Author: Margaret McLemore        Major: BFA Studio Art – Focus on photography 

From L to R: Nan, Loren, Maggie, and Mariah at our residency research location at Mount Sequoyah’s Creative Spaces

Maggie McLemore is a rising senior pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Art in Studio Art with a focus in photography and a minor in art history. Maggie, her mentor Adrienne Callander, and three other students have spent their first semester of research discovering how art and entrepreneurial practices intersect, specifically in an artist residency model. Professor Callander teaches in the School of Art and the Walton College of Business.

In the fall of 2020, I took Adrienne Callander’s Arts Entrepreneurship class. This class piqued my interest in the research that Adrienne does and in potential entrepreneurial ventures. After the semester’s end, three of my classmates — Mariah, Nan and Loren — and I met with Adrienne about creating a special topics course for the spring, a continuation of what we had been learning the semester prior. While some of our research took place in the classroom, most of our research took place in our community. Entrepreneurship and Art require hands-on research techniques with failures and successes and, accordingly, adjustments. We decided to apply for a research grant from the Honors College to help us develop our ideas beyond the concept stage.

In the classroom, Adrienne introduced ideas to us that opened our eyes to all we could create. Outside of class time, we would take actions to research how art and entrepreneurship intersect. In our fall semester in Art Entrepreneurship, each of my classmates participated in a 3-day artist residency, designed by Studio Art graduate teaching assistant Juliette Walker. After this experience, we knew that for our continued research, we wanted to create a micro artist residency for artists in our local community. We based our research model on a slew of historical and local entrepreneurial ventures that we curated to fit our research goals.

At the beginning of our research period, we discovered a historical entrepreneurial art practice known as ‘FOOD.’ FOOD was a restaurant model that employed artists as chefs. The artists gave their creativity and ingenuity to the restaurant and the dishes. The restaurant gave back to the artists by supporting them financially and creatively. The restaurant supported the artists, and the artists supported the restaurant. After this discovery, paired with our own goal of supporting local artists through an artist residency, we took to the Fayetteville community to find mentors who could help guide our research.

First, we met with the director of Lucky Star Farm, Donna Musarra. Lucky Star Farm is an agricultural artist residency and a working farm, located on the Buffalo River in Yell, AR. We talked with her about our idea of an artist residency and about the Lucky Star Farm model. After speaking with her, we were very interested in how she not only intersects art and entrepreneurship but also art and agriculture into the residency model. At Lucky Star, Donna has created a niche residency where artists can use nature in their work. For example, she plants flowers that can act as dyes in textile art. She gives the artist free space to work, and the artist has the opportunity to give back by helping out on the farm.

We were interested in adding agriculture to our own residency model, but we needed mentoring. So, we went back out into the community to find a mentor. Professor Adrienne Callander suggested local Washington County master gardener, Caite Mae Ramos. Caite guided us on what we should plant and how to plant it. At this stage we began our micro grow space at 1 East Center Street, just off the downtown Fayetteville Square.

We wanted to pair with community partners to give away the produce our micro garden produced, so we reached out to Roots Festival founders, Bryan and Bernice Hembree and learned how their organization supported local musicians during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Artists grow a community in vital ways. Following our guiding principles from the FOOD model, we researched and practiced a cyclical model of “giving back”, one that recognizes support of artists as a way to support community more broadly.

From this research project, I learned that research can happen in any field. Before, I had a misconception that as an art student I didn’t really do “research”, but of course I do! It just looks different than it might in other fields. It’s practice-led.