Each year, the On-Ramp Creative Entrepreneur Accelerator Program gathers Indiana artists for a workshop on networking, community engagement, and entrepreneurship. This summer, the fruit of that labor culminates in an exhibit staged by four area artists as part of the 2021 cohort.
Painters Joshua Bronaugh and Christina Robinson, metal worker Zak Will, and mixed media artist Sarah Wolfe joined 29 creators in May 2021 in Lafayette, Indiana, after being delayed a year due to COVID-19. The three-day program created in 2018 by the Indiana Arts Commission runs on a curriculum designed by Elaine Grogran Luttrull of Minerva Financial Arts to teach artists how to make a business out of their craft and provide them with $2,000 to put the lesson into action.
That action is on display in a for-profit exhibit through Aug. 26 in the Arts Council of Southwestern Indiana’s Bower-Suhrheinruch Foundation Gallery.
“I am highly inspired by music and have asked my audience to engage with me on this project by requesting they send me a song or two that is meaningful and inspiring to them,” says Robinson, an Evansville native. “I will display geometric abstract pieces inspired by audience feedback and song choice.”
Will, another Evansville resident who has begun incorporating wood into his intricate metal art, will display kinetic pieces, three live edge shelves, and a four-person interactive chess board. Wolfe’s work will focus on her anatomical series that explores the themes of “externalizing the internal and internalizing the external.”
“The highlight of the On-Ramp weekend was spending time with artists from many disciplines in all times of life,” says Wolfe, a Vincennes, Indiana resident. “While all of our goals are slightly different, pooling our in-kind resources means that we were able to use our funding more effectively.”
