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Creative Destruction
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Were
it not for the “Euro” décor of polished metal and sleek
furniture, the corporate culture of Rainmaker Studios
would seem only one step removed from that of a college
dormitory. Musicians leave electric guitars propped
against the sofa. Take-out pizzas are delivered with the
pepperonis arranged in four-letter words. Pranksters play
bizarre music tracks -- Iranian gangsta rap, or Harry
Connick Jr.-style crooning of the Red Hot Chili Peppers
-- to phone callers stuck on hold.
Her
goal, says Kristin O’Connor, Rainmaker’s
infectiously enthusiastic owner, is to foster an
atmosphere of quirkiness, creativity and fun. It takes
more than sinking a million dollars into digital
recording gear and sound insulation, she explains, to
produce advertising soundtracks for the likes of Nascar,
Quiznos Subs and Nick at Nite. It takes talented,
creative people who are jazzed about their work and
don’t mind pulling the occasional all-nighter.
It
also helps, O’Connor might have added, if you can
impart the zaniness to your friends and neighbors.
Rainmaker was the first permanent tenant at the Superior
Production Exchange, a renovated, 36,000-square-foot
warehouse in Shockoe Bottom. When she set up shop there
in June 2000, O’Connor coaxed Bunt Young, a
cinematographer, to move in as well. Then, working their
contacts, the two of them persuaded other business
buddies to join them. Before long, much to the delight
of the lucky landlord, others were clamoring to “join
the fun.”
With
24 commercial tenants, the Exchange is nearly full. The
building now sustains a complete business eco-system
under a single roof, pulling together ad agencies, film
makers, post-production boutiques, web developers, copy
writers, editors and even a bookkeeper and an
entertainment attorney. There’s nothing like it in the
world, says O’Connor, who has searched for parallels.
The Custard Factory, an arts and media cluster in a
restored warehouse in
Birmingham, England, is
similar, she says, but it lacks the intense
advertising-driven focus.
Tenants
tell O’Connor that locating in the Exchange gave them
a 10 percent to 30 percent bump in revenue. Companies
frequently refer business to one another and collaborate
on big projects. But the Exchange is more than a
glorified tip club. It’s a place where professionals
in the artistic trades can mingle and inspire one
another. Whether they’re roller skating in the atrium,
brewing coffee in the kitchen or organizing a Rodney
Dangerfield film festival to raise money for Shockoe
Bottom flood victims, people are constantly interacting.
“There’s a spirit here,” she says. “The
atmosphere lends itself to creative and innovative
thinking.”
No
higher authority planned for the Superior Production
Exchange to turn out like it has. The cluster of media
talent just assembled on its own. In that sense, the
Exchange is a microcosm of the larger artistic community
in Richmond. The
city is home to hundreds of creative boutiques and
free-lancers – writers, painters, graphic designers,
film producers, musicians, Web developers -- who make a
commercial living in artistic fields. Most of the
enterprises are so small that they’re invisible to
anyone outside the advertising profession. But they’re
getting organized, and they’re a growing social and
economic influence in
Richmond.
Commercial
artists are a force for urban renewal, moving into the
city while other businesses continue to move out.
Craving interaction with other creative types, they
congregate in older neighborhoods with distinctive
architecture, great restaurants and, in Shockoe Bottom
at least, a lively club scene. Working artists also have
a penchant for renovating empty old warehouses and
industrial buildings and refitting them with urban
flair. In sum, they bring an indisputable aura of
coolness to a city that is otherwise very pin-striped
and button-down.
Richmond has
been recognized as a regional creative center for years.
There has always been a strong corporate base – the
region boasts of ten
Fortune 1,000 companies – and a strong advertising
community to support it. The Martin
Agency, the
top ad agency in the Southeast, reels in national
clients, recruits world-class creative talent and seeds
the landscape with start-ups by former employees.
Meanwhile, Virginia
Commonwealth
University’s
School of the Arts, ranked 6th nationally
among programs for art and design, unleashes more than
500 graduates into the workplace every year; many of
them stay in Richmond.
