Building A Community in the Raw
As a year confined to our homes has brought many to question returning to normal-past, its time to conceptualize a future normal.
Andersen Design museum project takes two steps forward and one step back
A Big Step Forward:
Luke, the VLA lawyer from Boston has connected me to a lawyer in Maine interested in helping with the 501(3)(C) application for the Andersen Design Museum of American Designer Craftsmen. Receiving that news literally felt like a dark cloud floated away from where it was collecting in the sky over my head, but it is just one step forward in a challenging process.
One Step Forward and One Step Back
I spoke with Sean Ireland, the developer of the Grand Building in Bath, who was very nice and read my idea and responded to my thoughts, unlike my past interaction with the JECD group of the Towns of Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor, whom, when I presented a museum proposal, pretended that I had presented nothing at all. Mr. Ireland thought my idea interesting but said he is overwhelmed working with the Town of Bath.
Grassroots Economic Development
My interaction with Mr. Ireland made it clear that I need to work through grassroots resources, not the establishment, which is consistent with Andersen Design’s history.
Andersen Design has worked with and developed raw talent since Andersen Design was established in 1952. Most of our employees have been women, and so I thought of a young woman artist-designer who has run her own business and comes across as having leadership qualities although I do not know her well. I asked a mutual acquaintance what they thought of her abilities and if she might be interested but there has yet been no response. Instinctually I believe this young woman has the talent and the drive but does she have the will? I do not know, but it helps to puts a real face to the leadership position that the museum project needs to fill, in moving forward.
In other news
Speaking of raw talent, just now, as I am writing, I received notice that the paper I submitted to Humanities and Social Sciences Communications has passed through the first gateway of staff approval and will now move on to the editors. Since I do not have an academic background being a mere unaffiliated independent, I got there on raw talent- but- I have not yet crossed the finish line to publication in a journal and then on to properly edit the Wikipedia biography of Governor James B Longley, who presided over the institutionalization of the centrally managed economy of Maine, at a time when Maine was leading the country in the number of small businesses employing up to 100 people. Andersen Design was one of those businesses on the rise during that period (1976).
The Museum Board
I am realizing that the board of the museum should approve the leader of the museum. I have been focused on the leader because, Luke, my VLA contact, said that, to avoid a conflict of interest, the leader of the museum should be someone without direct ties to Andersen Design, as Andersen Design would like to be fiscally sponsored through the museum to set up a design, research, training and retail gallery. The idea for a museum got started as a tangent in my search for funding for our traditional business, and as I studied the wealth redistribution systems in the state, country, and world. I learned about fiscal sponsorship, which allows free enterprises to apply for non-profit funding.
Once, I read, in a paper about Marx, that Marx identified the proletariat as those outside the system, whom. in order to be accepted within the system, had to change the whole system. I identified. The system was clearly not serving my interest. I was lucky to have a voice in the conversation. Fiscal sponsorship was everywhere but nowhere was it available to Andersen Design. However, Andersen Design is qualifiable as a museum and a museum can be a fiscal sponsor, which can sponsor many designer-craftsmen, enabling the small micro-economy of free enterprise designer-craftsmen to apply for non-profit funding, including Andersen Design, as a private design and production entity. Coincidentally, my intention is the same as that used to justify the institutionalization of a centrally managed economy of Maine, a plan written by a board of the largest and wealthiest industries in Maine, to help small businesses find capitalization funding.
At this point, I need to backtrack in my story about how the museum idea was first initiated, not by Andersen Design, but by Fractured Atlas, which rejected our application as a designer craftsmen production company, because the board said that “production” means ”one is in it only for the money”, a very biased definition of production from the non-profit sector, which concentrates and redistributes wealth, said in the old tradition, to be created when something is produced.
However, being the source of wealth creation hardly means that one who produces something is only in it for the money. To produce something well requires a focused interest in producing the object of production first and foremost. In this series, I have been highlighting voices employed in the corporate world who want to continue as remote workers. They are voices sharing a common cause of productivity as an essential reason for preferring to work at home. Without the distraction of the corporate office culture, they have discovered that they are much more productive. The conversation is not about the money, it is about the well-beingness conferred by getting something done, or focusing on an idea, and in the example upcoming in this story, directing productivity into a meaningful pursuit. Productivity is therapeutic. Our contemporary culture needs productivity therapy. People need to feel productive and self-directed, again. This desire is at the core of the worker-initiated remote working movement.
Andersen Design was not ready for the museum idea at the time Fractured Atlas tossed it in our lap as a consolation prize, but over time, through studying how wealth redistribution systems work, I realized Andersen Design should be the name and philosophy behind a museum, not a fiscally sponsored museum but the museum that is a fiscal sponsor, requiring 501(3)(C) status. It is the important first step that enables the third phase of funding the museum.
I have a contact for a VLA lawyer from an excellent firm in Maine now, but it does not cover the costs of fees- an unknown amount.
So I started a KO-FI Page. Right now it is just the free version, but I will likely soon upgrade it. Contributions I receive here will help to cover the costs of the 501(3)(C) and whatever else may arise in connection with this process.
If the museum idea were not so foreign at the time that we were fiscally sponsored to start a museum, we might have been able to use that as a stepping stone, but would still have needed to find a board because the board is of the utmost importance when applying for grants to start a museum and that is how the board should be considered at this point. It should be a board that will get us through the grant application process. Andersen Design’s long-established history is a great asset but it needs to be complemented with a great board and the board should approve the leader of the museum.
The Museum is conceptually to be a Museum of American Designer Craftsmen and so it should have board members for different areas of the country. It could become a network of museums, but for now, it is just a concept living in my head. I visualize it as consistent and emergent from the values that Andersen Design has always furthered. Indigenous, grassroots involvement is the core or the soul of the idea, but so is America. Like America, Andersen Design is an idea, rooted in a long history.
Jumping ahead into the future, when the Andersen Museum is an actuality, it will be uniquely grounded in our long history of creating a handmade product affordable to the middle classes. The once-great American middle-class were the first Andersen collectors. Collections that began in the 1950s were handed down through family generations. Today it is common, in the secondary market, to see Andersen selling at upwards of three times its price point, a few years ago. Some work is better crafted, some work is more unusual, but each piece is nonfungible. It is interesting to watch the secondary market evolve in terms of uniquely perceived value which has always been a constant of the Andersen brand. Our customers often took their time in deciding which seal’s eyes spoke personally to them, or which individually decorated cobble had their name on it. Collectors also create value in the way that they collect, and this can make an interesting story to be told by the museum.
Today I leave you with another story from the “let’s not return to normal” media.
I really enjoyed reading My Home At The End of The World by Felicity C Sullivan, who has had much success as a creative elite but this story is dark and raw as she expresses in beautifully written prose her frustration with using her talent in the service of others. Warning! Because it is written so well, it penetrated deeper than I anticipated, so read it with preparedness in mind. You may feel a lingering effect.
The buzz in the alternative media is that a year of being confined at home has led many to realize they want more control over their own work process and their life and it is not only about money, it is also about the meaning that work gives to our lives.
Notice
I am merging Andersen Design Economic Evolution into substack because I have many more readers on Substack and Substack does not cost me except as a percentage of paid subscriptions.
So Andersen Design Economic Evolution Discourse, will it be streaming as Butterflies and Rocketships from now on.