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Step 2. Don the mantle of leader When you run a successful art class, workshop, or retreat you are doing more than presenting information or sharing techniques. You are leading. Leadership is not a quality we usually associate with teachers or with workshop leaders...

Step 1. Embrace the Logic If you’re a working artist who loves making things and who has little patience for other pursuits why would you want to run art classes, workshops or retreats? Won’t they cost you time and energy that you’d rather devote to making art? And...

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the most powerful and the most useful. One such simple idea is getting to your art before your “real” day (of a day job or similar responsibilities) begins. Many people already do something during this “before the day begins” time:...

Selling to Tourists: Louise’s Workshop Let’s create a hypothetical watercolor artist by the name of Louise and place her in a particular locale—let’s say the art tourist town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California—and see how she might go about selling to tourists. Step 1....

There are many ways that artists can connect with tourists, from creating hands-on workshops and promoting them to tourists to renting prime space and staging an exhibition. Imagine that you are a visual artist. You might: + Create a workshop specifically geared to...

Artists want to connect with tourists. But tourists also want to connect with artists. Currently tourists crawl through the exhibits of a great museum as much because it is an obligation as it is a pleasure. But if they encounter Mongolian chanters, Andean flute...

Let’s say that you want to promote the idea that creative tourism is valuable and that your community should support the efforts of artists to reach out to tourists. What sorts of arguments might you present to the stakeholders I’ve described—to hotel managers,...

There is more to selling to tourists than standing on a bridge in Prague and selling your photographs or setting up in a square in Paris and doing caricatures of passers-by. You can also promote the creative tourism model I’ve been describing and become an activist in...

We’ve looked at how artists can reach out—to the organizers of a farmers market, to hotel managers, etc.—to create interactive experiences with tourists and to increase their sales. What about some more offbeat, unusual efforts that an artist might dream up? Here are...

Artists can and should actively market to tourists. In the creative tourism model that I’m describing, individual artists and collections of artists dream up public, interactive experiences meant to reach tourists while local officials, local businesses, tourism...