Oklahoma Creativity Forum Announces World-renowned Speakers

Oklahoma Creativity Forum 2012 LogoOKLAHOMA CITY, OKLA. (May 15, 2012) – Creative Oklahoma announces the one-day Oklahoma Creativity Forum 2012 will be held on Tuesday, November 13 at the Cox Convention Center in downtown Oklahoma City.

Keynote speakers include internationally recognized creativity and education leader and author, Sir Ken Robinson, and Chairman and CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation, Peter Diamandis. “The forum is a rare opportunity to learn from some of the world’s foremost innovative leaders,” said Susan McCalmont, president of Creative Oklahoma. “The Oklahoma Creativity Forum 2012 will bring internationally renowned speakers together with Oklahoma practitioners for a dynamic conversation about how to become a more creative individual and make your school, workplace, or community a thriving environment for ideas and innovation.”

Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D. is one of the world’s leading speakers with a profound impact on audiences everywhere. An estimated 200 million people in over 150 countries have seen the videos of his famous 2006 and 2010 talks at the prestigious TED Conference. His book, “The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything,” is a New York Times best seller and has been translated into twenty-one languages. His latest book is a 10th anniversary edition of his classic work on creativity and innovation, “Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative.” Robinson is also the founding advisor to Creative Oklahoma.

Dr. Peter Diamandis is the Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, a non-profit focused on designing and launching large incentive prizes to drive radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.  Diamandis is an international leader in the commercial space arena, having founded and run many of the leading entrepreneurial companies in this sector.  Diamandis is also the New York Times bestselling author of “Abundance – The Future Is Better Than You Think.”

Registration for the Oklahoma Creativity Forum 2012 will be available soon at stateofcreativity.com.

Creative Oklahoma also announces a Pre-Forum professional development workshop on November 12, 2012 that will be available to a limited number of registrants. The workshop will feature the Creative Oklahoma Experts in Residence, a group of nine Oklahoma academicians and practitioners in creativity and innovation. The workshop consists of four 90-minute in-depth sessions on creativity and innovation principles and how to apply those principles to your organization or business. Registration will be available July 1, 2012.

McCalmont added that Creative Oklahoma has year-round initiatives that encourage innovation in Oklahoma. The State of Creativity Awards program includes: Creative SPARKS!, awarding grants to Oklahoma students and their schools; Great Inspirations, recognizing inspiring past or current innovations by Oklahomans that contribute to the greater good; Oklahoma Innovation Prize, sponsored by SandRidge Energy, is a new award granting cash prizes to high school, college, and post-college youth for new ideas or innovations that address needs in the community, state, nation, or world. The Oklahoma Creativity Ambassador program honors nationally and internationally known Oklahomans for their creative contributions.

Other initiatives include the launch of the Oklahoma Innovation Challenge Index, a cross-sector project to investigate the creative inputs into Oklahoma K-12 education; the Oklahoma Creative Communities project, a creative-problem-solving initiative for Oklahoma rural communities; and the Oklahoma ArtScience Prize, a high-school after-school program using collaborative, aspirational thinking to resolve global issues. Additionally, Creative Oklahoma has been instrumental in changing public perceptions of Oklahoma through the national public television documentary series, ReCreating America, by award-winning producer David Kennard; educational workshops and webinars with renowned creativity experts; creation of the National Creativity Network, a network of 15 creative districts in the US and Canada; and representation as the only North American region in the 14 member international Districts of Creativity Network.

About Creative Oklahoma:
Formed in 2006, Creative Oklahoma is a statewide non-profit organization advancing Oklahoma’s creative economy through creativity and innovation based initiatives in education, commerce and culture. The mission is to transform the state of Oklahoma through projects and collaborative ventures that help develop a more entrepreneurial and vibrant economy and an improved life quality for its citizens. For more information please visit stateofcreativity.com.

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Media Contact:
Meg Jackson at 405.232.5573
meg@stateofcreativity.com

Small Oklahoma town leverages NEA funds to install sculpture by world-renowned artist

Via artdaily.org

Chickasha, a rural Oklahoma town of 16,500, turned a $10,000 NEA Community Fast Track grant into a sculpture project worth $80,000. Photo courtesy of Karen Brady, Chickasha Leader.

 

CHICKASHA, OK.- On April 16, 2012, a 1,500 pound, stainless steel sculpture by renown sculptor, Archie Held was installed at the entrance of the community’s historic depot. The official dedication of the sculpture will be September 28, 2012 during the community’s arts festival.

