SuttonBeresCuller Bring “Trailer Park” and “Small Moons” to Louisville


SuttonBeresCuller (2008 Visual Arts) recently presented two major projects in Louisville in conjunction with the recent IdeaFestival. The collaborative group installed their nomadic urban oasis, Trailer Park, in front of the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts and at other sites in downtown Louisville.


The mini-park, built on a car trailer, is complete with live grass turf, a tree and a working fountain powered by a car battery—free and open for anyone to enjoy. Trailer Park was commissioned by artwithoutwallsContinue reading

Creative Capital and IdeaFestival: How We Fell in Love with Louisville


Ruby Lerner presenting at IdeaFestival 2010

On Friday, our Executive Director Ruby Lerner presents “Creative Capital: Art on the Edge” with grantees Liz Cohen, Hasan Elahi, Tahir Hemphill and Sam Van Aken at IdeaFestival in Louisville, KY (September 21, 10:30am, Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts). This is our third year presenting on Creative Capital at this convening of global thinkers and innovators, and we’re so excited to be returning with a truly remarkable group of artists. Liz Cohen (2005 Visual Arts) is a photographer and performance artist who is best known for her project Bodywork, in which she transformed an East German Trabant automobile into a Chevy El Camino. Hasan Elahi (2006 Emerging Fields) is an interdisciplinary artist who began the self-surveillance project Tracking Transience in response to being mistakenly listed on the FBI’s terrorist watch list. He presented on Tracking Transience last year at TED Global. Tahir Hemphill (2012 Visual Arts) is a multimedia artist who created The Hip-Hop Word Count, a visualization series of data abstracted from a searchable database of lyrics from over 40,000 Hip Hop songs. Sam Van Aken (2009 Emerging Fields) is an installation and new media artist whose work has most recently taken the form of grafted trees that will bear over 40 different varieties of fruit on a single tree. What a group!

I spoke with Ruby and Alice Gray Stites—Director of artwithoutwalls, Chief Curator and Director of Art Programming at Louisville’s 21c Museum and long-time friend of Creative Capital—about IdeaFestival and Creative Capital’s strong ties with Louisville.  Continue reading

Artists and Organizations, Experimenting Together


Ruby Lerner, Erika Blumenfeld, Mark Shepard and Pamela Z at IdeaFestival. Photo by Bill Wine, Louisville Voice-Tribune.

Welcome to The Lab, Creative Capital’s new blog exploring the creative process! Since artists and arts organizations thrive on experimentation, our blog will delve into the work-in-progress of the artists we support and share the evolution of Creative Capital as a laboratory for artist services.

Part of my job as President of Creative Capital is to spread the word about what we have learned from working with groundbreaking artists over the past 12 years and to share ideas about how we can enable the creative process to flourish.

In September, I had the pleasure of presenting at IdeaFestival in Louisville with an inspiring group of Creative Capital artists: Erika Blumenfeld, Shih-Chieh Huang, Richard Pell, Mark Shepard and Pamela Z. Continue reading

Mark Shepard Leads Serendipitous Walk in Louisville

Mark Shepard (2009 Emerging Fields), one of the five artists who presented with Creative Capital President Ruby Lerner at IdeaFestival in September, led a group of festival-goers on a meandering walk through downtown Louisville using the Serendipitor smart-phone app that he developed. Here’s Mark’s great description of the app: “In the near-future, finding our way from point A to point B will not be the problem. Maintaining consciousness of what happens along the way might be more difficult. Serendipitor is an alternative navigation app for the iPhone that helps you find something by looking for something else. Continue reading