But
something qualitatively different is happening now. Like
water vapor that crystallizes on a window pane, the
artistic community is spontaneously searching for
structure. There’s no one leading the effort – as if
artists could agree to be led by anyone – and no one
is priming the pump with government funds or
philanthropic grants. It’s a ground-up movement driven
by the conviction among the artists themselves that
interacting with their peers stimulates the creative
juices.
While
the Superior Production Exchange is the first artistic
ecosystem to establish itself, others have followed. A
developer has renovated an old warehouse in Manchester,
across the river from downtown, to provide studio space
for artists and craftsmen in one part of the building
and a Torpedo Factory-like environment in the other,
where artists can show their wares to the public.
Nearby, two architecture firms are planning to share
space with a graphic design studio, a photographer and a
coffee shop with the conscious intent of sparking
creative interaction.
Even
writers, as hard to herd as cats, are getting organized.
The James River Writer’s Festival, which originated as
a conference for working writers about two years ago,
has evolved into a year-round support network for
working and aspiring writers. The volunteer group is
organizing workshops, instigating poetry slams and
sponsoring short-story readings.
O’Connor
finds it all quite marvelous. Moving to
Richmond
after graduating from
Rutgers
University, she
co-founded Rainmaker at the age of 23. Over the past
eight years, she has built the sound studio into a $1.5
million-a-year business. The rent happens to be cheaper
in Richmond
than
in New
York
or L.A.,
which is a bonus, but that’s not why she’s here, she
insists. “It’s about being here at a time that Richmond’s
becoming a destination, being acknowledged for its arts,
its music, its innovative spirit.”
To
all outward appearances, Danny Robinson had it made in
New York. As
a co-founder and creative officer of Vigilante, he
specialized in a rarefied marketing niche: advertising
to urban audiences. He focused on where cultural trends
start – usually among the urban youth -- and how they
percolate into broader society. His sales pitch to
advertisers was to market products to the ultra-hip
consumers in major cities like Manhattan, Miami, L.A., Paris
and
London
in
the hopes that they could hitch a free ride into the
mainstream. He worked on major accounts like Pontiac,
Heineken, the USTA and Akademiks, an urban clothing
brand.
New York
is
the center of the North American advertising universe,
but there was a downside to Robinson’s life. The
commutes from Fairfield
County
into
Manhattan
were
grueling: a 15-minute drive to the station, a 60-minute
train ride, a 15-minute subway ride, and a 15-minute
walk to the office. After knocking himself out for six
straight years, he was undergoing a period self
assessment when he received a phone call from Mike
Hughes, president and creative director of the Martin
Agency. How
about moving to
Richmond,
Hughes asked.
The
prospect of a 20-minute commute and a lower cost of
living had some appeal, says Robinson, but the
Martin
Agency’s
reputation was the clincher. Even in New York, the agency is known for top-drawer creative work: Advertising
Age proclaimed it the “third most creative”
advertising agency in the world. Even more importantly,
he shared Martin’s philosophy towards clients and
employees. “It’s identical to the way I think about
it,” he says. “It’s the way people work and treat
each other. It’s the integrity of the place.”
There
are many excellent small and midsized advertising
agencies in Richmond, but
only Martin has the national stature to snatch star
talent like Robinson from the nation’s major
advertising centers. With approximately $350 million in
billings, Martin is the largest agency in the Southeastern
U.S.,
sporting blue chip clients like Alltell, Geico, Coca
Cola, Hanes, Miller Brewing and UPS.
There
is no overstating the impact that Martin has had on the Richmond
creative community. It out-sources elements of its ad
creation to local businesses like Rainmaker, giving them
shots at national accounts they might never get on their
own. More importantly in the long run, Martin acts as a
giant talent pump, siphoning top creative professionals
from major media centers into Richmond, a
city they wouldn’t otherwise consider moving to. Some
stay at Martin, some move on, and some split off to
start their own firms.
Martin
Agency alumni are everywhere. The Hodges Group, a public
relations firm, founded by two ex-Martin guys… Free
Radicals, a web design boutique, started by refugees
from Martin Interactive… The Boomer project, a
marketing firm launched by Martin veteran Matt
Thornhill,
specializing in the Baby Boomer demographic...