Chickasha, a rural Oklahoma town of 16,500, turned a $10,000 NEA Community Fast Track grant into a sculpture project worth $80,000 through various avenues of community and state support. Thanks to the vision and commitment of the Chickasha Area Arts Council, the Chickasha community and several partnerships, the two-year project is now complete.

“When I read of museums, galleries, colleges installing large-scale sculptures, it almost feels like having public art is out of reach for a small community,” Chickasha Public Art Project Director Julie Bohannon said, “And, as an art advocate from a rural area, I struggled to see how public art can be brought into a community with reduced resources.”

Bohannon and other members of the Arts Council were involved in community planning activities and made the vital connections within the city government and city council. These connections led to partnerships that allowed the Arts Council to install two public art projects funded in part by the Oklahoma Arts Council and the City of Chickasha.

The art installations and community partnerships provided the confidence for the council to apply for NEA Community Fast Track grant.

In 2010, the Chickasha Area Arts Council received the only NEA community grant given to Oklahoma in the form of a $10,000 award. It was immediately leveraged with state arts council funds, city funds, local and regional foundation grants. The Chickasha community supplied in-kind donations for concrete, artist housing and construction management services for the site preparation.

“I met Archie Held when he worked with the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma [USAO] to install wonderful pieces in front of the college’s library. I felt that he had the wonderful ability to capture a ‘sense of place’ within a beautifully graceful form. When I asked if he would be the grant project’s design lead, I was delighted when he agreed to participate,” Bohannon said.

Completing the design team were emerging Oklahoma artists, Eric Baker, Dustin Boise, and Kolbe Roper who provided additional design elements to be integrated in the second installment phase of the around the sculpture. Cecil Lee, Emeritus Professor of Art at USAO provided the team historical and cultural context for the sculpture’s design and setting.

“I wanted the sculpture to be dynamic and to speak to the community,” said Held, “I hope the piece will become a focal point for the establishment of an arts district in the downtown area.”

Held is an internationally recognized artist who has been creating sculpture since the 1970s. Held works primarily in bronze and stainless steel and in 2006, Art in America’s juried competition named his piece “Burden Basket” one of the top twenty public art pieces in America. His sculptures are found in many public, corporate, and private collections throughout the world.

More Information: http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=54996[/url]
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Where does that creative spark come from?

BY BROOKE DONALD – Standford University News

In her new book, Tina Seelig provides tools and techniques to enhance creativity in individuals, teams and organizations.


Tina Seelig teaches people how to get their creative juices flowing. She’s done this for the past dozen years with students at Stanford and at companies around the world.

Now, in a new book, she compiles her lessons for the rest of us – using exercises from her classroom, studies from scholars, guidance from innovative colleagues and her own insights.

The book, inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity, does not provide a 10-step list of what to do to be creative – such as painting your office blue or moving the restroom to the center of your building. Seelig says those kinds of lists only lead to disappointment.

Rather, chapter-by-chapter it explains specific tools, techniques and conditions that together enhance creativity in individuals, teams and organizations.

Seelig offers a new model, called the “Innovation Engine,” to explain how ingenuity is generated and fostered.

“It is terribly frustrating to hear people describe themselves as not creative. If you consider it, each sentence we utter is a creative act,” Seelig said in a recent interview. “We need to look at every problem, every product and every moment in our lives as an opportunity for creativity.”

By doing this, Seelig says, we are better equipped to tackle problems at home, work, school and in our communities.

“The world is filled with challenges. With enhanced creativity, we can look at those problems as opportunities,” she said.

Graduate student Victoire Lejzerzon takes notes on the whiteboard during an exercise.

Seelig began writing this latest book two years ago, but her interest in the origins of creativity stretch back to her time as a doctoral student in neuroscience at the Stanford School of Medicine. There, she was interested in the neurological underpinnings of creativity.

After completing her studies, she wanted to see how creativity worked “in the wild.” She worked as a management consultant, multimedia producer and entrepreneur.

Seelig is now the executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program in the Department of Management Science and Engineering. The program helps students across campus learn the skills needed to bring their ideas to life.

She also co-directs the Mayfield Fellows Program with Tom Byers, a professor of management science and engineering, and teaches a course on creativity and innovation at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the d.school) with Leticia Britos and Rich Cox.

The creativity course is essentially a laboratory. Students run through simulations or experiments aimed at finding solutions to a wide variety of problems or creating interesting new opportunities.

Recently students did a case study focused on the circus industry. They examined all of the assumptions of a traditional circus and then turned those upside down. They saw how Cirque du Soleil used a similar approach to reinvent the circus industry.

