Art and Craft Business Workshop

Workshop Dates: Wednesday July 20 – Thursday July 21
Time: 9:30am – 4pm both days
Location: Anderson School of Management, UNM campus, Albuquerque

Description
We are hosting a workshop for clay artists focused on developing and improving business strategies, led by Dr. Manuel Montoya from UNM’s Anderson School of Management. The session should be valuable for experienced business owners as well as artists who are just starting out. Participants will engage in sessions that help them think about how to organize their business practices in relation to what they value about their work. You will be using business tools adapted for creative work, including a “value-chain” analysis and several frameworks to think more strategically about the market for your work.  This includes an exercise that gets you to think broadly about how technology relates to your work and how being rural and/or New Mexican adds unique value to your work.  Dr. Montoya will lead exercises on the first day and on the following day, the team will work together to distill what we have learned. The second day will also include talks by New Mexico-based clay artists, including a keynote by Christine Tenenholz, whose work is shown above.

This workshop is part of a research project funded by the National Science Foundation. You can see more information about the project here: https://handandmachine.org/index.php/2021/08/04/computational-ceramics/

Dr. Manuel Montoya is an Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico’s Anderson School of Management. He was born and raised in Mora, New Mexico, and received his B.A. in English Literature and Economics from the University of New Mexico. He has Master’s degrees from Oxford University and NYU as a Truman Scholar and Rhodes Scholar. He received his Ph.D. at Emory University in Foreign Relations and Comparative Literature as a George Woodruff Scholar and a UNM Center for Regional Studies Fellow. His research interests mainly focus on a concept he refers to as “global legibility,” the process whereby humans conceptualize the planet and make it a meaningful part of their realities. This work incorporates ideas drawn from studies in Global Political Economy, Emerging Markets, Creative Economy, and Critical Management Studies.

Dr. Montoya is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has contributed to international efforts to eliminate child soldiers from major conflict regions. He has served as a policy analyst for the United States Senate and considers public service a pillar of his work.

Dr. Montoya also contributes to several community organizations. He is on the Board of Directors for the International Folk Art Alliance and The Keshet Center for the Arts. An amateur watchmaker, poet, and short story writer, he has been published in several prestigious literary magazines. He was inducted into the Anderson Hall of Fame in 2015 and was named one of Albuquerque’s 40 under 40 in 2016.