The Creative Process · Arts, Culture & Society: 2022-2023

The GRAMMY Museum believes that music is a gateway to learning. Their mission is to explore and celebrate the enduring legacies of the creative process behind all forms of music through immersive and interactive exhibits and essential music education programs. Michael Sticka serves as President/CEO. He’s responsible for the creation of the Museum's growth and sustainability as an independent nonprofit arts organization, overseeing the Museum Foundation™’s national programming, including GRAMMY In The Schools®, grants for music research and preservation and national affiliates. Their many projects include the multimillion-dollar renovation of the Museum in downtown Los Angeles, building the only gallery dedicated to Latin music in California; GRAMMY Museum at Home, a collection of virtual exhibits, artist programs and educational content available free to educators and music lovers worldwide; and their official streaming service COLLECTION:live™. An advocate for accessibility, the GRAMMY Museum became the only museum named as a Certified Autism Center™ in California.
Prior to joining the Academy, Sticka consulted for nonprofit organizations and co-founded the Zoot Theatre Company in Dayton, Ohio.

"I think music has changed the world. I think if you look at most social movements that have challenged the status quo and challenged even just the establishment at the time, there's been a soundtrack to those movements. And I think that is what maintains and fosters the movement and fosters the people to get behind it. So there's no question that music can change the world. It already has.

It's actually right in our mission statement that 'we celebrate the music of yesterday and today to inspire the music of tomorrow.' And we do it through our exhibits. We have 35,000 square feet of galleries. We travel exhibits, really, all over the world over the world for the past 15 years. And through our education programs, we really focus on the next generation of music's creators and leaders. We do that through really specific curricula that is designed to educate particularly young people, K-12, about the business of music, especially for those who want to go into the industry."

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"I think there's this belief that creativity requires our ability to think outward and extrapolate beyond our own experiences and think of the world in imaginative new ways - which is true in a lot of cases - but I also believe in creativity as the ability to access inward and look introspectively at our own personal experiences and mine those experiences in ways that aren't necessarily one to one copies of our lives, but that we can extrapolate themes and lessons, comedy, drama, humor...into new works.”

Ken Cheng is a writer/producer who has previously written for Wilfred, Betas, and Sin City Saints. Ken’s feature comedy Easter Sunday, which he co-wrote, and executive produced for Amblin Partners, Rideback, and Universal, is inspired by the life and comedy of standup comedian Jo Koy. Forthcoming projects include writing and executive producing the half-hour comedy series, House of Chow, for HBO, co-writing – along with his creative partners at Crab Club, Inc. - a feature film adaptation of the GQ Magazine article, “The Great Chinese Art Heist”, for Warner Bros., Conde Nast, and director Jon M. Chu, and writing/producing a feature adaptation of the New York Magazine article “Chateau Sucker” for Bound Entertainment.

www.crabclubinc.com

Ken Cheng IMDB

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Ken Cheng is a writer/producer who has previously written for Wilfred, Betas, and Sin City Saints. Ken’s feature comedy Easter Sunday, which he co-wrote, and executive produced for Amblin Partners, Rideback, and Universal, is inspired by the life and comedy of standup comedian Jo Koy. Forthcoming projects include writing and executive producing the half-hour comedy series, House of Chow, for HBO, co-writing – along with his creative partners at Crab Club, Inc. - a feature film adaptation of the GQ Magazine article, “The Great Chinese Art Heist”, for Warner Bros., Conde Nast, and director Jon M. Chu, and writing/producing a feature adaptation of the New York Magazine article “Chateau Sucker” for Bound Entertainment.

"I think there's this belief that creativity requires our ability to think outward and extrapolate beyond our own experiences and think of the world in imaginative new ways - which is true in a lot of cases - but I also believe in creativity as the ability to access inward and look introspectively at our own personal experiences and mine those experiences in ways that aren't necessarily one to one copies of our lives, but that we can extrapolate themes and lessons, comedy, drama, humor...into new works.”

www.crabclubinc.com

Ken Cheng IMDB

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Designer, author, educator and artist Bruce Mau is a brilliantly creative optimist whose love of thorny problems led him to create a methodology for life-centered design. Across thirty years of design innovation, he’s collaborated with global brands and companies, leading organizations, heads of state, renowned artists and fellow optimists. Mau became an international figure with the publication of his landmark S,M,L,XL, designed and co-authored with Rem Koolhaas, and his most recent books are Mau MC24: Bruce Mau’s 24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in Your Life and Work and, with co-author, Julio Ottino, dean of Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, The Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World – The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science. Mau is co-founder and CEO of Massive Change Network, a holistic design collective based in the Chicago area.