Once the students learned these techniques, they used them to challenge assumptions in a wide variety of cases, including assessment of student learning.

Seelig’s approach to unlocking creativity is a holistic one. Her “Innovation Engine” has six parts – three that come from inside of you (knowledge, imagination and attitude) and three that are generated by the environment in which you live (resources, culture and habitat).

From left, Victoire Lejzerzon, Titus Seah, Tina Seelig, and Ramprasath Palanisamy talk about the results of a group exercise in class.

“These are not isolated factors. You have to look at them in concert,” Seelig said.

Knowledge, she says, is the toolbox for your imagination; your imagination is the catalyst for the transformation of your knowledge into new ideas; and your attitude provides you with the drive needed to push through difficult problems.

Our habitats have a huge impact on this process, and we are deeply influenced by space, rules, rewards, resources and culture, Seelig says.

In her book, Seelig reminds us that children are uninhibited innovators, full of curiosity. They tap into their natural creativity all day long, as they find ways to make sense of the complicated world around them. They also spend time in stimulating environments, including preschools filled with toys.

But, Seelig writes, as we grow, “We give up playing and focus on producing, and we trade in our imagination in order to focus on implementation. Our attitude changes and our creative aptitude withers as we learn to judge and dismiss new ideas.”

Seelig provides tools for getting back the childhood sense of wonder and amusement. She also offers a lesson from her class to demonstrate that everything around us is ripe for innovation.

On the first day of class, Seelig asks the students to redesign a nametag. Current tags are difficult to read, don’t have relevant information and often hang awkwardly down around the wearer’s belt buckle.

When the students are done, Seelig asks them to think about the problem differently. “Why do we use name tags at all?” she says.

After a discussion in which they realize that nametags address a set of complex social problems, they are asked to design a new “introduction device.”

Students interview each other to learn how they want to engage with new people and how they want others to engage with them. These interviews provide insights that lead to new solutions. One team designed T-shirts with a mix of information about the wearer in both words and pictures. Another team created bracelets that communicate how each person is feeling.

“We all have creativity within us,” Seelig argues, “and there are endless opportunities to use it.

Media Contact

Tina Seelig, Stanford Technology Ventures Program: tseelig@stanford.edu

Brooke Donald, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-0224, brooke.donald@stanford.edu

Plenty to Go Around

‘Abundance,’ by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

By JON GERTNER – The New York Times

The past few years have been trying ones for the world’s optimists. In rapid succession, our global crises have ranged from the environmental to the economic — from tsunamis leveling entire regions of Asia and destroying seemingly impregnable nuclear reactors, to debt and unemployment crushing ostensibly healthy nations. Meanwhile, as the planet warms, ice caps melt, oceans acidify and dry regions desertify. To choose just one metric of doom, about 30 percent of the world’s fish populations have either collapsed or are on their way to collapse; to choose another, global carbon emissions rose by a record 5.9 percent in 2010, a worrisome development considering that the period was characterized by slow economic growth. (What happens when things start booming again?) I could go on, but you get the gist. It seems self-evident that things are getting worse, doesn’t it?

Well, maybe. In Silicon Valley, where the locals tend to be too busy starting companies to wallow in gloom, Peter Diamandis has stood out as one of the more striking optimists. Several years ago, Diamandis founded the X Prize Foundation, which rewards entrepreneurs with cash for achieving difficult goals, like putting a reusable spaceship into flight on a limited budget. More recently he helped start Singularity University, an academic program that convenes several weeks a year in the Valley and educates business leaders about the “disruptive” — i.e., phenomenally innovative — technological changes Diamandis is anticipating. To be sure, Diamandis is both very bright (he studied molecular biology and aerospace engineering at M.I.T. before getting an M.D. at Harvard) and well informed. Moreover, he’s not the kind of optimist who will merely see the glass as half full. He’ll give you dozens of reasons, some highly technical, why it’s half full. Then he’ll explain that your cognitive biases are tricking you into seeing the glass of water in a negative light, and cart out the research of acclaimed psychologists like Daniel Kahne­man to prove his point. Finally he may suggest you stop fretting: new technologies will soon fill the glass up anyway. Indeed, they are likely to overfill it.

I don’t mean to fault this disposition. Our future depends on optimists like Diamandis, and his new book, “Abundance,” written with the journalist Steven Kotler, is an enthusiastic take on what’s to come. To Diamandis — though the book is co-­written, it’s narrated in his voice — the state of the world is in fact much better than it appears and will soon get even better. “Humanity,” he says early on, “is now entering a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman and child on the planet.”

