learning requires three things: inclination, training and discipline. The first is our birthright, the second has been defined by Creative Capital, but the third is the real challenge. As humans we sometimes fall short of goals. Thankfully, the class has endowed us with the fail-safe mechanism of Creative Capital follow-ups and the support of our group. Motivating each other when life distracts us is critical to our success.

You can learn more about Creative Capital’s Professional Development Program on our newly redesigned website: http://creative-capital.org/pdp.


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