Evan
Davies, an early convert to the Internet, credits a
stint with Martin’s interactive group with
accelerating his Web design career. Working for
Martin’s interactive division in 1994, he built most
of Coca Cola’s very first website. That credential
served in him good stead when he founded Davies New
Media, a high-end Web design firm that thrived through
the ‘90s and is still around today.
While
Martin is the 800-pound gorilla of the
Richmond
advertising/marketing community, there are plenty of
400-pound silverbacks to keep it from getting
complacent. Just look at the Richmond Ad Club’s 2003
“Ad Show” awards. Although Martin ruled the
“advertising” category, smaller agencies dominated
the “design” and “interactive” categories.
Second-tier firms like Siddall, Barber Martin, WORK,
just to name some of the larger ones, are widely
recognized for their creative work as well. Although
they don’t handle as many national accounts, Richmond
agencies dominate the Mid-Atlantic regional marketplace.
They, in turn, outsource much of their work to local
boutiques and free-lancers.
“Richmond
has
always been known as a small Mecca
of
agencies,” says Rachel Bender, creative account
manager at Aquent, a temporary employment firm. The
agencies are the big fish in the pond; they line up the
projects and assemble the creative teams, often drawing
up extensive networks of outside talent. “About 80
percent of the work we do is with free-lancers,” she
says. “There is a huge free-lance community here.”
Ask
Bruce Hornstein how he fits into
Richmond
’s
artistic domain, and you won’t get a simple answer. As
co-owner of Pyramid Studios, his specialty is designing
multimedia for museum exhibits. His projects entail
writing, historical research, photography, film making,
sound production, computer programming, music, and
editing and post production.
It took all those skills and more not long ago when
he and his wife/co-owner Dixie
tackled one of the biggest jobs of their career:
designing Frontier Texas.
The people of Abilene
had found the money to build a museum from the ground up
to tell the story of western Texas
between the years 1780 and 1880, before the railroad
tamed the region. Between the Indians, the Spanish, the
buffalo hunters, the cattle drives, the outlaws and
lawmen, it was an incredibly colorful epoch. Project
historians had compiled a wealth of material, says
Hornstein, but they didn’t know the best way to tell
the story. Adding to the challenge, the museum had no
artifacts – whatever he did, it had be media
intensive.
Hornstein
hit upon the idea of telling the story through eight
individuals – an Indian, a cowboy, a soldier, etc. –
who lived in and impacted the region. Then, using
state-of-the-art display techniques, Pyramid created
three-dimensional holograph-like images to tell their
stories. Visitors encounter each character in turn, and
then finish the story in a special effects amphitheatre.
Sitting on swiveling stools, they rotate 360 degrees and
watch as an 18-minute show immerses them in
thunderstorms, prairie fires, a saloon card game and a
buffalo stampede. Huge sub-woofers shake the seats as
the cattle rumble past.
How did a business like Pyramid Studios wind up in
Richmond?
Pyramid is here because Hornstein is here, and Hornstein
is here because VCU is here. He had no special
connection to the city before enrolling at VCU: His
father had worked with the CIA, and he’d moved all
around the world. Studying communications art and
design, he landed a local job when he graduated in 1980,
and he met Dixie
soon after. One thing
led to another. They started Pyramid. They got married.
And they rode the business bronco as it bucked one
direction and then another until they figured out what
they did better than anyone else in the country: design
multimedia for museum exhibits.
Like the
Martin
Agency,
VCU is a turbine that sucks up artistic talent from
around the country and disgorges it into Richmond.
Last
year 88 graduate students and 474 undergrads
matriculated from the School of the Arts, says Dean
Richard E. Toscan. He doesn’t keep formal track of
where they all go, but he estimates that between 40
percent and 60 percent stay in Virginia
– most of them in Richmond.
While Martin recruits working artists at the top of
their game, VCU brings in fresh, unformed talent. The
graduates may be raw, but they’ve been schooled in the
latest digital technologies and they display a
willingness to push the envelope of the possible.
The
VCU
School
of the Arts is the sixth-ranked art school in the
country – the second ranked school if you’re considering only public
institutions. The sculpture program is ranked top
in the country, while graphic design and
painting/drawing both crack the Top 10. Of significance
to the Richmond
economy, the School doesn’t turn out artsy-fartsy artistes – it graduates artists who understand the realities of
the marketplace.
