SMFA’s 2011-2012 Graduate Entrepreneurial Fellow, Mark Modzelewski, initiated a partnership with the popular fundraising site Kickstarter. We caught up with him to ask him about his fellowship, Kickstarter and his own Kickstarter project:

What is your fellowship about?

After I finished art school as an undergrad I took a bit of a detour into law, politics and business. Among other things, I was involved with starting a few companies. When I came back to school last year, I was discussing ways in which SMFA could help educate students more as to their creative career options, working on their financial health and ensuring they aren’t starving artists, but ones that eat and live well. So I was asked by the powers that be to work with Catherine Tutter and the ARC on creating a program that did just that—the Creative Futures program.

Along the way I  applied to grad school here, and after getting in was asked to become a fellow to continue to work on the Creative Futures effort and other projects that encourage art and entrepreneurship.

Why do you think it’s important for SMFA to have its own curated page on Kickstarter?

So much of what is happening in the art world these days is a movement away from the traditional grant and museum/gallery world for funding and developing projects. Kickstarter has become a powerful tool that offers artists a new way to realize their vision. SMFA having a curated page lets the students, instructors and alumni find literally millions of new sponsors and buyers for their work.

Tell us about your project!

My own project on Kickstarter is a rather ambitious one. It’s looking to raise quite a bit of funding in order to grow a museum of contemporary art. For this project, I will plant a field of wheat that will be harvested, turned into strawbales—a safe, green and proven construction material—that will be used to build a museum of contemporary art. The field that supplies the wheat will in turn become the grounds for the museum. Phase One of the project will result in 1,500–1,750 square feet of gallery/performance space for the exhibition of cutting edge contemporary visual artists from across the world, as well as dance, performance, music and other culturally-enriching activities.

The museum itself will be a work of art, a conceptual piece that will grow—literally and figuratively—from the fields where it is planted and become a showcase for emerging artists and cultural development. The ultimate goal is a facility with a permanent and revolving collection of art of the moment in a post-post-modern world.

Over time the facilities will allow for summer performance, residencies and community education in the arts. The museum will also have robust online presence allowing for all shows, lectures and performance to be viewed in depth over the internet and have works designed specifically for online viewing.

You can read more about it at:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fmarek/growing-a-museum