The fact that Providence is now a branded city – “The Creative Capital,” a much-ballyhooed naming campaign that was rolled out earlier this year – doesn’t surprise those who know the city, or have heard about its transformation over the years.
That includes Julie Peeler, vice president of Private Sector Initiatives for Americans for the Arts, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that decided to hold its annual convention in Providence, an event scheduled for Oct.30-Nov. 2 that’s expected to draw more than 500 attendees from across the country.
“Picking a city to hold the convention was in the works prior to the Creative Capital campaign gelling, they were working on it when we made the decision, but [choosing Providence] had everything to do with the reasons the campaign exists,” said Peeler of a conference that has more than 1,000 room nights in the city under contract. “Providence has undergone a renaissance from a heavily industrialized area to a city that took its unique points of difference and brought them all together.”
Peeler had a logistics person scope out the city who had been here in the early 1990s but hadn’t been back until recently.
“It was so completely different, she was really shocked,” Peeler said.
All the things that make Providence creative, from its arts to its diversity to it being a breeding ground for entrepreneurial business, are things being incorporated into the campaign, which is aimed at drawing business to the city as well as tourists. And the former has much to do with the latter, said Lynne McCormack, director of the city’s department of art, culture and tourism, the lead agency coordinating the campaign.
“When business comes here for conferences, they get out and see things, eat at restaurants, see what the city has,” she said. “And they may very well want to come back on their own.”
Her agency and others, including the Providence Warwick Convention and Visitors Bureau, are putting the Creative Capital brand on all their mailings and promotional material, but said the brand is not limited to their agencies or any other. In the spirit of creative freedom, anyone who wants to use it may, said Kristen Adamo, vice president of marketing for the PWCVB.
“We use it, the Providence Foundation uses it in their advertising, it’s flexible, people can use it as it best fits their needs,” Adamo said.
The city is a product, said PWCVB’s president, Martha Sheridan, and “establishing a brand for it is important, it differentiates your city from hundreds of others. We’re working with the city to help differentiate ourselves, but what people are saying about the city confirms what we’ve known: Providence is a creative city.”
The natural intent of the brand is to draw visitors and business to the city, but beyond that, it personifies what the city represents: A place with a sharp creative edge, a concept begun by the city’s founder, Roger Williams, when he broke off from the religious and political mainstream in the 17th century and started his own colony of independent thinkers.
“The brand says the city is a place where original thinking is celebrated,” said Mayor David N. Cicilline, who in June unveiled “Creative Providence: A Cultural Plan for the Creative Sector,” 40 pages worth that includes recommendations that can and are being implemented now and others for when more money becomes available. “Now we have a platform for that creativity to be used in ads and such. And we’re working on an [Internet] gateway to link all city sites. It’s very important to align the arts and cultural and tourism markets so the message is repeated.”
Getting the brand out isn’t expensive, he said; the two-year process to brand the city cost roughly $70,000, fairly short money considering Providence’s nonprofit arts and cultural organizations generate well more than $110 million annually and support some 3,000 jobs.
“The success of the branding campaign will be the gain of jobs and increased revenue,” Cicilline said.
Asked what his personal favorite component of his creative city is, Cicilline said “the people who are here, the young entrepreneurs, the artists … we have an extraordinary concentration of free-thinking people.”
The plan relies on several components, including what city officials call the “knowledge economy.” Providence has long supported the knowledge industry, they said, including such modern businesses as AS220’s Mercantile Block with its MIT Fab Lab, one of only 30 in the world, the Beta Spring Micro Seed Venture for concept-to-production of young businesses, expansion of the Green Collar Network, and the R.I. Innovation Network and Business Development Program to bring ideas to market.
The visual and performing arts continue to be a major factor in maintaining the city’s creative image. A 2007 survey by Americans for the Arts confirmed factually what was anecdotally taken for granted: The arts generate whopping revenue. The survey found that arts groups in Providence spent $40.7 million and their audiences nearly twice as much – six times the rate spent by audiences in comparable and larger cities.
“It gives direction and focus to [the Department of Art, Culture and Tourism],” said Lisa Carnavale, executive director of Rhode Island Citizens for the Arts. “The city was out ahead of the game in terms of appointing a cabinet-level position within the administration. It feels like this defines a mission; though long in place [that] really starts helping us look at ourselves as a city-state.”
While he has no argument that Providence is a creative city, Herb Weiss, Pawtucket’s economic and cultural affairs officer, would like it to be known that this former mill city turned arts colony is a pretty creative community that had been billing itself as such for years.
“A few years ago, I was having a 5-minute conversation with Blackstone Valley Tourism Council executive director Bob Billington about how to get the message out to the state, New England and the nation that Pawtucket is a home for artists,” Weiss said. “We said the slogan would be ‘Pawtucket: Rhode Island’s Creative Community.’ ”
“We have no problem with Providence pushing the arts: because we’re one of the strongest boosters of the arts in the state,” Weiss said of a city with hundreds of artists in more than 70 renovated mills. “Pawtucket works very hard to roll out the red carpet for artists. Every city and town should roll it out for artists and creative-sector companies. If they do, great: We’ll just make our carpet thicker.”
Virtually any community in the state could call itself “Rhode Island’s creative community, Woonsocket, Westerly, Newport, all of them could and it would be true,” Weiss said. “We should ratchet it up, maybe the state needs to recognize that and grow its creative sector. I’d love to see Rhode Island take the term creative and put it in the state moniker.”
Bert Crenca, founder of AS220 and a member of the Creative Capital steering committee, is a long-time force on Providence’s creative scene, fostering an atmosphere of free expression at AS220 that has artists from all over the country applying to live at the studio’s residential component. Crenca is convinced the city’s new campaign will work.
“It was a year-long process, it reached into people’s homes. The intention and process is completely genuine,” Crenca said. “There was no pre-agenda.”
With his quarter-century of making arts and culture a pivotal consideration in the city, Crenca said the effort behind the campaign says “They believe it. You begin to feel as if and think as if, and you become what you claim to be.”
Simply put, he said, the city is buying into what it knew about itself all along, and now “it becomes part of the mindset, the consciousness.” •