“The design fields are totally focused on
commercial work,” says Toscan. Graphic artists
typically wind up working for advertising agencies or
setting up free-lance businesses. Even fine arts
students are encouraged to develop a personal vision
with the goal of eventually connecting with a gallery
that can sell their work.
Kelly Alder came to
Richmond
to study illustration at VCU. After four years there, he
landed a local job, worked in New York
a few years, and then came back to Richmond.
He works mainly for national magazines like The
New Yorker, Atlantic
Monthly, Fortune,
Business Week and Men’s
Health. He sometimes marvels at all the illustrators
he knows in Richmond.
“When
I started out, it was Bill Nelson and Scott Wright. Now
there are quite a few – and some are doing very
well.”
Another VCU alumnus, Mark Smith, has worked the
graphic arts scene from every angle. After graduating,
he worked his way up to creative director at a Richmond
ad agency. Then, concluding that he liked the graphics
end of the business best, he left to start his own
design shop. He kept the firm very small for years
until, about five years ago, he merged with firm owned
by Susan Hogg to create Circle S Studio. The firm
happily sticks to a six- to seven-person staff,
says Smith, that’s capable of doing graphic design
rivaling the work done “anywhere in the country.”
Phaedra
Hise worked as an editor at Inc.
magazine in
Boston
before she followed her husband, Bill Hargis, to
Richmond.
She had no idea of what to expect when she moved to this
strange city in the South. “I didn’t know a soul. I
was terrified.”
But fear of the unknown didn’t slow her down for
long. She just made up her mind to link up with other
writers in town. Every time someone dropped a name or
she read about someone in the newspaper, she made a
point of meeting them for lunch. Soon, she’d compiled
a long enough list – novelists, poets, journalists,
essayists -- to throw a cocktail party.
“I was amazed at how many professional writers
there are in Richmond,”
she says. “I know more people here working at a
consistently higher level than I did in
Boston.
I know a dozen people here who are working on books, or
they’ve just published one, or they’re working on a
deal. I have four friends who have screenplays written
based on their books!”
A couple of years ago, David Robbins, a life-long
Richmonder and accomplished World War II novelist,
approached Hise with a proposal: How about creating a
writer’s festival? Charlottesville
already had a major literary event, aimed mainly at book
lovers, but this would be for writers and aspiring
writers. The idea was to create a vehicle for getting
writers connected with one another.
Thus was born the James River Writers Festival. For
two consecutive years, the Festival has brought
nationally renowned authors like Tom Robbins (Only
Cowgirls Get the Blues) and Mark Bowden (Black
Hawk Down), plus editors and agents together with
300 or more mostly Richmond-area writers. Like any
business conference, the Writers Festival was structured
to help writers with their professional development
through workshops, panels of experts, keynote speakers
and networking opportunities. No one in Richmond
had ever treated writers as a profession
before.
The festivals have been successful and the
organization is gaining momentum. Plans are afoot to
hire a staff person, invest more money in public
relations and build programs. Even now, Writers Festival
volunteers are acting as an information clearinghouse
for the Richmond
area. The group maintains a literary calendar – book
signings, author lectures and the like – as well as a
newsletter.
Additionally, the Writers Festival is developing a
year-long series of professional workshops, and it’s
acting as a sponsor and publicist for other events such
as Virginia Arts & Letters Live, a series of short
stories performed by local actors. One spin-off has
taken a life of its own: poetry slams. Acting under the
Writers Festival aegis, D.L. Hopkins, a local actor and
poet, organized a couple of poetry competitions at the
Café Gutenburg bookstore/wine bar. By the third event,
Hise says, the place was so packed that the restaurant
started worrying about the fire marshals. Now the
monthly event has moved to the Firehouse Theater.
“In
terms of our central goal -- seeding writers’
communities throughout the city -- it’s a runaway
success,” says Robbins. “Aspiring writers are being
put into the presence of professional writers.
Communities are forming large and small.”
