The Brilliant Business Of Art: How CAP UCLA's Kristy Edmunds Corrals The Power Of Creativity

August 27, 2017

As an artist, curator, artistic director and frequent keynote speaker internationally, Kristy Edmunds has a reputation for innovation and depth in the presentation of contemporary performing arts. In collaboration with master artists, she has curated unique platforms that survey the breadth of their artistry, while placing equal emphasis on the support and commissioning of new work by some of today’s leading performance creators across disciplines. She is the Executive and Artistic Director of UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance and recently sat down with Claire Coghlan, contributor at Forbes.

"Artist, Curator and Artistic Director of UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, Kristy Edmunds has headed the Melbourne Festival in Australia and the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Here, she shares why it’s crucial — and highly profitable — to nurture our capacity to be curious.

Claire Coghlan: You work for a performance art non-profit. What does success look like in your world?

Kristy Edmunds: We measure success on whether or not the artist was able to uphold the integrity of his or her vision and feel connected to the audience and achieve the work as it was intended. Did we generate an audience of substance for the artist? Was the audience able to make meaningful use of the experience? My job is to make sure that the highest and best of the artist’s voice and capacity is being supported, not negotiated, so that the work is at the highest and best caliber it can be. Otherwise, it loses its potency.

Coghlan: Why’s it important that art be potent, that it push the bounds of artistic expression?

Edmunds: The fence line of the familiar is fixed unless we extend it, right? If we stay within the terrain we know, we lose our capacity to be curious, to provoke debate differently, because we're too concerned with upholding familiar, conventional, known, assured outcomes. Artists expand the possibility of the human imagination inside of their art form. They go into areas and terrain that are not yet known, and they come out acting both as a kind of advanced warning and beacon."— Claire Coghlan, Aug. 27, 2017

Read the full article at the Forbes website.