PDP Stories: Houston Artist Lillian Warren on Integrating Life and Art

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.

This month’s PDP story comes from Lillian Warren, an artist from Houston who took our Core Weekend workshop through DiverseWorks in 2003:

It would be hard to overstate the impact that the Creative Capital Professional Development Program has had on my life.  I participated in the workshop eight years ago. It was truly a turning point, a eureka event that changed my self-image as an artist, my ability to set and achieve personal and artistic goals, and my mindset, which had isolated my business life from my art life. The workshop helped me integrate the two and set me on a path to connect within the art world that I had not imagined.

As a professional artist, I expanded the venues I showed in to include exhibitions across the nation, and gained representation with a gallery. I maximized the value of my one-person shows with publicity (including several articles in the main newspaper in Houston) and public events (including talks and panel discussions with art world notables, artist from different disciplines, and business executives). One of the most personally satisfying and continuing domino effects of the workshop was the tremendous expansion of my network of friends in the art world, in Houston and around the country.

As a professional who inhabits the world of business planning/strategic planning and the art world, I became a facilitator and mentor with the Creative Capital program and have helped facilitate portions of the PDP workshop on several occasions in a variety of cities, including serving as a small group mentor in Houston this past spring. I have also had the opportunity and privilege to participate as a coach in the CC Coaching Program and work with CC grantees on their personal strategic plans.

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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