Carbon
Leaf, an acoustic-based rock band with Celtic overtones,
is on the verge of making it big. With a hot-selling new
album, Indian
Summer, the Fan-based band now spends most of its
time on the road, playing at concerts and festivals that
draw audiences of 1,000 to 1,500 per show.
It
hasn’t always been that way, says Barry Previtt,
lyricist and lead vocalist. “We’ve been on the scene
in
Richmond
for
10 years. It took us all that time to garner a
following.” He remembers the early days when he felt
lucky to play in front of 30 people at the Cary Street
Café. “We couldn’t book a gig at Alley Cats for the
first six years of our career! We scraped for anything
we could get.”
But
Previtt and his four fellow band members persevered,
working their way up to bigger gigs and expanding their
performance circuit from Richmond
to
the Mid-Atlantic, and now traveling as far as Nevada,
where they were when WORK magazine caught up with them.
Meanwhile, they’ve build a strong repertoire of
material: Over the years, they’ve recorded five of
their own CDs. Their big break came about a year ago
when they won the American Music Awards, organized by
Dick Clark of American Bandstand fame, after a national
talent search.
Richmond is a
great base of operations for a band trying to get a
start, Privett says. It’s a lot easier to scrape by
during the lean years in Richmond
than
in expensive cities like New
York
or Los
Angeles. And
Richmond’s
location at the mid-section of the East Coast makes it
equidistant from major touring circuits. Besides, after
all this time, says Privett, Richmond
feels like home. “I can see myself settling down here.
I’d like to stay rooted in the area.”
Privett
is hardly alone in his thinking. Richmond is home base
to a surprising number of successful bands playing punk,
rap, heavy metal or experimental music that are better
known in Europe than they are at home. John Morand,
co-owner of the Sound of Music recording, recalls living
in the Oregon Hill neighborhood when he first came to
town. The rent was only $240 a month. “We were living
in this neighborhood because it was so cheap,” he
says. “There were some 30 different bands in Oregon
Hill – we counted them up -- that had record deals and
were all out touring.”
Morand
is well positioned to track the indie music scene in Richmond
–
many local musicians record their CDs at the Sound of
Music. Recording equipment has gotten so inexpensive
that bands can turn out decent CDs in their basement,
but the more accomplished groups are willing to hire a
producer like Morand or his partner David Lowery to
critique and polish their performance. Of course, Morand
and Lowery are accomplished musicians themselves. Morand
and his wife play in Slow News Day in the Vampire World,
an “electronica” band which he describes as “an
ambient form of electronic dance music” with a heavy
European influence. Lowery plays in two bands, Cracker
and Camper van Beethoven.
Musicians
form a creative sub-culture that flies under the radar
of the city’s power brokers, who seem largely
oblivious to its existence. Richmond,
says Morand, has long been known as a punk rock town.
Punk rock? Sure, “At any one time,” he adds,
“there are probably five or six Richmond
punk
bands on tour in Europe
or
Japan.”
While
most musicians dream of cutting their own CDs and
playing the concert circuit, a number marry music with
the advertising business. Richmond’s
“other” music recording studio, In Your Ear,
specializes in cutting jingles and soundtracks for ads,
adding yet another resource for the advertising sector.
As a consequence, there is a fair amount of cross-over
between the commercial and artistic sides of the
business. Robin Thompson, one of the principals of In
Your Ear and author of Virginia’s
unofficial state anthem, Sweet Virginia Breeze, has cut
a number of CDs and periodically gives live
performances.
There’s
so much happening in Richmond’s
music scene that, even with all his connections, Morand
says he has trouble keeping up with it all. “There’s
a lot going on here,” he says. “People who say
there’s nothing to do in Richmond
have
way too much time on their hands.”
In
a business like architecture, competitive advantage
comes from the creativity of the architects. And Jay
Hugo, principal of 3north, thinks that creativity comes
from the interaction of different disciplines and
perspectives. That’s why, when he opens the firm’s
new office next year, he wants to share it with other
tenants. Indeed, Hugo wants to literally tear down the
walls between the tenants.
Though a small firm, 3north designs have made a
powerful visual impact on the city through such
structures as the Richmond Ballet and the new Dominion
Power building on the James
River. Now the firm hopes to make a statement through its
own office building, a renovated industrial structure in
Manchester.
