Every year, innovators across disciplines come together for an annual event in Louisville, Kentucky, called IdeaFestival. The festival presenters includes artists, thinkers, entrepreneurs, and business leaders who are using their work to precipitate change all over the world. For the past several years, Creative Capital has partnered with IdeaFestival to present a session called “Art at the Edge.” This year’s panel on September 26 is an exciting opportunity to give a platform to some of the artists we support.
This year, Stephen Reily, Chair of the Creative Capital Board, will be joined for a presentation by artists Ann Carlson as well as Carmen Montoya and Christopher Robbins of Ghana ThinkTank.

Through her “embedded” research, Ann Carlson pushes the form of choreography and theater to produce unexpected outcomes. For her piece Sloss, Kerr, Rosenberg & Moore, Carlson spent time in law firms examining the lives, work and movements of lawyers. She enlisted four lawyers to perform the piece, and the four have performed all over the world. In 2016, Carlson won a Creative Capital award for her work The Symphonic Body. When the piece is performed, Carlson will act as a conductor orchestrating a symphony of dancers performing “every day gestures.”
The idea behind Ghana ThinkTank‘s practice is simple: to engage people in the “developing world” to create solutions for problems in the “first world.” Most recently, this strategy has resulted in American Riad, their Creative Capital project, currently under development. For the project, Ghana ThinkTank examined one community in Detroit who complained of social isolation. Citizens in Morocco suggested a common structure of Islamic architecture: the riad. Working with the Oakland Avenue Artist Coalition, the artists are currently building a Riad that will unite one neighborhood block.
For more info about the IdeaFestival conference, check out their website.