"I'm very, very concerned that we are already in a time of being lost, that a lot of people feel lost, and they feel like the world has kind of moved out from under them, and that they have lost their bearings. They've lost their anchor, and they don't have what it takes to actually navigate.

And in that kind of environment, it's a very rich environment for fascism and for the worst kind of political movement, for the worst kind of political actors to take advantage of that feeling of powerlessness and fear and disconnection. Design is a methodology that is an empowering methodology within a condition of being unmoored.

So when you don't know what to do, design is a methodology of figuring out what to do, and it's why we're doing a project that we call Massive Action, which is to really give people the tools of empowerment to give them the power to design their life because over the coming couple of decades people are going to see a level of turmoil and change that has not happened in human history. The foundation of any culture is energy, and we have to change fundamentally our source of energy, which is going to change everything else. And I really worry that it's going to be a time – and we're already seeing it - it's going to be a time where the forces of autocracy and totalitarianism and fascism will find fertile ground if we don't actually help people navigate those conditions."

www.massivechangenetwork.com

www.Brucemaustudio.com

Mau MC24

The Nexus

Image Courtesy of Massive Change Network

www.creativeprocess.info

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Designer, author, educator and artist Bruce Mau is a brilliantly creative optimist whose love of thorny problems led him to create a methodology for life-centered design. Across thirty years of design innovation, he’s collaborated with global brands and companies, leading organizations, heads of state, renowned artists and fellow optimists. Mau became an international figure with the publication of his landmark S,M,L,XL, designed and co-authored with Rem Koolhaas, and his most recent books are Mau MC24: Bruce Mau’s 24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in Your Life and Work and, with co-author, Julio Ottino, dean of Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, The Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World – The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science. Mau is co-founder and CEO of Massive Change Network, a holistic design collective based in the Chicago area.

"I'm very, very concerned that we are already in a time of being lost, that a lot of people feel lost, and they feel like the world has kind of moved out from under them, and that they have lost their bearings. They've lost their anchor, and they don't have what it takes to actually navigate.

And in that kind of environment, it's a very rich environment for fascism and for the worst kind of political movement, for the worst kind of political actors to take advantage of that feeling of powerlessness and fear and disconnection. Design is a methodology that is an empowering methodology within a condition of being unmoored.

So when you don't know what to do, design is a methodology of figuring out what to do, and it's why we're doing a project that we call Massive Action, which is to really give people the tools of empowerment to give them the power to design their life because over the coming couple of decades people are going to see a level of turmoil and change that has not happened in human history. The foundation of any culture is energy, and we have to change fundamentally our source of energy, which is going to change everything else. And I really worry that it's going to be a time – and we're already seeing it - it's going to be a time where the forces of autocracy and totalitarianism and fascism will find fertile ground if we don't actually help people navigate those conditions."

www.massivechangenetwork.com

www.Brucemaustudio.com

Mau MC24

The Nexus

Image Courtesy of Massive Change Network

www.creativeprocess.info

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

"Just thinking about how our actions play out over multiple generations who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions. I think we need to stretch our sense of time, and within that stretch our sense of empathy. The philosopher Roman Krznaric talks about that in his book The Good Ancestor, that we need a more elastic sense of empathy that can encompass not just those close to us or living alongside us, but those who have yet to be born will have to inherit the world that we passed down to them. But I think in stretching that sense of empathy and stretching that sense of the times that we touch, if you like, because all of us are engaged in activities that will lead long legacies, long tails, in terms of the fossil fuels we're consuming. And so, alongside that, I think we need to accept that the time we live in is a strange one, and time itself is doing strange things in the anthropocene.”

David Farrier's books include Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (2020) and Anthropocene Poetics (2019). Footprints won the Royal Society of Literature’s Giles St. Aubyn award and has been translated into nine languages. He is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. 

Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils

www.ed.ac.uk/profile/david-farrier

Anthropocene Poetics

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

www.creativeprocess.info

David Farrier's books include Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (2020) and Anthropocene Poetics (2019). Footprints won the Royal Society of Literature’s Giles St. Aubyn award and has been translated into nine languages. He is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. 

"Just thinking about how our actions play out over multiple generations who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions. I think we need to stretch our sense of time, and within that stretch our sense of empathy. The philosopher Roman Krznaric talks about that in his book The Good Ancestor, that we need a more elastic sense of empathy that can encompass not just those close to us or living alongside us, but those who have yet to be born will have to inherit the world that we passed down to them. But I think in stretching that sense of empathy and stretching that sense of the times that we touch, if you like, because all of us are engaged in activities that will lead long legacies, long tails, in terms of the fossil fuels we're consuming. And so, alongside that, I think we need to accept that the time we live in is a strange one, and time itself is doing strange things in the anthropocene.”

Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils

www.ed.ac.uk/profile/david-farrier

Anthropocene Poetics

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

www.creativeprocess.info

"I started looking over the stories that I had done. I would say the majority of the essays were not really about travel. They were more about aging and marriage and memory and all of those things, but I did find in the travel essays those kernels of things that I wanted to explore - bigger kernels of things that were sort of scratching at me from the inside like a piece of sand in my pocket that was irritating me and that I wanted to explore. What I found was that the theme of coming and going, the theme of arrivals and departures, the theme of entrances and exits, and the theme of home and away seemed to repeat itself. I felt that whenever I was somewhere, there was always a tide home. And when I was home, there was always the urge for going. And so I just weeded out and weeded out and really wanted to keep this theme of home and away."

Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist, essayist, and author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life, 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, a New York Times travel bestseller. A contributor writer at Travel + Leisure, she also writes for Air Mail, Vogue, BBC Travel and many other publications. She has won five Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and is the recipient of the 2021 Gold Award for Travel Story of the Year. Before becoming a writer, she was a television news producer for ABC, NBC and CBS News, for most of those years producing for Barbara Walters. She lives in Connecticut.

https://marciadesanctis.com

A Hard Place to Leave

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist, essayist, and author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life, 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, a New York Times travel bestseller. A contributor writer at Travel + Leisure, she also writes for Air Mail, Vogue, BBC Travel and many other publications. She has won five Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and is the recipient of the 2021 Gold Award for Travel Story of the Year. Before becoming a writer, she was a television news producer for ABC, NBC and CBS News, for most of those years producing for Barbara Walters. She lives in Connecticut.

"I started looking over the stories that I had done. I would say the majority of the essays were not really about travel. They were more about aging and marriage and memory and all of those things, but I did find in the travel essays those kernels of things that I wanted to explore - bigger kernels of things that were sort of scratching at me from the inside like a piece of sand in my pocket that was irritating me and that I wanted to explore. What I found was that the theme of coming and going, the theme of arrivals and departures, the theme of entrances and exits, and the theme of home and away seemed to repeat itself. I felt that whenever I was somewhere, there was always a tide home. And when I was home, there was always the urge for going. And so I just weeded out and weeded out and really wanted to keep this theme of home and away."

https://marciadesanctis.com

A Hard Place to Leave

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Photo credit: Elena Seibert

"What's trending now with beginning farmers is that it is creating this kind of community connection. It's bringing people to the farm. It's connecting them to their food source. That creates community. It helps cultivate culture and connectivity, and so I think overall, it's like the landscape and agriculture as a whole is shifting towards a different direction."

John and Emily Beaton have created a multi-enterprise farming business in Northeastern Minnesota near Duluth and the shores of Lake Superior. They founded Fairhaven Farm with a spirit of community building, a focus on soil health, and a desire to see a thriving local food system. 

They sell starter plants each spring for home gardeners, grow food for over 50 families through their CSA program, and are launching a new Pizza Farm enterprise where the couple will serve wood-fired pizzas on the farm featuring all locally sourced ingredients—including fresh tomatoes and vegetables right from their field!

www.fairhaven.farm

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

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