Come join the very first Creative Chats Conference!

Since January 2025, we’ve had over a dozen Creative Chats gatherings to get creative people face-to-face to mingle, hear a featured conversation on the topic of creativity and the creative life, and engage in the conversation themselves. Now it’s time to end the second season with something a little bigger!

The Creative Chats Conference will be on Thursday, June 4th from 12-4pm at the Mosesian Center for the Arts. Rather than the typical early Friday morning event with a single topic, the conference will be a 4 hour afternoon block which will have multiple speakers and allow for a thread to be pulled through multiple topics. I’m super excited to see this all come together!

Creative Chats are free and open to anyone interested in creativity! Come to get inspired, connect, and reflect.

Theme: How Do We Support a Healthy Local Arts Ecosystem?

As a group of artists (broadly defined) and art supporters, we will explore ideas and philosophies to help our local arts community thrive. There will be two interactive panels to drive the conversation. Each panel will feature an opening panel discussion around topics brought in by the panelists that touch on unique parts of the issue of building a healthy local arts ecosystem. Then we will split the audience into small groups and the panelists will spread out to those groups to discuss the topics more intimately. Finally, the panelists will come back together for a last panel discussion to talk about points that came up in the small group chats. 

The intention is that by the end of the afternoon, folks will leave with not only some inspiration and new connections, but also as a group we will have come up with a list of some actionable steps to move forward with. This will be aided by Sheri Kennedy, a local artist and graphic facilitator, who will graphically notate the panel discussions to provide us with some visual overviews and notes to see at the end of all the talking.

This event will be strengthened by the number and diversity of creatives that attend, so if you usually just listen to the Creative Chats episodes, please come out and join us! And invite your creative friends!

Details:

12pm-1230pm - Welcome and mingle

1230pm-2pm - Interactive Panel 1 - Money: How to Value Art, Get it Funded, and Connect with a Buying Audience (Featuring Cat Bennett, Matt Jatkola, and Jan Taylor)

Cat Bennett (Visual Artist and Teacher) - How can artists inspire the public to learn more about art and feel confident, even excited, about buying it?

Matt Jatkola (Associate Executive Director, Mosesian Center for the Arts) - How do we reinforce the value of art in a culture that often expects it to be cheap or free?

Jan Taylor (Fundraising Strategist & Consultant) - How do we fund art creatively?

2pm-230pm - Break

230pm-4pm - Interactive Panel 2 - Organization and Systems: How to Create Connections Between Artists With Other Artists and to Arts Organizers and How to Build Systems That Encourage a Diverse Array of Types of Art (Featuring Allie Fry, DeWitt Henry, Jan Taylor)

Allie Fry (Programming Librarian, Watertown Free Public Library) - How do we make it easier for artists to pitch their ideas (in the right way to the right places)?

DeWitt Henry (Writer and Watertown Lit Squad Organizer) - How do we garner attention for forms of art beyond the most popular local mediums? 

Jan Taylor (Fundraising Strategist & Consultant) - What does it mean to be creative if you’re not the one making the art?