His thesis rests on a four-legged stool. The first idea is that our technologies in computing, energy, medicine and a host of other areas are improving at such an exponential rate that they will soon enable breakthroughs we now barely think possible. Second, these technologies have empowered do-it-yourself innovators to achieve startling advances — in vehicle engineering, medical care and even synthetic biology — with scant resources and little manpower, so we can stop depending on big corporations or national laboratories. Third, technology has created a generation of techno-philanthropists (think Bill Gates) who are pouring their billions into solving seemingly intractable problems like hunger and disease. And finally, we have what Diamandis calls “the rising billion.” These are the world’s poor, who are now (thanks again to technology) able to lessen their burdens in profound ways. “For the first time ever,” Diamandis says, “the rising billion will have the remarkable power to identify, solve and implement their own abundance solutions.”

Diamandis and Kotler have written a frequently interesting and sometimes uplifting book. There are a number of ideas in “Abundance” that even devoted followers of technological trends may find new and reifying. The authors’ tutorial on the declining costs of solar panels and power storage, for instance, makes a nearly airtight case for clean energy’s imminent economic and environmental effects. And did you know that robotic surgeons — first developed for soldiers during battle, now used to help with knee-replacement surgeries — may be adapted to perform simple and urgent procedures in developing countries where doctors are scarce? Or that “vertical farms” within cities have a real potential to provide vegetables and fruits to local consumers on a mass scale? I didn’t.

Especially encouraging here is how the authors’ vision for the world’s poor — better medical care, clean water, more food, more education, all possible with the various technological tools we now have or soon will have — adds up to a deeply humanistic case. By a future of abundance, they do not mean luxury. They mean a future that will be “providing all with a life of possibility.”

Still, it’s worth making a distinction. “Abundance” is not so much a report on the future as it is an argument for the potentiality of the future. And there is, so to speak, an abundance of problems in such an approach. To his credit, Diamandis acknowledges the magnitude of our global problems; and he hints, in places, at the complexity of overcoming them. Yet many new technological developments are presented here without the ballast of specific scientific, or economic, skepticism. Will we regularly “3-D print” human organs in the near future, just as laser printers now zip out documents? Will a revolutionary new generation of nuclear power plants actually be marketed by 2030?

The authors, keen on extrapolations, often show a casual disregard for what California’s venture capitalists, an equally optimistic bunch, describe respectfully as the “Valley of Death.” This term refers to the difficult, cash-starved terrain a new start-up and its technology must travel through to survive. Usually they fail. In California and elsewhere, it’s never enough to make a breakthrough. The inventor or company must make something that succeeds technologically, economically and culturally on a large scale. Innovation, to put it another way, harmonizes closely with market acceptance and impact. Thus when Diamandis tells us about a water purification technology developed by the inventor Dean Kamen, we’re led to believe it’s an imminent leap forward and are told only later that the technology is still far too expensive for widespread adoption. In this instance, and several others in the book, the take-away is not quite convincing.

More problematic, I think, is the authors’ glorification of small groups over large ones. There’s a curious absence of alarm over climate change in “Abundance,” perhaps because arresting its effects will necessitate not only a huge technological push but also the messy business of changing human behavior, radically altering government policies and brokering international accords. In other words, it doesn’t begin to fit into the authors’ paradigm of a problem that requires a D.I.Y. or techno-­philanthropic fix. (Nor does it appear to be a situation in which our glass-half-empty tendencies are leading us to an overly pessimistic view of the consequences. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center indicates that only 38 percent of Ameri­cans consider global warming a “very serious” problem.)

Throughout the book Diamandis never­theless offers small groups of driven entrepreneurs as a kind of Leatherman solution to the world’s problems. It’s true that plenty of insurgents are doing impressive things out there — Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors, which helped jump-start the world’s electric car industry, is a good example. But Diamandis neglects to point out that small and proficient groups also often function within the fertile confines of a larger corporation (Google, Apple, Intel, even General Motors) and thus draw on an enveloping pool of expertise in research, manufacturing and marketing.

At the same time, small groups tend to be good at starting things but aren’t equipped to finish things. Put another way, they can’t stay small if they want to scale up. That Diamandis’s X Prize Foundation awarded millions of dollars in 2007 to several inventors with car models that could achieve more than 100 miles per gallon does not implicitly prove the incompetence of companies like Ford and Toyota. To me, it merely adds to a conversation about the difficulty of moving away from cheap oil and of retooling the immensely complex global car industry, with its manufacturing challenges, liability issues and price-sensitive consumer markets. D.I.Y. folks don’t worry much about such things.

