Episode 9: Creative Cultural Leadership with Sanjit Sethi

Sanjit Sethi has been an artist and cultural academic leader for the past twenty years and is currently the President of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He has also served in leadership roles at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University, Memphis College of Art, the California College of the Arts and the Santa Fe Art Institute – among others. Additionally, he has taught at prestigious art schools such as the Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology in India, MIT; and the Art Institute of Chicago. As an artist and curator, his work has spanned different media and geographies. Past works include the Kuni Wada Bakery Remembrance; Richmond Voting Stories; and the Gypsy Bridge project. Recent curatorial projects have included Spiked: The Unpublished Political Cartoons of Rob Rogers and 6.13.89 The Cancelling of the Mapplethorpe Exhibition. 

Creative Cultural Leadership

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• Creative Cultural Leadership is a philosophy that embraces artistry, innovation and empathy as fundamental to understanding and working with individuals and communities.
  
• The words creativity and innovation have taken on definitions which are too limiting.
  
• Creativity, experimentation and collaboration involves listening and decisiveness but also an embrace and an elevation of your own voice alongside the voice of others; it’s not a solitary activity.
  
• All problems have a cultural aspect to it.
  
• The creative and the poetic mindset go hand in hand when building communities.
  

Imperfection is OK

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• Failure is an iterative process: Try, Fail, Learn – this is easier to see in art than it is in leadership.
  
• The world is asymmetrical in nature; very few things actually fit in neat tidy boxes.
  
• Our focus on symmetry allows us to avoid the real issues that exist in the world; oftentimes we're stymied thinking the system has to be perfect before being able to fix something.
  

Leading a Team During a Crisis

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• It’s powerful to check in with your team about how they are doing – and yet be surgically efficient in how we use our time.
  
• Make space for visioning because you can't simply turn it on; inspire vision, create a visual palette cleanse to prepare the mind to vision.
  
• Push your team to not just solve current problems, but also to think about the future.
  
• Keep the team motivated: give credit, celebrate accomplishments, thank people in surprising ways, also there is no such thing as a dumb idea.
  

Leadership Is…

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• Leadership is how someone is able to judge when to leap from one moving freight train to another moving freight train and how to keep your hat during that leap. You have to know when to leap and when to wait.
  
• Leadership is asking what you know to be true that you think no one else in your field believes in; because you've got an idea everyone else thinks is absolutely bonkers.
  
• Leadership is being ok with the unease everyone feels which can be isolating.
  
• Leadership is showing empathy by showing a little bit of yourself.
  
• Leadership is vulnerability and contemplation which are two leadership qualities that are overlooked.
  

Leading with Panic

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• Check out Sanjit’s article called Leading with Panic. Why Leaders Need to Talk More Openly About Anxiety.
  
• How do you take a disability or how do you take what seems like a disability and reframe it as an asset for communication and for greater empathy?
  

Code Switching

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• Working through leadership as a person of color
  
• Code switching can be exhausting and it’s ok to acknowledge that
  
• Navigating white privilege
  
• Microaggressions can still exist even when have similar political perspectives
  

Other References

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• Jamie Bennett the Executive Director at ArtPlace America
  
• Ken Strickland who was the Dean at the Memphis College of Art
  
• Jean-Pierre Larocque a ceramicists and Associate Professor at Concordia University
  
• Ben Vinson, Provost and Executive Vice President at Case Western Reserve University
  
• Association for Independent Colleges of Art and Design
  

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I look forward to sharing another transformative conversation with you next week!