Entrepreneurs continued
According to a new model of higher education in the arts, Richmond said, universities should broaden students’ horizons and help them create their own career opportunities. “It’s really empowerment,” he said. “Students come to us with an interest in the arts and with a few ideas about how they might be a part of the arts enterprise professionally. “That is, do the thing they love so much and get paid for it.” Sebora said the concept applies to all colleges, not just Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts.“I want every student who comes to UNL exposed to the fact that they have a choice to take a job or make a job,” he said. Making a job—entrepreneurship—could be intimidating, especially for someone who doesn’t understand tax laws. It doesn’t have to be. “You don’t need to know everything you need to know right now,” said Ann Chang-Barnes, senior lecturer of music, who also spoke at Arts Entrepreneurship Day. Chang-Barnes, who graduated from Indiana University with a music performance degree, said she knew next to nothing about business before she began the Meadowlark Music Festival in Ann Chang-Barnes, senior 2000. Meadowlark is an annual three- or four-day event in Lincoln that brings chamber lecturer of music, talks to music to unconventional locations. Four years into the festival, Chang-Barnes jokes that she Arts Entrepreneurship Day still doesn’t know anything about business. participants about the Like Bedient, she said, knowing where to seek help has gotten her through the business-operating process safely. Lawyers and accountants helped her establish Meadowlark as a nonprofit, incorporated organization.
Meadowlark Music Festival. Photo by Mike Edholm.
They also helped her figure out tax laws and put together a governing board for her business. “The amount of detail that has to be taken care of and business savvy necessary to make things work was really quite shocking to me,” Chang-Barnes said. Even with assistance, it hasn’t been easy. She said she probably wouldn’t have gone through with the venture if she wasn’t so passionate about music. “If I was selling a product that I didn’t believe in, this would be a tortuous job,” ChangBarnes said. Successful entrepreneurship is really only a matter of figuring out how to turn potential into profit. That’s something Sebora said arts students may actually have better luck at than business students. “People who have talent have a greater chance for success and building businesses,” he said. “They have a greater chance for success than people trained to manage.” To make it, many arts students just need a push in the right direction. “They have to find a way to value their talent,” Sebora said. Thirty-five years ago, Bedient never would have guessed he’d employ 15 people and own an 11,000-square-foot operating facility in west Lincoln. Like UNL fine arts majors today, he never had to set foot in the business college to earn his degree. He said he began servicing organs as a means to pay for his Master’s degree in music at UNL. At the time, he thought he might become a composer, an educator or return to an old interest, electrical engineering. “I had no idea,” Bedient said. “I know that very same thing happens to a lot of people. You start on something you think is just for the moment and it consumes your life.”
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