Women at Work on the Business of Art: A Profile of Women Across the Continent Who Make Art Work for Them

Spring 2004 Issue

“We have it in us to be splendid!”
Maya Angelou

If statements coming from government budget committees in Washington, DC, Albany, NY, or Sacramento, CA, are your main source of arts information, you might not realize the business of art is alive and thriving in communities spread across the continent.

In large and small communities as disparate as Miami, FL, and Bear River, Nova Scotia, arts businesses are providing women with opportunities to create, travel and live the lives they want to live.

Although these women, themselves, are often artmakers, they also, in every instance, make art work for them. They are successful at the business of art, they are impressive at the art of business, and they all have it in them to, as Maya said, “be splendid.”

The antithesis of Valley Girls, Lynne and Academia are veteran composers and musicians. They manage their own careers, teach business practices to artists, have rich lives that incorporate mentoring and mentors, and share a strong entrepreneurial streak. Visitors to their individual Web sites, however, will immediately realize the two artspreneurs could not be more unlike.

Lynne’s Web site is awash in sea shades of aquamarine and pictures her sitting, clothed in gauze, on a beach next to a golden harp. A brooding Academia is pictured on her site in hot magenta against a black background. The pictures say it all.

Dark and exotic, Eleanor Academia teaches martial arts to Navy Seals, is an expert on traditional Kulintang (gong/drum ensemble music of the Southern Philippines ), has gyrated her way through Europe and Asia as a hard rock Sony/Epic star, and has performed on the MTV Awards Show. She is glamorous, funny, tough, and says of her experiences as a martial arts instructor for the Marines and Greek kickboxers, “A punch is a punch and has no gender.”

Although Academia attended the University of Southern California as a music major on full scholarship, her formal training also involved more than 20 years of private tutelage in Kulintang with one of the few Kulintang masters still living in the Philippines .

In 1994, she produced the first recording of Kulintang music in the world and was the first artist to use the ancient art of bronze gongs with heavy metal rock guitars on a rock album, “Oracle of the Black Swan.”

Academia’s rock career began as both a performer and producer under the umbrella of Columbia Records and Epic/Sony. Her two solo albums gave her a #1 Billboard Hit on the U.S. charts and also earned her a #1 spot on the charts in Germany . This success enabled her to build her own professional 24-track recording studio, called Studio vk.E.o, and to start her own independent label, Black Swan Records.

Academia also owns and operates her own publishing company, Elohim Music, an enterprise that adds to the royalty checks she already receives regularly from Japan, Germany and other countries where her music is played. As she says, “It’s a hard day’s walk” when she takes her morning stroll to her mailbox to pick up TV, radio and film royalty checks from around the globe.

The Black Swan, whose stated philosophy is “evolve or die,” has just finished producing and mastering a new solo album, “When U Live.” Together with some of the greatest rock artists of the era, including Steve Smith, former drummer for Journey, Academia provides lead vocals and plays keyboard on the new release. A new remix of her earlier album, “Adventure,” will shortly be released in Germany . The sultry independent producer now envisions a mailbox filled with envelopes from Berlin and Munich .

To say the least, Lisa Lynne is more ethereal in appearance than Academia. She produces original music on the Celtic harp, and is the first musician-in-residence at the City of Hope Cancer Treatment Center, where she developed a “hands on harps” therapy program for cancer patients.

An inspiring performer, Lynne hopes one day to take the City of Hope medical staff and patients to Chicago to serenade Oprah. It is probably no accident that her record titles have names like “Celestial Winds” and “Love & Peace” or that her record labels have names like New Earth and Lavender Sky.

As a self-taught musician who started playing rock and roll in local bars, Lynne moved from guitar, electric bass, and mandolin to Celtic harp. Ultimately, she developed her Web site and mail order business, and by the time she had sold a half-million albums, she had a Windham Hill contract and a back catalog of recordings that is still valuable.

With management tools such as poster-size calendars that allow her to track her work patterns over five-year periods, Lynne bases her career decisions on the stories her calendars tell her. With one glance, she gets a clear picture of what worked and didn’t work in 1999 or 2001. Focused on results, she says “Every single day, I do at least one thing, no matter how small, that takes me closer to my goals.”

“My key word is ‘today,’” she says. “What can I do today to move my business forward?”

Her home-based business employs her mother and her sister, an office assistant, a contract booking agent, a live show assistant, and from time-to-time, photographers, manufacturers and designers.