3north will share the facility with Grace Street
Residential Design, an affiliated architecture firm, as
well as Circle S Studio, a graphic design firm, the
studio of photographer Guy Crittendon, and a coffee
shop. To round out the mix, Hugo would like to recruit a
Web development boutique or a marketing firm.
Like
the Superior Production Exchange, there will be common
areas where people can interact. But there will be no
hard walls between tenants. The walls won’t even reach
to the ceiling. The goal is to open up communication.
Says Hugo: “There’s so
much to learn from being around other people. We really
thrive on that. We’re looking forward to being in a
mix with all that energy and all that talent.”
The
romantic notion of an inspired genius working in sublime
isolation is dead. Creative people feed off of one
another. There have always been places where working
artists could plug into the community: the Richmond Ad
Club the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, or the 40 or more
independent art galleries in town. But market forces are
working now to bring artists and other creative types
together under one roof, typically in renovated
warehouses or industrial buildings, where they can
interact to do business.
Plant
Zero in Manchester
occupies 65,000 square feet of an 111,000-square foot
warehouse that has been part of an old cigarette
packaging plant. That space has been divided into 60
artist studios, ranging from 400 to 800 square feet and
renting for $200 to $400 per month. The artist rents are
subsidized, says Director Janet Kane, but they create a
coolness factor that lets the developer charge higher
rents to other clients. The facility also has an event
space, a café, eight apartments and Artworks, a
combination art gallery/artist studio.
The
artists cover a wide spectrum, says Kane. There are
painters, sculptors, photographers, a metal smith and a
woodworker. There are graphic designers, film and video
makers and an indie magazine. “Our artists come in –
they have no windows – they close the doors and they
produce art without interruption. The goal is to give
them space to create.” But there are ample
opportunities for them to interact as well – in the
hallway, in the café or at an event, like a film show,
organized by the tenants themselves.
Brad Armstrong, president of the Virginia Foundation for the Performing
Arts, entertains much of the same vision for the
performing arts. He is trying to raise $113 million to
transform an entire block of downtown
Richmond
into
a performing arts center that would support
state-of-the-art theaters, practice halls, offices and a
jazz club.
There
are two economic drivers behind the project. One is to
provide shared overhead – facilities the
not-for-profit groups never could afford on their own --
for arts organizations like the Richmond Symphony, the
Elegba Folklore Society, Theater IV and the Richmond
Boys Choir. The other is to stimulate creativity by
bringing these groups together under a single roof where
they can collaborate and cross-pollinate one another.
Because
of the huge price tag attached, there is no assurance
that the Performing Arts Center will be built. Indeed,
critics have argued that there are far more cost
effective ways to stimulate the arts in Richmond
than
by building a huge new facility. One group under the
banner of SaveRichmond.com suggests that the city could
accomplish far more through simple measures like easing
its adversarial relationship with nightclubs, which act
as incubators for local musicians, empowering
independent radio, publishing an events guide and
holding an annual music festival to promote
Richmond
musicians.
Taking
the criticisms in stride, Armstrong espouses a big tent
philosophy. It’s not a matter of either/or, he says. Richmond
needs to support the arts of all kinds: symphonies and
opera for the tuxedo set; punk rock and poetry slams for
the ear-ring crowd; film festivals and concerts for the
Yuppies; graphic arts and illustration for the
advertising industry. There’s cross-over between all
these sub-cultures, and the interaction between them
spurs the artists to greater level of creativity and
innovation. Says Armstrong: “We want creative people
to stay here no matter what their discipline is.”
As
the advertising industry pulls out of its recessionary
funk, Richmond’s
ad industry is getting more business, and work is
filtering down to the artistic class. Simultaneously, as
working artists learn to collaborate more effectively
– whether by co-locating in old warehouses like the
Superior Production Exchange or organizing professional
organizations like the James River Writers Festival –
they should become more competitive in the national
marketplace for artistic talent. The 2000s could well be
the breakthrough decade when Richmond
gains recognition as one of America’s
centers of artistic creativity.
-- January 31, 2005
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