Art Croft Creative Center Offers Refuge for Artists in Rural Kentucky

When people talk about the new economy today one of the topics you hear discussed quite frequently is creativity. Daniel Pink has written that Americans should cultivate the right side of their brain to flourish in the New Economy: "To flourish in this age, we'll need to supplement our well-developed high tech abilities with aptitudes that are "high concept" and "high touch." High concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to come up with inventions the world didn't know it was missing. High touch involves the capacity to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning."

Richard Florida, one of the leading thinkers on the New Economy, has posited that regions with a strong artsy feel are more likely to flourish than more traditional communities. (A thesis that has been somewhat controversial for some of its prescriptions, but one that nobody disputes at its core: namely that creativity is key to the new economy.)

And in an economy that’s increasingly splintered into a multitude of choices Chris Anderson showed us with his Long Tail thesis that when it comes to entertainment consumers “are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).” The upside of course is that cultural niches, like Appalachian art and culture, can now find markets in places that would have impossible previously.

Enter Art Croft Creative Center, a center dedicated to creativity and artists in Carlisle, Nicholas County, KY. According to their mission statement: “Artcroft’s mission is to provide direct support to the artist and the community. The residency program allows literary and visual artists a rural and serene environment in which to work creatively without distractions. Support to the community is via arts programming, collaborations, small venue presentations, and partnerships.” By utilizing the web the center tries to attract artists into the area to stay at their 400 acre rural farm. Once there the artists have carte blanche to work on the projects of their choosing.

The Art Croft is helping create the New Economy by giving stimulus to those right brain thinkers Daniel Pink described as being essential to a modern economy. And in the process they're extending the essential elements of Richard Florida's vision- a trendy, creative community as a basic ingredient for the New Economy- into the central highlands of Appalachian, KY.

A footnote: A founder of the Artcroft, Robert Barker, is a graduate of the Kentucky Entrepreneurial Coaches Institute, a program designed to help provide mentoring support to entrepreneurs in rural KY.