Regardless of the book’s short­comings, I’m fairly certain even the most skeptical readers will come away from “Abundance” feeling less gloomy. What’s more, anyone contemplating the direction of our global society would do well to read and debate its arguments. The future may not turn out to be very bad, or even very good. We may just muddle through, with plenty of highs and lows, kind of as we’re doing now. Still, there’s a significant idea embedded within “Abundance”: We should remain aware, as writers like Jared Diamond have likewise told us, that societies can choose their own future, and thus their own fate. In that spirit Diamandis and Kotler put forth a range of possible goals we may achieve if we have the imagination and the will. A little optimism wouldn’t hurt, either.

 

Jon Gertner is an editor at Fast Company and the author of “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.”

 A version of this review appeared in print on April 1, 2012, on page BR18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Plenty to Go Around.

Lawton art exhibit features transformed musical instruments

Barbara Scott of Oklahoma City has art on display at the Leslie Powell Foundation and Gallery in Lawton. (Courtesy photo)

LAWTON – An exhibit featuring musical instruments transformed into works of art opened in January at the Leslie Powell Foundation and Gallery at 620 SW D Ave. in Lawton.

The exhibition includes a silent auction of the 14 works of art. All money from sales will be allocated to the Lawton Philharmonic Orchestra. No commissions from the sales go to the gallery and visitors can drop by and see the exhibit and other art on display at the gallery for free.

The gallery has six shows a year, all with free admission; awards scholarships and grants; is the site of concerts and lunch bag lectures; and has a meeting room that is available for use by groups.

All of it is free.

“We do not charge for anything,” said Nancy P. Anderson, executive director and curator of the Leslie Powell Foundation and Gallery. “We do not charge a commission when we sell a piece. I do not know of another gallery that does that.”

All of the operating expenses are provided by the foundation.

“I have been here 24 years and we decided from the start that we would not charge for anything,” Anderson said. “Groups can use the meeting room for free, but they cannot charge.”

Leslie Powell was born in 1906 in Kansas and spent his youth in Lawton after moving to Oklahoma with his family. Between 1923 and 1926, Powell studied art at the University of Oklahoma and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Later he studied at Columbia University.

As a painter, Powell traveled, but spent most of his time in New York showing his works at East Coast galleries and museums. He maintained his ties with Lawton over the years, often returning to paint in the Wichita Mountains.

He created the Municipal Arts Collection in Lawton in memory of his parents and created a trust to enrich cultural life. Powell died in 1979.

Powell was the only child of a pharmacist who was an original stockholder in Security Bank and Trust. When his father died, Leslie Powell inherited the bank interest, which became the basic financing for the Leslie Powell Trust. The Leslie Powell Foundation and Gallery operates on money provided by the trust, Anderson said.

“We are financed off the interest of the trust,” she said. “We are really fortunate and the community of Lawton is very fortunate that Leslie Powell did this for us.”

With events like the current exhibit featuring the musical instruments turned into works of art benefiting the Lawton Philharmonic Orchestra, the gallery enriches cultural life in Lawton and helps the community.

“We collaborated with the Lawton Philharmonic Orchestra for the exhibit,” Anderson said. “They rounded up 14 instruments and I found artists to transform them into pieces of art.”

The exhibit, “Instruments Transformed,” opened Jan. 7. Silent auction bidding will continue through April 14.

“We already have more than $5,000 in bids,” Anderson said.

Every two years the gallery sponsors a national, juried art show, Oklahoma: Centerfold.

“We call it the centerfold because if you open a Rand McNally map, Lawton is in the centerfold,” Anderson said.

The Oklahoma: Centerfold 2012 natural juried art show will be up at the gallery Nov. 3 to Dec. 31. Kristy Deetz, professor in the art discipline at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, will be the juror. Oklahoma: Centerfold will have more than $5,000 in prizes, including $3,000 for first place.

“It is a national show and a great deal of the art comes from the East and West coasts,” Anderson said.

For the last Oklahoma: Centerfold show, the Leslie Powell Gallery had 800 entries and selected 45 for the show.

The Leslie Powell Gallery also has shows in collaboration with the Lawton-Fort Sill Arts Council and the Museum of the Great Plains.

Anderson, a native of Idaho who moved to Lawton 30 years ago with her husband, has an art degree from Cameron University.

“I have been interested in art since the day I ate my first red crayon,” she said. “My dad’s family is all somehow affiliated with the arts.”

She has been executive director of the gallery since 1989.

“They were advertising for an executive director and curator and I applied,” she said. “It was serendipitous that I was in the right place at the right time.”