Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Not farewell. I want to say a fond au revoir to Abby Maier, who is leaving her job as the leader of Cleveland’s COSE Arts Network to start a new life as a mom in rural Vermont. Though she will no longer be representing COSE on Geniocity.com, Abby will be returning to this site in 2009 to blog about creativity from the artist’s point of view.

That’s a point of view she knows well. Before joining COSE, Abby earned a degree in art, specializing in fabric-based work. She’ll resume that creative side of her life in Vermont and – because not all inventive art occurs in large metropolitan areas – will give us some needed perspective on what’s happening creatively in the vast areas of the U.S. that aren’t paved and overpopulated.

Just as her own artistic background informed Abby’s work at COSE, so her COSE experience and close connection to the issues, policies and practices of arts entrepreneurship will enrich her commentary on how artists function creatively in small towns. 

Geniocity.com owes Abby more than a “see you later” and a thank-you for her posts. We are deeply grateful for the help she gave us, as she did so many other COSE Arts Network members, in pursuing our entrepreneurial dreams: finding resources and advisors for us, keeping us regularly tuned in to COSE’s many helpful networking and educational events and cheering us on.

As the pioneering first leader of the Arts Network, Abby helped COSE create something unique in this nation: a place for artists at the table of business, a place that honors and supports the economic role  artists play in the Greater Cleveland community. The city may not be wealthy right now, but it is rich in a kind of arts-business innovation that the rest of you around the world will want to give a second look. Abby and COSE, along with Cleveland’s Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, are making this part of Northeast Ohio a home of unequaled resources for the arts and those who practice them.

So I wish her well and wish her back at Geniocity.com soon. Abby, you’re the best.