The Plug: How Building A Business Is Art: Artist Collectives Are Making Spaces For Creatives In Philly
Article from The Plug
Black founders are leading spaces in Philadelphia’s creative scene and it has not gone unnoticed: REC Philly, which describes itself as a part creative incubator and part creative agency recently secured a $2 million investment from rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs to open another hub in Miami early next year.
In the last few years a handful of agencies, artists’ collectives, working spaces, as well a combination of these concepts have popped up in Philadelphia to support the city’s creatives.
Business and life partners YaYa Horne and Damion Ward started Tiny Room for Elephants in an underground warehouse recording artists at work as a way to “document the culture.” Now, they operate as a network of creatives that fuse art and music to create unique experiences for artists, brands and consumers, inviting the public to watch the art process as it happens.
“You go to an art show at a gallery and you walk in and the paintings are hung neatly on the wall, there’s wine and cheese, but you don’t know the backstory of how many mistakes these artists made or how many iterations of that painting it took to get to this one masterpiece,” co-founder Damion Ward told The Plug.
Calan, the founder of entertainment company 69&Sunny, which amplifies contemporary artists, writers and thinkers, started the company in 2018 in Philadelphia. Founded under a different name, the company was originally a cannabis education platform after Calan began researching cannabis as a medical remedy following her mother’s stroke. Now, the company has transformed into a blend of an agency and an artist collective bringing Calan’s background as an artist to the fold.
“We try to bring together different businesses and artists and we just try to support community fun in a very small intimate way,” Calan told The Plug. “I say 69&Sunny is life, liberty and the pursuit of fun,” a nod to Philadelphia’s history as the place where the Declaration of Independence was signed.