Since her audience is primarily female, she tends to work with, and listen to, women who serve as almost an in-house focus group. She estimates that 90 percent of the material on her CDs is original work, although she occasionally produces a traditional Celtic or Renaissance piece. Her most recent recording, “Hopes and Dreams” reached #6 on the Billboard New Age Music charts and was #4 overall on the retail chart for hip and trendy Central New York.

Lynne realizes she has the best of both worlds. She has a major label that promotes her work and ensures radio play, as well as her own small label, Lavender Sky Music.

Marketed on her Web site and at live concerts, Lavender Sky Music benefits from the notoriety she receives from work positioned on the chartsbetween Metallica and rapper 50 Cent. By blending 70’s rock with Celtic and Renaissance influences, Lynne manages to touch a lot of age groups and satisfy tastes major labels seldom target. She finds it significant that her new work, “Hopes and Dreams,” is a compilation of lullabies she wrote for ailing patients at the City of Hope .

“So many fine artists only get rejection, but they are just going down the same tired, beaten paths,” Lynne says. “They have to find new paths.”

On the Streets of Miami

Tina Spiro thinks — and paints — big.

A protégée and student of famed sculptor David Smith and Spanish/Israeli painter Mati Larwein, Spiro’s fearless thought processes and comfort level with scope and depth are reflected in “The Shekkinah Scrolls.” An 80-foot long multi-media work that took two and a half years to complete, with a tabernacle 36 feet in diameter, the “Scrolls” combine image and text scribed by women. Throughout the work, Spiro used the powers of the Hebrew alphabet as a device to narrate the Kabalistic story of the creation of the universe.

Still, the “Shekkinah Scrolls” are modest in size (if not in scope) when compared with Spiro’s current project.

Her latest work covers a 39-square-block area of downtown Miami . Following completion of all the complex phases involved in transforming a large chunk of Miami real estate, she may return to collecting and curating Caribbean art for the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, the FW Mestre Collection in Miami, or for individual collectors in Dominica, Florida, and the Bahamas .

Like most artists, Spiro generates most of her income not from the sale of monumental artworks, but from art related activities she develops to support her more ambitious projects.

Her luminous gallery paintings, many of which mirror the verdant, luscious Jamaican countryside where she made her home for several decades, are more modest in scale and price. These paintings, often dealing with the theme of “transcendence as an alternative to extinction,” can be purchased at Westwood Gallery in New York City .

An artist who has chosen to satisfy her passion rather than chase a conventional definition of success, Spiro has never considered an alternative career. Art and the various related arts businesses she created (collector for collectors, gallery owner, educator) have provided her with the life she wanted to have in the places she wanted to live.

Perhaps the conventional definition of success should incorporate fewer stocks and bonds and more travel to exotic places, a beautiful home in the blue-green hills of Jamaica, and a painting in downtown Miami that covers 39 square blocks.

Along the Evangeline Trail

The notion of distance between locations has changed fundamentally since the arrival of e-mail, inexpensive telephone calls, and global marketing campaigns. On one level, small towns in Nova Scotia are functionally as near as your computer and on another, at least 200 years away and back in time.

The heart of Nova Scotia ’s Evangeline Trail winds along the southwestern tip of the province. In many villages along the French Shore or in the fishing towns shaped by the dramatic tides of the Bay of Fundy, time stands still, French and English co-exist, land and sea merge, and arts businesses are as commonplace as diners featuring fresh scallops and haddock cakes.

Women own many of these businesses, all part of the sector that in Atlantic Canada alone accounts for more than $2 billion in annual sales and revenue and even in the sparsely populated Maritimes employs more than 175,000 people.

Directories listing hundreds of Nova Scotian artists and art businesses fill the shelves of bookstores in Digby and Annapolis and Yarmouth . Although the fishing industry supported Nova Scotians for hundreds of years, these days, visitors to the small Atlantic province can find galleries, studios and craft festivals more often than they can see active scallop fishermen or lobstermen.

Cod may have been “fished out” by local and foreign fishermen, and lobster may now be trapped by quota, but contemporary artists, importers, heritage galleries, Grou Tyme Acadian Festivals, pageants, and live theatre all flourish from May through October in the land of the Mi’kmaq. A disproportionate number of these arts businesses are owned and operated by women.

Cindy Wilson is one many women business owners in Nova Scotia who designed her business to accommodate both her passion for art and her passion for travel to warm weather climates.

