Creating Create: How Baltimore's Latest Grassroots Conference Came to Life

In Baltimore, a city long beset by economic decline, population exodus, and other negative nouns, we seem to have entered the Year of the Verb.

Rather than shuddering at the state of affairs in our fair city, a growing number of politicians, artists, students, entrepreneurs, and all sorts of other engaged citizens are taking steps to envision and implement large-scale solutions.

Amplify, Ignite, Innovate, and Create are some of the most prominent but not the only action words that name recent gatherings of Charm City thought leaders.

Rather than crowding each other out as they progress, these often-overlapping communities of doers respect the fact that their collective movements are the result of thousands of individual journeys and decisions. As they convene, they also distinguish themselves and establish complementary goals.

Scott Burkholder is one of the founders of the Create Baltimore initiative that first took place on January 15 at MICA's Brown Center. He came to Baltimore to study engineering at Johns Hopkins University in 1998. As we chatted in a Mount Vernon cafe a few days before the Create event, he walked me through his Baltimore story and how he's come to his current role in the community.

"This event is in many ways the embodiment of my story," Burkholder says. "I come from a very traditional left-brained understanding of intelligence, where you get a high enough SAT or ACT score, etc. and you're deemed to be smart."

After earning his degree from JHU, Burkholder went into the field of basic research, studying lung cancer. Though the goal of understanding that terrible affliction was admirable, the tenor of day-to-day competition within the field struck the wrong chord for Scott.

"I realized how political � in a very negative way � academia was." Though that might have been acceptable in business or of course politics itself, Burkholder's distaste for petri-dish politics diverted him to an unlikely new profession.

With an interior decorator for a mother, Scott had started moonlighting as a house painter during his junior year at Hopkins. "She always said it was a great way to make money," he grins, "but I doubt she'd want her college-educated son to be doing it." Nevertheless, the young engineer moved from microscopes and cultures to ladders and rollers, and his full-time entrepreneurship paid off.

It was strange, too, because the apparent mismatch of his left-brained background and choice of workaday profession brought in more business. "People would say, 'You went to Hopkins and you're painting houses? Please paint my house!'"

With evidence of his manual labor now gracing the walls of many Charm City residences, the engineer-turned-medical researcher-turned-house painter now came to another decision: expand the painting biz or move on to other endeavors?

He decided to apply to business schools to build on his entrepreneurial experience and perhaps come up with a way to blend eclectic past pursuits. But the decision to go after an MBA degree bred more confusion than resolve.

"When asked what I wanted to do with an MBA, in five different program applications, I gave four different answers." He got waitlisted. That was 2008, a year when hordes of MBA applicants knew exactly why they wanted a business degree�they were waiting out the storm on Wall Street.

By late 2009, the economic squall lines had lifted a bit and Burkholder was actively recruited by a major public university in the Midwest. He chatted with current students on a visit and asked about their hands-on experience in the program. Being married, Scott wanted to know about life as a paired-up business student.  

"I asked what's it like to bring your spouse, and I asked, 'What did you do for internship?'" The man told Burkholder that he had worked on brand management for Whirlpool. "All I could think of," Burkholder says, "was that after finishing my schooling I'd be convincing people to buy washing machines."

Having been disappointed by academia, exhilarated by residential painting, and now turned off by prospects of a corporate career, he looked to his daily life for inspiration.

"My personal philosophy and personal relationship with a bunch of artists led me to think that art was the business I wanted to be in. With art, we can show the world what is and what we want it to be."

"I also came to a realization of how intelligent these people were in problem solving and in their perspective of the world." Burkholder's artist friends hadn't taken classes on differential equations or organic chemistry, but they astutely blended systematic approaches with creativity.

He took a role in MICA graduate Michael Owen's Baltimore Love Project, a mural campaign where Burkholder began to handle fundraising and other business components. BLP has more than six murals up around Baltimore, and more are in the works.

Approaching entrepreneurship from an artistic perspective, other personal and strategic connections became clear. "Arts organizations are struggling with the same questions as entrepreneurs, whether connecting with organizations or the public in marketing, or in addressing general business concerns."

Create Baltimore is more of a path than a destination for Burkholder, who has come to his share of forks in the roads he has already traveled. For the city and its communities, Create means facilitating discussions between artists and technologists in order to implement solutions that involve left-brained and right-brained thinking in equal parts.


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Photos by Arianne Teeple:

- Homepage Image: Create Baltimore organizers Scott Burkholder, Andrew Hazlett, Dave Troy and J. Buck Jabaily pose for a portrait
- Create Baltimore organizers Scott Burkholder, Andrew Hazlett, Dave Troy and J. Buck Jabaily pose for a portrait
- A crowd mingles before the start of the 2011 Create Baltimore at MICA
- Individuals who attended received a Create Baltimore t-shirt
- Attendees were asked to submit a session topic at the start of the day
- Ellen Lupton, Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, speaks during the 2011 Create Baltimore at MICA
- Ellen Lupton
- Dave Troy organizes the session requests at the 2011 Create Baltimore
- Members of the audience listen during the 2011 Create Baltimore
- Create Baltimore organizers Dave Troy, Scott Burkholder, and Andrew Hazlett talk during the 2011 Create Baltimore