Whitepaper for the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, SC (excerpt)

The Lowcountry: A Booming Creative Economy

Across the nation and around the world, companies are clamoring for creative thinkers.  Leading universities, determined to prepare their students for twenty-first century employment, are looking to the arts to help them foster innovation. Arizona State offers a graduate electrical engineering degree with a concentration in arts, media, and engineering; University of California—Davis runs an Art/Science Fusion Program; Stanford University offers a joint M.F.A. and M.S. program in product and visual design, a collaboration of its departments of mechanical engineering and art and art history; and the College of Engineering at University of California—Santa Barbara cohosts a graduate program in Media Arts and Technology. More recently, MIT created a Center for Art, Science & Technology. Cities in which talent, technology, and tolerance thrive are increasingly attractive to major corporations, who move their operations to these centers regardless of incentives designed to attract them elsewhere. Charleston's burgeoning Digital Corridor is fueled by the rise of the arts in our region, and the Gibbes is part of a growing effort to build and retain creative capital now and in the future.

While PreK-12th grade schools tend to focus on careers in science and technology, there is ample opportunity to work in creative fields as well.  In 2010, the Charleston Regional Development Alliance released an in-depth analysis of the region’s creative economy (Charleston, Dorchester, and Berkeley counties).  The report focused on creative occupations in the five major categories of media, designers, cultural, artists, and culinary arts and concluded that in terms of employment, the creative economy is one of the top two economic clusters - second only to Biomedical/Biotechnology.  Gross sales associated with creative industries exceeded $1.4 billion in 2009.

What if there were a place where Lowcountry students stretch their minds and develop their potential, whatever their career goals?  The Gibbes Museum of Art is such a place.  We respectfully invite you to become a supporter of the outstanding educational programs offered here.  More than that, we hope the XXX family will lend its considerable expertise in education and technology to help us make these programs the best in the nation, and be part of the group that will transform education in the Lowcountry for generations to come.