The Cultural Architect: Whitney Hardy
The arts are a vehicle. Creatives should be represented as businesses and entrepreneurs, as well as one of the components of a healthy community.
5 QUESTIONS WITH Whitney Hardy
Executive Director & Founder, 3RDSPACE
Memphis, TN
Whitney Hardy is a Memphis based, Black entrepreneur, economic development thought leader, and cultural architect. She is the Founder & Executive Director of 3RDSPACE which exists to highlight and reinforce the connection between arts, people, and cities for socio-economic prosperity.
Whitney applies 10+ years of entrepreneurship, public accounting, and information technology experience to solve complex challenges, find opportunities and help businesses and cities grow. She is an award-winning leader, strategist, speaker and host at conferences around the United States, and advises government entities, foundations and business leaders on economic development strategies.
Her autodidactic fine arts acumen coupled with her business savvy, has made her a powerful voice around strategies for contemporary arts and culture’s role in economic development, and civic pride, innovation, social justice, and arts for art sake. She has worked with an array of national arts institutions, universities, and creative entrepreneurs around projects, ideas, exhibitions.
1. 3RDSPACE is focused on enlarging the pool of arts enthusiasts, supporters, and audiences. Your goal is to “build audience participation and cultural transformation”. What led you to this mission in the arts?
I have an unconventional pathway to being involved in the arts sector. I earned my Masters and then jumped into public accounting during the 2008 recession. I saw banks collapse and businesses fail which led me to researching newer methods of business sustainability. I was also living in Atlanta and curious about the overall impact on the city’s arts and entertainment culture with the changing economy.
From pharmaceuticals to product companies, I remember articles about seasoned businesses that failed to recruit from younger and more diverse talent, they essentially thought of revenue diversification separately from talent diversification and hadn’t linked diversity with innovation.
When I moved home to Memphis, I noticed a lack of diversity in audience members and patrons, staffing, philanthropists, etc. This left me curious. Did the arts non-profit sector not pay attention to what happened to the for-profit sector just a few years before?
I think 3RDSPACE came in as a different and disruptive organization that was led by an arts newcomer that was young and black, different from the other leaders. The way I felt unheard was the toxicity of the culture and the resistance to change. So I made it my mission to try to fix that. 3RDSPACE has been undercapitalized since inception. I’ve wanted to go full-time for years so I can continue to build on the work.
2. Since you work on cultivating new audiences — many completely fresh to the arts — what sort of narratives do you believe must be developed and articulated to better position the arts to the general public? What has worked best for you in Memphis?
(1) Institutions are quick to celebrate 100+ year anniversaries with glitz, glam, and logo refreshes. However, they struggle to dismantle the oppressive culture on which they were founded. The civil rights movement is still happening and you aren’t doing the work for the anniversary cake! The entirety of the arts community has to begin spending time on some uncomfortable internal reflections before it can authentically listen and respond to the needs of the entire community it exists to serve.
(2)There’s also the importance of acknowledging the multidimensional relationship between the arts and the general public. The arts are a vehicle. Creatives should be represented as businesses and entrepreneurs, as well as one of the components of a healthy community.
In 2019, 3RDSPACE started a Community Gallery program to bring the arts to unconventional spaces with new audiences! LatinoMemphis was our first partner. They were renovating their office with a goal to be a more welcome space for the population they served. We saw the emotions that people had as the organization provided resources and community. We created a gallery space that addressed wellness and mental health and exhibited Latinx, LGBT, and immigrant artists.
Our second was with the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce. I met with the Chamber President and talked about artists as entrepreneurs. The Chamber office has a constant flow of traffic — employees, worldwide visitors, local powerhouses. The gallery focuses on local photographers and local makers/artisans, disciplines that capture the essence of the people, place, and prosperity of Memphis’s vibrant economy. I also wanted to introduce executives to the beauty of non-stock photography and potential to create B2B relationships with local makers.
And I was the first one to have a B2B conversation with them about the creative community!
What has worked best for me was the decision to (1) do the hard things, (2) fill in the gaps in the system, (3) and be more ambitious than the status quo.