Her six-year-old business, Far-Fetched, houses one of the finest collections of Vietnamese paintings, Buddhist art, and antique Balinese and Chinese furniture in North America . In the picturesque but unlikely village of Annapolis Royal, tucked away on one of the town’s three side streets, Cindy and her husband, Tom, have mysteriously found a clientele for the art and artifacts they bring back each year from their buying trips to Myanmar, Shanghai, Laos, Bali, and places in between.

Although Cindy is the sole proprietor and the DOE (Director of Everything),

Tom is very involved in the nuts and bolts of their (for Nova Scotia ) unconventional business. Clearly the child of both their dreams and a mutual desire to forego a life “written” by others, Far Fetched opens its doors in June with a fresh supply of artwork from Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and China . It closes at the end of October, just in time for the Wilsons to head for Thailand or some other tropical location where the kayaking is good and the art trade is well established.

In Thailand or Indonesia, the Wilsons go to remote villages to commission work from local artists at a true grassroots level. If they have to deal with rogue governments as they sometimes do in countries like Myanmar and Cambodia, they do everything they can to make sure their money goes into artists’ pockets rather than to middlemen and government brokers.

Although no banker reviewing a business plan would consider Nova Scotia a promising market for original Asian art, Wilson finds that a third of her customers come from the Annapolis Valley region. The Annapolis area has more Victorian homes than are found in most other areas of the country, and antique Chinese furniture and art are very compatible with Victoriana.

The balance of her clientele is made up of tourists, almost all of whom visit Nova Scotia between June and September. Thus, the business plan for Far Fetched requires Cindy and Tom to actually be in Nova Scotia less than six months a year.

It’s difficult to say how much their gallery’s success depends upon Far Fetched products and how much it depends upon the joyful personalities of the Far Fetched proprietors. Certainly, the Wilsons get a lot of repeat business from customers who simply want to hang out with the direct descendent of Nova Scotia ’s first Black Loyalists. In many ways, Far Fetched is like the home of a collector who can scarcely bear to part with even one of his treasures. Their appreciation for the artwork they sell is contagious and seductive.

Wilson ’s favorite quote, “Work like you don’t need the money, love like you’ve never been hurt, and dance like no one is watching” might appropriately be posted above the beautiful carvings near the front door of Far Fetched. It reflects an attitude that, to a large extent, accounts for the unpredictable success of an Asian Art Gallery in Annapolis Royal .

Carving Their Own Special Niche in the World

Nova Scotia’s arts business owners, women and men, deserve to have volumes written about them.

With little support from the government, a depressed economy that is now historic, climactic conditions that at least five months of the year can be best described as brutal, and even geographic isolation from the heart and heat of Canada, it would not be surprising if both art and business in Nova Scotia failed to prosper.

But, just as it has in California and Ohio and Florida, small business has saved Nova Scotia ’s economy. Between 1989 and 1999, firms with one hundred or more employees represented 61 percent of the total job losses for Atlantic Canada. At the same time, Nova Scotia’s small to medium-sized businesses were responsible for 95 percent of all new employment.

Employers and business owners such as Bear River ’s Zoe Onysko, Judy Robicheau and her partner, stone painter Rob Buckland-Nicks, and craftsmen Phyllis and Robert Woods are typical of Nova Scotian artspreneurs who have continued to make business from art during very challenging economic times.

Many artists’ studios and galleries are located in Bear River . Often called the “Switzerland of Nova Scotia,” the small and tranquil village is set alongside a winding river that runs about 15 miles from the saltwater coastal village of Smith ’s Cove inland to sleepy South Milford . Houses built in the 1800s perch on stilts over the river in the center of the tiny town, and several of those structures house artists whose work is shown and sold throughout Canada .

Oddacity Designs, one of the most unusual businesses in Bear River, is owned by “recycling” artist Zoe Onysko. Admittedly someone who cannot bear to throw away one square inch of silk, velvet or lace, Onysko designs one-of-a-kind clothing, hats that make your knees weak, fun jewelry, and witty glass sculpture. Aimed toward customers who believe “being interesting is better than being rich,” everything in Onysko’s shop is sold at affordable wholesale prices.

One of Onysko’s most whimsical designs is her bright blue store with the yellow sunburst. Covered with lyrics from Bob Dylan songs, the store often has tourists lined up, singing Dylan lyrics (“the sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken”). As she says, Oddacity is “not the place to buy souvenir t-shirts or lobster key rings, or to get your ego stroked by paying too much.”

