Frances Pollock was drawn to the arts from a young\u00a0age.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She found that the arts \u2014 especially music \u2014 allowed her to make sense of the contradictions, and even messiness, of\u00a0life.<\/p>\n
\u201cGrowing up, I found that the world wants to put you in boxes,\u201d said Pollock, \u201919 M.M., \u201925 D.M.A. \u201cThe box I was born into didn\u2019t work for me, and if I had stayed in my boxes, I would be an entirely different person. The way I escaped from my boxes was through art. Art breaks all of that\u00a0open.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pollock doesn\u2019t just mean that symbolically. She also means it strategically and economically. She started to break open more boxes herself when she was given the opportunity to join the Yale School of Music as a master\u2019s student in 2017. A composer by training, she was interested in both creating music and\u00a0exploring ways in which an artist could make the often-precarious career in art more\u00a0sustainable.<\/p>\n
Eventually, Pollock and eight other collaborators in 2020 launched the Midnight Oil Collective<\/a> (MOC) to tackle those very issues. Founded, owned, and managed entirely by artists, the venture capital fund helps artists and arts-based institutions develop financially sustainable models that help them maintain greater control over their work and\u00a0profits.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what led Pollock to start working with Yale Ventures, a university initiative that supports Yale\u2019s innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, connecting faculty, students, staff, and community innovators through innovation programming, intellectual property and licensing resources, business development, partnerships, mentorship, and\u00a0events.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I started to understand the ways in which the university could be a catalyst for cultural\u00a0changes, I desperately wanted to be a part of that conversation,\u201d she\u00a0said.<\/p>\n Pollock is now bringing that conversation to an even wider audience as the inaugural director of the university\u2019s new Cultural Innovation Lab<\/a>. After three years of building alongside Yale Ventures, the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD), and MOC, the Cultural Innovation Lab<\/a> will be an applied research and development lab that develops practical solutions to ethical and structural challenges in cultural\u00a0production.<\/p>\n \u201cArts innovation at Yale and across Connecticut is a vibrant, essential part of our innovation ecosystem,\u201d said Josh Geballe, \u201997, \u201902 M.B.A., managing director of Yale Ventures and senior associate provost for entrepreneurship and innovation at Yale University. \u201cWe\u2019re proud to serve as the home for the Cultural Innovation Lab and look forward to seeing the impact it will have across\u00a0Connecticut.\u201d<\/p>\n The lab will leverage the university\u2019s legacy as a beacon of the arts and humanities to make the cultural sector more sustainable, creative, and accountable \u2014 at a time when artists, scholars, and institutions are confronting economic precarity and societal\u00a0change.<\/p>\n \u201cAs much as the humanities need business, business needs the humanities, too,\u201d said Pollock, who is also a venture advisor at the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (Tsai CITY). \u201cOtherwise, we\u2019re not actually enacting a world that is kind and gentle and humane in a way that is building the type of world we all want to be a part\u00a0of.\u201d<\/p>\n Like art itself, the Cultural Innovation Lab is a work-in-progress. But it will have three core pillars: incubation, the \u201cbrain trust,\u201d and capital architecture. Thanks to $1.7 million in funding from the state\u2019s DECD, the lab will launch a multi-year accelerator program for arts and culture projects that are ambitious, intellectual property-driven, and scalable. Think Y Combinator<\/a> \u2014 a prestigious accelerator for tech startups \u2014 but for the\u00a0arts.<\/p>\n \u201cConnecticut\u2019s creative sector is a vital part of our economy, and the Cultural Innovation Lab represents an exciting new way to nurture its growth,\u201d said Liz Shapiro, director of arts, preservation, and museums with the Connecticut DECD. \u201cBy giving our artists, scholars, and creative entrepreneurs the same kind of support available to other industries, we are investing in both cultural vitality and economic opportunity for our\u00a0state.\u201d<\/p>\n The accelerator\u2019s first cohort is designed around Connecticut-based theaters like the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford and the Theater Works in New Milford \u2014 and for good reason. The state has a long history of incubating acclaimed musicals including \u201cAnnie,\u201d \u201cMan of La Mancha,\u201d and \u201cIn the\u00a0Heights.\u201d<\/p>\n The accelerator will help even more culture makers launch brands and companies that reach similar global audiences, leaders\u00a0say.<\/p>\n \u201cThe arts can be a primary driver of economic development in the same way that tech or biomedical engineering are for the state [of Connecticut],\u201d Pollock\u00a0said.<\/p>\n In addition to incubation, the lab launched three think tanks this year as spaces for artists, scholars, and civic leaders to confront tough questions about ethics, power, and public trust in cultural work. This includes the launch of two think tanks this past fall \u2014 one on public-facing scholarship and one on civics, activism, and the arts and humanities \u2014 and one this spring on opera as playground for\u00a0disruption.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I really wanted to do was make sure that we always had a place where we could bring together leaders and experts in different fields and different spaces to really guide the trajectory of what the lab was doing,\u201d Pollock\u00a0said.<\/p>\n Finally, the lab will reimagine the role of capital within the arts and humanities, rethinking how money enters, supports, and sustains cultural work while deliberately softening the line between artist and executive. Rather than relying exclusively on philanthropy or short-term project funding, the lab is exploring pathways that align capital with artistic agency, long-term value creation, and ethical stewardship, including collaborations with leaders like\u00a0James Rhee<\/a>, an entrepreneur, author, and the lab\u2019s inaugural artist-in-residence whose work challenges the assumption that creative and executive identities must be\u00a0separate.<\/p>\n Like her work with the MOC, Pollock thinks it\u2019s essential to put capital and control in the hands of artists themselves through the new\u00a0lab.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you look beneath the hood of cultural production in almost any field, what you\u2019re going to see is a lot of outdated and ossified production models,\u201d she said. \u201cAn artist doesn\u2019t want their work to feel cheapened, but, at the same time, they don\u2019t want their work to sit on a hard drive\u00a0either.\u201d<\/p>\n On Jan. 15, the Cultural Innovation Lab \u2014 in collaboration with the Yale School of Music and the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale \u2014 will host a showcase featuring\u00a0Red Helicopter: An American Rock Opera, a stage adaptation of James Rhee\u2019s bestselling book that explores leadership, kindness, and systems change through music.\u00a0Register here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Frances Pollock was drawn to the arts from a young\u00a0age.\u00a0 She found that the arts \u2014 especially music…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":421229,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":["post-421228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/421229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}