3. You talk about the transformational change that can happen to local economies when there is a thriving creative sector. The second stated goal of 3RDSPACE is to “expand access to capital for creative and creative entrepreneurs”. How do you specifically advocate for this, and how can individuals best serve as change agents to do this in their communities?
Cities need jobs with livable wages and a sense of community. When we think of community, we think of how we come together, which is rooted in arts and culture activities. Arts and culture is the secret sauce of thriving cities!
Over the past few years, I’ve researched access to capital for creative entrepreneurs from makers to filmmakers. In Memphis, there is limited to no money for individual artists creating community programs or working to scale their business. 3RDSPACE designed and hosted Crowdfund Live with the goal of raising small increments of capital to invest in creatives that were growing impactful, scalable, and/or cool experimental practices. By having it live, it allowed people to build a relationship with the poet, playwright, or singer and to help them reach their goal. Creatives need the fuel to continue to grow and that comes through access to capital and resources deployed.
4. You launched Young Collectors Contemporary in 2015, which includes artists, curators, and collectors from non-coastal underestimated art cities. Now in 2020 you are launching the inaugural Memphis Art + Design Week with hundreds of events and hands-on creative experiences. Scheduled for October this year, how are you adapting the event to attract new audiences in the context of the 2020 reality?
MAD Week was created to be a symbol of pride and to amplify the brilliance of the Memphis arts scene locally and nationally! COVID-19 didn’t change the why!
What better time than now? MAD Week programming is curated from community-wide open proposals and creative ideas. Because we are also looking at how we can provide resources, MAD Week also offers opportunities to provide professional development and best practices from outside the city.
We have event concepts with musicians, collectors, entrepreneurship centers, neighborhood groups, garden clubs, and more! It’s going to be dope. The design aspect was full spectrum and equally about the craft and the ways communities exist.
This is the biggest community-centered and collaborative project that Memphis has done in the arts community. And before I could feel good, I wanted to make sure Frayser, South Memphis, Orange Mound, and other communities were engaged with the same authenticity and coolness as our other arts districts. There is a tech disparity, we had to go beyond Zoom!
Over the years, I built relationships with people in and from the community. We could have placed a large ad on a billboard, but I remember attending a community meeting when the residents voiced issues around negative messages and unused ill-repaired billboards. A billboard ad would be pollution. We nixed a giant ad, and instead opted to focus on large pieces of art on the billboards with a QR Code that allowed them to explore more about the work and artist.
It’s going to be a great inaugural year.
5. We are seeing swelling calls for changes to arts funding, big philanthropy, and pathways to wealth creation. In your view, how does the current system most urgently need to evolve?
I always like to look at cross-industry comparisons, because art and culture always manages to be filed separately from tech, economic development, and for profit business in people’s minds.
Telephones have evolved because of the who, what, when, why, how that required it to change. The acknowledgement of access in location and in cost has adjusted. The user interfaces evolved. Telecommunication CEOs and investors that denied or fought the change bankrupted their company or were fired.
I believe we are seeing little fires everywhere right now! The culture and role of arts institutions are changing and the expectation of innovation, equity, and community shouldn’t be ignored.
We need to see non-profit spending in minority, women, and community businesses with the same vigor that we ask from ed, med, and government entities.
We need to hold that level of expectations from the top-down—foundation leaders and executives to board members and program managers.
Whitney Hardy is a Memphis based, Black entrepreneur, economic development thought leader, and cultural architect. She is the Founder & Executive Director of 3RDSPACE which exists to highlight and reinforce the connection between arts, people, and cities for socio-economic prosperity.
Whitney applies 10+ years of entrepreneurship, public accounting, and information technology experience to solve complex challenges, find opportunities and help businesses and cities grow. She is an award-winning leader, strategist, speaker and host at conferences around the United States, and advises government entities, foundations and business leaders on economic development strategies.
Her autodidactic fine arts acumen coupled with her business savvy, has made her a powerful voice around strategies for contemporary arts and culture’s role in economic development, and civic pride, innovation, social justice, and arts for art sake. She has worked with an array of national arts institutions, universities, and creative entrepreneurs around projects, ideas, exhibitions.
Photo by: Elizabeth Looney Photography