Still, if you’re in Bear River, Nova Scotia, and you want to lift your spirits, it’s a great stop for anyone willing to “read the writing on the wall.”

Judy Robicheau is one of nine children local business legends Ricki and Raymond Robicheau produced at the same time they were developing their own businesses on Brier Island . Part owner of Flight of Fancy, an upscale gallery located next door to Oddacity Designs, Judy’s career took as many turns and twists as the careers of her six sisters, one of whom currently captains fishing boats in Western Canada.

A study in Maritime entrepreneurism, all the Robicheau offspring grew up working the cash register and stocking shelves in the only general store on Brier Island, a small but beautiful bit of rocky land at the end of Digby Neck. Today, four of the grown Robicheau daughters are involved in enterprises that involve the sale of local or imported art.

Although Judy, together with artist Rob Buckland-Nicks, has finally settled near the gallery they own in Bear River, she has traveled extensively around Canada . She also spent several years in Hawaii, but appears to have found a haven in Nova Scotia ’s answer to Switzerland ..

“We live in the most beautiful setting I can imagine,” she says. “Wherever I go, I always compare it to our home on Kniffen Hollow Road overlooking the river. The new place always comes up short.”

The most conventional and most upscale gallery in the region, Flight of Fancy carries art created primarily by Nova Scotian artists. Two of the gallery’s most popular artists, Phyllis and Robert Woods, have sold their work through the “downtown” Bear River venue, although they themselves own and operate Raven Winds Studios.

Like Judy Robicheau, Phyllis Woods says, “I couldn’t find another place I’d rather live.”

“We were looking for a community of like-minded souls where we felt we could be ourselves,” Woods explains. “ Bear River, more than any other place, fulfilled our hopes. There are craftsmen here with whom we can brainstorm and, even more important, there are many strong women in the area who are conscious of, and support, one another.”

Like Far Fetched, Raven Winds Studios is partially dependent upon the tourist trade. But, increasingly, Phyllis Woods has found that more and more Nova Scotians appreciate and support the netsuke-like tegua nut and hardwood boxes she creates.

Cindy Wilson, Zoe Onysko, and Phyllis Woods all started their businesses in order to achieve an independent life style.

“We try to live a lifestyle based on simplicity and integrity,” Woods says. “We spend a little of each day walking around our gardens. We make time for good friends and good books. We live in a beautiful house and studio we built ourselves. We get to make our own choices, and we have more than I ever dreamed of having. Sometimes, I just shake my head and marvel at the world that opened up to us once we made the decision to leave Southern Ontario .”

Woods has a quote she hands to visitors on a small card. It reads, “Chop wood and carry water every day.” The discipline seems to have served her, her business, and her family well.

“The first year we started our business, we decided to do second-hand gift giving at Christmas,” Woods says. “We wrapped records, books, and other small treasures and put them under the tree for our girls. I worried they would miss getting and buying new gifts. However, when our business did better and we suggested returning to ‘normal’ gift giving, they were too excited about shopping for inexpensive, second-hand gifts and too pleased with the gifts we found for them to give up the ‘new’ custom.”

“We realized then that the new custom represented our lifestyle perfectly.”

Redefining the Meaning, and the Boundaries, of Success

Although the definition of success in the United States and even in most urban areas of Canada often implies the presence of financial wealth and property, Webster defines it differently: “Success is a person or thing that prospers.” Within that framework, women artists and arts business owners across the continent appear to have the brass ring at their fingertips.

They are living life on their own terms, living where they want to live, and managing time better than most well-known gurus of time management. These amazing women from California, Miami, and Nova Scotia, as well as the men who support their art, adventures and dreams, have found a way to generate income through businesses no Harvard MBA would ever consider feasible.

Coco Chanel said, “There is time for work. There is time for love. There is no other time.”

Had she known Cindy Wilson, she might have added, “There is always time for art for women workers and lovers who have it ‘in them to be splendid.’”

Judith Luther Wilder is president of The Center for Cultural Innovation (www.cci2002.org) in Culver City, CA . She can be contacted at JudithALW@aol.com

(This article is reprinted from the Spring 2004 edition of Enterprising Women magazine. Copyright 2004 Enterprising Women Inc.  Reproduction in whole or part is prohibited, except by express permission of the publisher.)